The National Security Division of the Department of Justice has been in a fight trying to meet with the promise of President Donald Trump on Monday to disseminate declassified information on JFK’s murder investigation today.
Trump, during a visit to the Center John F. Kennedy for the performing arts, announced that the government would launch all the archives about Kennedy’s murder on Tuesday afternoon.
Less than half an hour after that announcement, the Office of the Department of Justice that manages the requests for foreign surveillance and other intelligence -related operations began to change resources to focus on the task, sources said.
In an email just before 5 pm on Monday, a senior official within the Doj Intelligence Office said that despite the fact that the FBI had already made “a review of initial declassification” of the documents, “all” of the lawyers in the operations section now had to provide “a second set of eyes” to help with this “project of the entire NSD”.
Finally, however, there were other lawyers from the National Security Division who ended up having to help, the sources said.
The lawyers of the entire division were awake throughout the night, until the early hours of the morning, each of which read up to hundreds of documents, the sources said. Only prosecutors with an imminent arrest or other imminent work did not have to help, sources said.
President John F. Kennedy, shown during his press conference in the State Department.
Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
A spokesman for the Department of Justice did not immediately respond to a request for comments from ABC News.
By promising the release of the JFK files today, Trump said Monday that there is “a lot of paper.”
“You have a lot of reading,” he said. “I don’t think we are going to write anything. I said: ‘I just don’t write. You can’t write.”
Trump signed in January an executive order that directed the “complete and complete release of records related to the murder of President John F. Kennedy” to end the waiting of decades for the release of the Government’s secret archives on Kennedy’s murder in 1963.
Around 98% of the Warren Commission records investigated the murder were published between 1994 and 1998, and the next release of additional documents, which raises the total amount to 99% in June 2023.
Hannah Demissie and Molly Nagle of ABC News contributed to this report.
