There was frustration, fury and disappointment on Tuesday night after the Trump administration dropped the latest top secret files on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
The much-anticipated documents were published on the website of the National Archives.
It came roughly 24 hours after President Donald Trump announced a trove of 80,000 pages of material would be released.
But many of the aged documents were faded, poorly scanned and impossible to read.
Others were notes in handwriting that was completely illegible or included crossed out words and scribbles.
And more ended up being highly redacted despite promises from the Trump administration that the files would not be.
‘I’m quickly going through the JFK files to see if we would get everything unredacted like promised. We have not,’ posted one researcher.
‘I was told repeatedly these were going to be unredacted…’ vented another frustrated X user.
‘Most of these documents were marked “safe” for declassification YEARS ago. There is nothing here. Where are the “exempt” and “excluded” JFK files?’ wrote another.
John Greenewald, Jr., who created The Black Vault which is an online repository of declassified government documents, responded to the tranche released with ‘oof.’
He noted that the PDFs are not searchable, there are no bulk downloads and no spreadsheet index of records like previous releases.
‘This dump is profoundly more impenetrable than all the previous more annotated ones,’ historian David Garrow told the New York Times of the document release.
He suggested it would take two days even to open all the documents and that it would take a while to figure out if there was anything new.
Garrow noted that the more than 1,100 separate PDFs released lack any annotation including agency of origin or file numbers from previous releases.
Historians also noted that many and perhaps even most of the documents dropped will have been previously released in one form or another.
One document was an excerpt from the leftwing political magazine Ramparts which was published from 1962 to 1975. That document had been publicly available for years.
Despite the slow slog through the documents as Americans scoured to find anything new MAGA world cheered the release.
‘The file I am particularly interested is a CIA IG report from whistleblowers alleging that the CIA hid information from Congress ref JFK assassination as it implicated them (shortly after the assassination),’ wrote Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fl.) who led the task force to declassification of JFK assassination records.
‘We were given this as a tip and there is actually a document we are currently tracking down,’ she added.
The GOP congresswoman wrote on X ‘promises made, promises kept’ despite the documents including redactions.
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard also claimed on X that Trump was ‘ushering in a new era of maximum transparency’ and that the files were being released ‘with no redactions.’
Some X users responded to her post with screen grabs of redacted documents from the release.
Leading up to its release, Trump said it would be ‘interesting’ and the White House said Americans would be ‘shocked’ by revelations.
‘People have been waiting for decades for this,’ Trump said on Monday. ‘We have a tremendous amount of paper. You’ve got a lot of reading.’
‘I don’t believe we are going to redact anything. I said just don’t redact. You can’t redact. But we’re going to be releasing the JFK files,’ he added.
The trove of documents include hand-written notes as well as typewritten reports.
Historians reacting to the document dump signaled they did not expect any major revelations that change the the circumstances of the assassination, but the release could provide additional details.
Some of the documents hold information on Lee Harvey Oswald’s activities prior to the assassination including his contacts with Cuban and Soviet intelligence.
One document noted that Oswald was considered a ‘poor shot.’
The release also contained a letter from a Russian in which he claimed he warned U.S. officials in August 1963 that Oswald was preparing to kill the president.
The massive document release had JFK sleuths and conspiracy theorists scouring the National Archives website Tuesday night for any new juicy morsels of information.
Trump was for releasing the JFK files during his first term in office but thousands remained under seal.
During his 2024 campaign he vowed to make them public as part of his overall effort to increase government transparency.
He signed an executive order in January to declassify the remaining files.
