The Justice Department’s National Security Division has been in a scramble trying to meet President Donald Trump’s promise on Monday to release declassified information from the JFK assassination investigation today.
Trump, during a visit Monday to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, announced the government would be releasing all the files on Kennedy’s assassination on Tuesday afternoon.
Less than half an hour after that announcement, the Justice Department’s office that handles foreign surveillance requests and other intelligence-related operations began to shift resources to focus on the task, sources said.
In an email just before 5 p.m. ET Monday, a senior official within DOJ’s Office of Intelligence said that even though the FBI had already conducted “an initial declassification review” of the documents, “all” of the attorneys in the operations section now had to provide “a second set of eyes” to help with this “urgent NSD-wide project.”
Eventually, however, it was other National Security Division attorneys who ended up having to help, sources said.
Attorneys from across the division were up throughout the night, into the early morning hours, each reading through as many as hundreds of pages of documents, sources said. Only prosecutors with an impending arrest or other imminent work did not have to help, sources said.
President John F. Kennedy, shown during his news conference at the State Department.
Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
A Justice Department spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment from ABC News.
In promising the release of JFK files today, Trump said Monday that there is “a tremendous amount of paper.”
“You’ve got a lot of reading,” he said. “I don’t believe we’re going to redact anything. I said, ‘Just don’t redact. You can’t redact.'”
Trump in January signed an executive order directing the “full and complete release of records relating to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy” in order to end the decades-long wait for the release of the government’s secret files on Kennedy’s 1963 assassination.
About 98% of the records from the Warren Commission that investigated the assassination were released between 1994 and 1998, with subsequent additional document releases bringing the total amount to 99% by June of 2023.
ABC News’ Hannah Demissie and Molly Nagle contributed to this report.
