There was an obscure deadline for the federal government coming up on Tuesday that is now being pushed back for the umpteenth time. According to the latest interpretations of the Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 (also known as the JFK Records Act or simply the JFK Act), the final trove of federal records related to the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 and the subsequent findings of the Warren Commission had to be reviewed by this coming Tuesday, October 26, 2021, “to determine whether continued withholding from disclosure is necessary.” Last night, President Joe Biden signed and released a memo stating that the release of the remaining records from the National Archives & Records Administration (NARA), would “unfortunately” be delayed yet again. The unreleased records contain more than 440,000 pages of documents.

The memo blames the COVID pandemic (what else?) for the latest delay but also reiterates the supposed need for the government to ensure that they “protect against identifiable harm to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or the conduct of foreign relations that is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in immediate disclosure.” Don’t get too excited about that language, however. It’s just boilerplate that was copied directly out of the JFK Act. (New York Post)

The US will “unfortunately” continue to delay the public release of records related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and officials say the COVID-19 pandemic is to blame.

The move was announced in a memo signed by President Joe Biden and released by the White House Friday.

“Temporary continued postponement is necessary to protect against identifiable harm to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or the conduct of foreign relations that is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in immediate disclosure,” Biden wrote.

The full release of the records was something that President Donald Trump promised to the country when running for president in 2016. It was one of the few campaign promises that he didn’t manage to fulfill, though he claims to have tried. When it comes to the federal government keeping endless secrets from the American public for generations, apparently some boulders are simply too heavy to push all the way up the hill.

The only reason I know that there are 22,933 documents totaling 442,606 pages still being withheld by NARA is the tireless work that’s been done by John Greenewald jr. at The Black Vault. You can read the full history of those records and view a searchable archive of the records that have been released to date at John’s site. I’ll warn you in advance that the collection is massive. The index of the documents that Greenewald created is more than 3,000 pages long by itself. John has been hunting for these documents since he was a teenager but the federal government has never fully emptied the bag.

Why is that, do you suppose? I have long since concluded that while I have no idea what the full truth is, this is yet another infamous case of the federal government lying to its citizens and covering something up. The government actually does this fairly often, but the JFK assassination is one of the more famous cases, along with whatever actually happened in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947.

My reason for making this assumption doesn’t involve any sort of infinite deep dive through all of the available records or the endless conspiracy theories (or perhaps not so conspiratorial after all) that have surfaced over the years. Instead, my conclusion was arrived at based on nothing more than a couple of common-sense questions. The conclusion of the Warren report was, in the short version, that Lee Harvey Oswald had “acted alone” when he shot Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963. They further concluded that Jack Ruby also “acted alone” when he gunned down Oswald live on national television.

If that was actually the case, what could the Warren Commission have actually dug up? What could the CIA have concluded from their own investigation? If these were simply two nutjobs that cooked up their own plot to murder someone with nobody else being involved, then there was nothing to hide from the public, right? While the victims involved were certainly of the highest profile at the time, from a legal standpoint, those were really nothing more than two random murders. Sadly, murders take place all the time in this country and the public is quickly informed of the details via the media, though there are occasional delays in the release of some information if doing so might compromise an ongoing investigation.

But in the case of the killings of both Kennedy and Oswald, the suspects were quickly in custody. There was no need to worry about someone getting away according to the Warren Commission because each of the men “acted alone.” So what was there to hide? Good question, eh? There’s an old rule of thumb when it comes to instances where the government shields information from the public for endless periods of time. That rule tells us that the government takes care of its own first and you don’t put out the information until all the guilty parties have died and can no longer be held accountable. Anyone who was an adult when Kennedy was shot would be at least in their 80s by now or very close to it. Based on average life expectancies for the period in question, a significant majority of them are almost certainly dead. But perhaps not all of them. I would say that “time will tell,” but I have very little faith that it’s a true statement when it comes to this.