In early 2025, the FBI announced that they had found more than 2,000 new records related to John F. Kennedy’s assassination. What do they include? Why did it take so long to find them? How many will be made public? The world waits to find out. In late 2023, we sat down with journalist, author, and co-founder of the substack JFK Facts Jefferson Morley. We discussed revelations regarding the CIA’s knowledge of Lee Harvey Oswald before November 22nd, the lasting legacy of JFK’s approach to foreign policy, and how clandestine intelligence agencies continue to withhold information about the 35th president’s death. Check out JFK Facts at jfkfacts.substack.com and Jeff’s books The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton, Our Man in Mexico: Winston Scott and the Hidden History of the CIA, and Scorpions’ Dance: The President, the Spymaster, and Watergate. Conspiracy Theories is on Instagram @theconspiracypod! Follow us to keep up with the show and get behind-the-scenes updates from Carter and the team. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What new documents did the FBI find about JFK's assassination?
The FBI has found more than 2,000 brand new records related to John F. Kennedy's assassination. What do they include? Why did it take so long to find them? And how many will be made public? We're just as curious as you are. Maybe by the time you're listening to this, we'll know.
But given all the excitement, we wanted to resurface a conversation our team had about what may have happened that day in Dallas, Texas, November 1963. And just as curiously, what has happened since. Enjoy. Enjoy. Welcome to Conspiracy Theories, a Spotify podcast. I'm Carter Roy. You can find us here every Wednesday. Be sure to check us out on Instagram at The Conspiracy Pod.
And we would love to hear from you. If you're listening on the Spotify app, swipe up and give us your thoughts. Something you might not know about me is I once played a man obsessed with JFK's assassination in a film called The Umbrella Man. Much like my character, our colleague Julian Boirot has long been obsessed with JFK conspiracy theories. He uses the term loosely, though.
Because, as he says, there are plenty of verifiable facts to show that we haven't been told the entire truth about what happened. He sat down with Jefferson Morley, journalist, author, and the co-founder of the sub-stack JFK Facts, for a fascinating discussion. Their conversation after this.
True tales of horror, bizarre happenings, unexplainable events. On our podcast, Disturbed, terror takes center stage. Kidnappings, serial killers, hauntings, and the very essence of your worst nightmares coming to life on this weekly true horror show. Enter at your own risk.
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Chapter 2: Why did it take so long to find JFK records?
I would like for our audience who may not know your work, if you could introduce yourself briefly.
Chapter 3: Who is Jefferson Morley and why is he interested in JFK?
My name is Jefferson Morley. I'm a journalist, investigative reporter. I'm the co-founder and editor of the JFK Facts blog, which was created in 2012 and is now found on Substack. I'm the author of four books of nonfiction, three of them about the CIA, and I live in Washington, D.C.
So you started the blog in 2012. I was wondering what interested you so much about the JFK assassination in particular, and why have you committed so much time to this event?
So... Rex Bradford is the creator of the Mary Farrell Foundation website, which is the largest online collection of JFK records. And is a good friend and has created an indispensable, the indispensable website. source for anybody interested in the Kennedy assassination or frankly, the Kennedy presidency. So he and I were talking and we were looking ahead to the 50th anniversary in 2013.
Chapter 4: What was the significance of the JFK Records Act?
And we just said, there's so much bad journalism. in major news organizations about the Kennedy assassination, that we need to have a presence there because we know that there's false statements, erroneous statements, misleading statements, a whole ridiculous discourse about conspiracy theories that doesn't interest us because we're researchers and historians.
And so we just wanted to have a presence in the continuing discussion of JFK's assassination. For me, it's a great story. I pay attention to it because it's very important in American history. It's of continuing interest to lots and lots of readers. And there's key questions and issues that are unresolved. And subject, you know, the ripe subject for good investigative reporting.
So to me, it's a very natural story to gravitate to. I like its scale. It's important. And we know that it's important. President Biden issued an order about it earlier this year. President Trump has been talking about JFK files. So, you know, it's a big deal in American culture. It always has been. So to me, it's a very appropriate subject for an investigative reporter.
I wonder if you could expand upon Biden's order because I feel like our listeners may not be as cognizant of the more recent updates around disclosure.
