‘You Need A Pitbull’: House Task Force To Probe Whether CIA Misled Congress On JFK Assassination

The House Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets will hold its first hearing on the newly released John F. Kennedy files on April 1 and could probe whether the Central Intelligence Agency misled Congress about the assassination, Republican Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida announced Thursday.

In a Zoom meeting with Mary Ferrell Foundation Vice President Jefferson Morley, Luna shared early details about the nascent probe into the failure of the nation’s intelligence agencies, chiefly the Central Intelligence Agency, to prevent the assassination of Kennedy.

“The task force and the transparency this is providing is long overdue,” Luna said. “The reason that you have such an array of theories is because the government was not transparent.”

Morley, a longtime independent investigator of the JFK case and declassification advocate, will serve as an expert witness.

An early priority for the committee is ensuring that all of the records eligible for declassification under President Donald Trump’s Jan. 23 executive order are released. The executive order required the director of national intelligence to present a plan for the release of the John F. Kennedy records within 15 days.

Some longtime JFK assassination researchers, including Morley, gave the Trump administration poor marks for the delay of the release of the full document set beyond that timeline.

Trump said while answering questions from reporters in the Oval Office Friday that he directed the National Archives and Records Administration to release the documents even with the unredacted social security numbers of some individuals, likely deceased, expediting the process.

“I was given the task of releasing that because many presidents have gone through it and they haven’t released. I said ‘release,’” Trump said. “We even released social security numbers. I didn’t want anything deleted.”