A federal judge in Minnesota who has seen a sizable portion of the unreleased documents on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy says those documents, due to be released Thursday, won’t be as exciting as many are hoping.
“The [Assassination Records Review Board] was very careful,” Judge John Tunheim, who served on the board, told the Washington Examiner in an interview. “Anything that we saw that was information itself about the assassination or about any of the key players such as Lee Harvey Oswald was released, regardless of whether an agency wanted us to protect it or not.”
The ARRB was created by an act of Congress in 1992, largely in reaction to the conspiracy theories revived by Oliver Stone’s movie “JFK,” which was released in 1991.
The National Archives estimates 88 percent of the total documents were publicly available after the ARRB’s work, and another 11 percent have been available since then, but were also partially redacted.
Most or all of the remaining one percent — three thousand pages that have never been seen at all, along with 34,000 that were redacted by the ARRB — will be made public this Thursday, which has historians, conspiracy theorists, and newshounds alike playing a guessing game of what might be so special as to remain unreleased.
But Tunheim gave a sober assessment of what the documents are likely to include, even though he hasn’t seen them in over 20 years.
“What we protected was largely intelligence-gathering information,”…