Yeah. So just to back up a little bit. To understand the context of what Biden did last June, you need to understand the story of the JFK Records Act. And a lot of people don't know this, which is why I want to go into some detail about it. Congress passed the JFK Records Act in 1992 amid the controversy about Oliver Stone's movie.
And what Congress said was, we're not going to reinvestigate the assassination, but we are going to make all of the government's records on the subject available to the public. in the controversy over Stone's movie, and people pointed fingers and said, oh, Oliver Stone, you're a bad boy. How dare you question our government and our sacred Warren Commission?
To which Stone replied with telling effect, if you have nothing to hide, why are all of the records of the Warren Commission and the House Select Committee on Assassinations still secret? So Congress responded to public opinion and wrote a strong law.
And the law created an independent board, which went to all of the government agencies and said, please identify any records related to Kennedy's assassination. And here's our criteria for that. Please give them to us. And please tell us if there's any reason why any portion of this document can't be released.
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Chapter 5: How did Biden's order change the disclosure of JFK documents?
The agencies were allowed to request postponement, not forever, but postponement of sensitive material, private information, secret government procedures, all that sort of thing. But the law said after 25 years, all of those withholdings should be ended.
And after 25 years, except in the rarest of cases, that was the language of Congress, except in the rarest of cases, all JFK records should be public in 25 years. Okay. So the question came to President Trump in October, 2017, And CIA director Mike Pompeo and FBI director Chris Wray went to Trump, met with him, and said, there's thousands of documents that we couldn't possibly release.
So Trump wrote an order about JFK files, and he sent out a tweet saying, all the JFK files have been released ahead of time. And that was false in two respects. All of the JFK files weren't released, and the ones that were released were released way behind time. But Trump's order gave the executive branch agencies four more years of secrecy, which is what they wanted.
That pushed the question of JFK files to October 2021, where it landed in the lap of President Biden. So the FBI and the CIA went to Biden and says, there's thousands of documents we couldn't possibly release. And so Biden gave them pass. What he did was he issued a statement and said, the agencies have not been able to comply with the law because of COVID.
So when the Washington Post called me up and asked me what I made of this, I said, this is the COVID dog ate my homework. This is absurd. They've had 29 years to prepare for this. COVID wasn't a big obstacle for 28 of those years. So it's just an excuse for more and continued secrecy. That lasted for a year.
And then in December of 2022, Biden issued another order asking federal agencies to take one last pass at declassifying everything they could, and then he would be done with it. So in 2023, federal agencies released several thousand more records in their entirety, removing the redactions that had existed, leaving about 3,500
documents related to the assassination that still contain some form of redactions. Might be a word, might be a sentence, might be a whole paragraph, might be a whole page. But there are 3,500 assassination-related records that still have redactions in them. And in June, President Biden issued what he called his final order on JFK files. And what he said is, from now on,
the release of these records will be handled by the agencies themselves. And so there is a transparency plan written by the CIA, which now governs the release or non-release of those remaining JFK assassination files. So what Biden did in June was he effectively negated the JFK Records Act.
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Chapter 6: What details emerged about Lee Harvey Oswald's surveillance?
which was a strong law precisely because it had taken the final decision about declassification out of the hands of the CIA and the FBI and invested it in an independent authority, which would consider the public interest in full disclosure, not only the agency's interest in continuing secrecy. So Biden gutted the JFK Records Act and the CIA is now in control of
of the release or non-release of those 3,468 remaining assassination-related records. So right now, those documents are secret indefinitely.
Understanding that Alan Dulles sat on the Warren Commission and that has serious implications for the validity of their findings with regards to the original investigation to the JFK assassination, what are the implications to the CIA controlling disclosure at this time?
Well, that's a very good question. I mean, Alan Dulles' presence on the commission a man who had been fired by President Kennedy and who had considerable hostility towards his policies, that was a blatant conflict of interest. And it showed that the commission had been compromised or corrupted right from the start by a CIA official.
So then over the years, if we look at the pattern, the CIA has issued false statements regularly and consistently about the assassination ever since 1963.
So 60 years later, when Congress has passed a law saying everything's got to be made public and the decision has to be taken out of the hands of executive branch agencies and the public interest in full disclosure has to be respected and honored, for the CIA to now control the process is again, a conflict of interest and a corruption of the process.
