US President Donald Trump on Tuesday released classified documents related to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, as he had announced he would do the day before, Reuters reported. The National Archives website began publishing the files on Tuesday, with more than 80,000 expected to be made public. Justice Department lawyers had meticulously reviewed the material before its release. Among the digital documents were classified memos, including one labeled "secret." This particular file contained a typed report with handwritten notes from a 1964 Warren Commission interview. The interviewee, CIA employee Lee Wigren, was questioned about discrepancies in information provided to the commission by the State Department and the CIA concerning Soviet-American marriages. The files also referenced various conspiracy theories, some suggesting that Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, left the Soviet Union in 1962 with the intent of assassinating the young president. However, other documents countered this theory, downplaying Oswald’s ties to the Soviet Union. One such document from November 1991 referenced an American professor, E.B. Smith, who spoke with KGB official "Slava" Nikonov in Moscow. Nikonov had reviewed extensive files on Oswald to determine whether he had been a KGB agent. "Nikonov is now confident that Oswald was at no time an agent controlled by the KGB," Smith reported. Additionally, documents from the Department of Defense shed light on Cold War tensions in 1963, including US operations in Latin America aimed at countering Cuban leader Fidel Castro. The reports suggested that while Castro was unlikely to take actions that would endanger his regime, he was expected to increase support for communist movements in the region. In January, Trump signed an executive order to declassify government records concerning the assassinations of Kennedy, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. The move has the potential to address lingering questions surrounding the killings, which all occurred more than 50 years ago. Official investigations concluded that the three assassinations were carried out by lone gunmen, but those findings have long been challenged by conspiracy theories, partly fueled by the government’s continued classification of some records related to the cases. Related articles: Trump to declassify 80,000 pages of JFK assassination files Trump orders release of JFK, RFK and MLK assassination documents CIA agent who followed JFK assassin owned a home in Israel Newly-declassified documents reveal who read JFK assassin's mail During his first presidency, Trump allowed delays in full disclosure in 2017 and 2018, a practice continued by his successor, President Joe Biden. In 2017, after the National Archives and Records Administration released 2,891 documents on the JFK assassination, Trump vowed he would release all documents related to the assassination.
