JFK Documents

When Congress passed the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act in 1992 agencies throughout the Federal Government transferred assassination-related records to the National Archives which established the JFK Assassination Records Collection. The Collection consists of approximately 5 million pages of records. Approximately 88% of the records in the Collection are open in full. An additional 11% are released in part with sensitive portions removed. Approximately 1% of documents identified as assassination-related remain withheld in full. All documents withheld either in part or in full were authorized for withholding by the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB), an independent temporary agency that was in existence from 1994 to 1998.

According to the Act, all records previously withheld either in part or in full were originally released on October 26, 2017, unless authorized for further withholding by the President of the United States. The 2017 date and subsequent release dates are derived directly from the law that states:

Each assassination record shall be publicly disclosed in full, and available in the Collection no later than the date that is 25 years after the date of the enactment of this Act, unless the President certifies, as required by this Act, that –

1. continued postponement is made necessary by an identifiable harm to military defence, intelligence operations, law enforcement or conduct of foreign relations; and
2. the identifiable harm is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in disclosure.

The Act was signed by President Bush on October 26, 1992, thus the final releases started on October 26, 2017 including the 1,491 documents released in December 2021, leaving more than 10,000 documents either partially redacted or withheld entirely, which won’t be seen until December 2022.

For more information, check out the National Archives JFK Main Page.