And it's certainly not in compliance with what Congress wanted. And let me point out one thing about the JFK Records Act. We live in a time of polarization, bitter polarization. And yet, the JFK Records Act passed both houses of Congress unanimously. 535 elected representatives approved of this bill. No one, no one dissented on the record, including Senator Joe Biden.
So this is what the people want. They want a full disclosure. And the CIA has stepped in and prevailed on both President Trump and President Biden to give them what they want. What they want is continued indefinite secrecy around JFK assassination records. Now, It is no surprise that given that set of facts, people are going to have suspicions about the CIA.
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Chapter 7: What was Kennedy's approach to foreign policy?
And that's not the fault of conspiracy theorists. That's the fault of the CIA itself.
Yeah, I'll say that on this show, we have covered a number of CIA operations that have achieved disclosure. And the nefarious nature of these agencies is not a conspiratorial thing. It is a real belief.
I'll tell you, I'll tell you in my eyes, the JFK assassination is meaningful because it seems like he was a president who was genuinely committed to peace in terms of actually talking to other countries and global entities about, as opposed to immediately defaulting to some kind of military intervention.
Now- Yeah, no, that's a very good point. And, you know, I mean, Kennedy was a politician. He was running for reelection. He said different things at different times. He presented himself as a fierce cold warrior sometimes and was very eloquent in defending the free world and that stuff.
But if you look at Kennedy's record in 1963, his policies were a very bold challenge to the conventional wisdom of the national security agencies in the United States in several ways. He pushed a test ban treaty with the Soviet Union, a measure that his generals on the Joint Chiefs of Staff unanimously and vehemently privately opposed. Kennedy used his prestige as a peacemaker,
which he gained during the Cuban Missile Crisis to prevail upon the generals and to get the Senate to approve that. And when they did approve it in September, 1963, Kennedy said that was his proudest moment as president. So Kennedy was moving the country, the ship of state in a new direction, not radically, slowly, but definitely. And the enemies of his policies
in Cuba, in Vietnam, for example, were very, very unhappy with him in 1963. That's the political setting in which Kennedy is assassinated, in which there are real schisms in his administration about the wisdom of his policy. And there is a pervasive feeling among the enemies of his policies that Kennedy is not only weak, but he's actually a danger to U.S. national security.
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Chapter 8: How has the CIA's role in JFK's assassination influenced public perception?
That was a very common feeling in the upper echelons of the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1963.
You stepped on my question a little bit because I was going to say that for our listeners who were not around for the political realities of the early 60s, I was going to ask, what is the difference between our current political system in which we have been somewhat conditioned to accept through extreme polarization that no progress can be made with any respect,
and the system that Kennedy was overseeing.
Well, so if we compare our situation today with that time, you know, We live in a multipolar world now, right? Russia is a superpower. China is a superpower. So in 1962, there were really only two superpowers, Soviet Union and the United States. And they were locked in the stance called the Cold War, which doesn't really evoke the full danger of the situation.
What you had was two nuclear armed superpowers who really did not talk to each other or negotiate with each other. were armed to the teeth with, you know, extensive, massive nuclear arsenals, which were on a hair-trigger setting. A missile could get from the Soviet Union to the United States in 15 minutes. So if there was a nuclear attack launched, the U.S.
government would have to decide in 15 minutes whether to respond. And likewise for the Soviet Union. So the world lived in a state of anxiety suppressed anxiety that we really don't feel today.
And those feelings came to the fore in what's called the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, in which the United States discovered that the Soviet Union was installing nuclear missiles in Cuba, just 90 miles south of Florida. And President Kennedy demanded that those missiles be removed. The Soviet Union refused. They said, you have missiles on our border, 20 miles from our border.
How can you be offended by our missiles 90 miles from your border? And Kennedy said, if those missiles aren't removed, I'm going to attack. We're going to destroy them ourselves. Kennedy was under huge pressure from his generals who said right from the start, just go in and destroy those missiles. Kennedy pursued a peaceful solution and rejected the unanimous recommendation of his generals.
And for two weeks, the world lived in a very real fear that there was about to be a nuclear war in which 10 million people might be killed in a matter of days. And President Kennedy was the president who was going to have to push the button and make that happen. And Kennedy thought, this is crazy. I don't want to go to war over Cuba. It's not an important country. I
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