Washington | US President Joe Biden announced Friday that the declassification of new classified archives related to the 1963 assassination of former US President John F. Kennedy will be delayed for a year.
“After agencies have proposed deferring declassification of all information in the archive, I certify that it will continue until December 15, 2022,” President Joe Biden wrote in a letter, nearly 60 years after the assassination.
In 2017, under President Donald Trump, the National Archives of the United States declassified a series of files three times.
In its statement, the White House clarified that archivists have been delayed in reviewing records due to the COVID-19 pandemic and need time.
President Biden said the delay was necessary “in order to prevent any attack on military security and intelligence operations, the maintenance of public order, and the conduct of foreign relations.”
He explained that all of these considerations seemed “more important than the public interest in seeing the declassification lifted immediately.”
The JFK Assassination Commission, better known as the Warren Commission—named after its chairman, Earl Warren, then Chief Justice of the United States—concluded in 1964 that Lee Harvey Oswald, a former naval commando who lived in the Soviet Union, acted alone to assassinate the president. Kennedy.
Upon publication, however, the report’s findings sparked controversy, with the commission’s work being criticized in later studies. A congressional committee later concluded that JFK “may have been assassinated because of a conspiracy.”
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