On March 18, 2025, in accordance with President Trump's Executive Order 14176, the National Archives released online two batches of documents from the JFK Collection which had remained partially withheld from the public, numbering over 2,000 records. This was followed three more batches, the last on April 3. Released earlier in the period 2017-2023 with blackouts, virtually all of these documents appear to be re-released now with no redactions.

MFF has now processed and put these documents online on this website;.

View these records here at MFF

These documents had been reviewed and released with redactions during the Assassination Records Review Board's declassification process in the 1990s, along with tens of thousands of others. In 2017, a sunset clause of the JFK Records Act mandated that they all be released in full, absent a Presidential directive otherwise. Both Presidents Trump and Biden presided over a period where, in stages, most of those documents were released in full, but a few thousand remained with blackouts even as of this year. These are the documents now being released with the blackouts lifted.

For more background, see an essay written this past January in anticipation of these releases: State of the JFK Releases 2025.

Five batches of documents have been released by the National Archives in PDF format as of 4/3/2025. NARA's page where they may be downloaded as PDF files gives the following details about the five batches of releases:

• March 18, 2025 - 7 PM EST Release: 32,000 pages (1,123 PDF files)
• March 18, 2025 - 10:30 PM EST Release: 31,400 pages (1,059 PDF files)
• March 20, 2025 - 9:30 PM EST Release: 13,700 pages (161 PDF files)
• March 26, 2025 - 3:30 PM EST Release: 53 pages (16 PDF files)
• April 3, 2025 - 7:00 PM EST Release: 704 pages (207 PDF files)

It is not known how many documents remain with redactions. Before this set of releases, 3,886 documents remained in so-called "transparency plans," but some of those were released in 2023 after the plans were created. NARA's 2023 releases page gives a number of 3,648 documents (too low by a couple of hundred?) which were reviewed in 2023 and were in many cases re-released, without then saying which of those were re-released in full and which merely got fewer redactions. Absent hard numbers from the Archives, it may take a little work to determine precisely what is left with redactions at this point. If NARA's earlier estimate of 80,000 pages to be now released is correct, then with 77,000 pages we may be just about done already. A post-releases accounting to see what may have fallen through the cracks is definitely in order, as we have already identified a few documents which were expected but not released.

For fans of the JFK Database Explorer, note that these new records are now included in that database. Documents may be looked up by record number and compared with earlier versions of the same document to see which redactions have been lifted. Note that the "central directory of identification aids" on which the Explorer is based is missing a great many records and so not every released document can be found there.

While over 80% of these records come from the CIA, FBI, and House Select Committee on Assassinations, hundreds more are derived from other agencies of government - the Church Committee, JFK and LBJ libraries, Ford Library (Rockefeller Commission), House Committee on Intelligence, State Department, President's Foreign Advisory Board, National Security Agency, Joint Chiefs of Staff, and other military branches including the Army and a records repository known as INSCOM/CSF.

Some of them deal with sensitive or embarrassing CIA operations - see the National Security Archives' story on some of what is new in the records. The University of Virginia's Center for Politics has a "top ten" list of highlights.

Other documents are more directly related to the JFK assassination and its investigations; it is too early to offer an assessment on what they add to the story of CIA surveillance of accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald and other aspects of this history. A robust discussion is already taking place on Jeff Morley's JFK Facts substack.

Note that many documents are of poor quality and searches are unlikely to hit many of them. But starting at the main page for this collection, you can browse by agency to read any document.

Here is a breakdown of the numbers of records released by each agency (not all of these are yet online at MFF as of 3/21/2025):

Completion of this process will mark the end of an era of 6 years of partial disclosure, and fulfill the sunset clause of the JFK Records Act which anticipated their full release in 2017. The Executive Order which initiated this week's declassification is entitled "Declassification of Records Concerning the Assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr." Some RFK records were recently posted by NARA. So these documents may be the start of something bigger; stay tuned.

This page will be updated as additional JFK records, if any, are posted by NARA. Watch this page for such notices.

- Rex Bradford, March 21, 2025
Last updated April 22, 2025