State of the JFK Releases 2026

The year 2025 finally saw the full declassification of the bulk of the records collected in the 1990s under the JFK Records Collection Act. In addition, there were major releases of government files on the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

The vast majority of JFK records were not "new" - they were re-releases of formerly redacted documents, this time with all the remaining redactions lifted (with some exceptions). There were a handful of brand-new JFK releases as well.

In the case of the RFK and MLK records, the releases consisted of some newly seen documents, accompanied by coherent all-in-one-place batches of records already made public.

This page describes the 2025 releases without undue explanation of background - how we got here. For more information, see the JFK Act Releases page and last year's edition of the "State of the JFK Releases" series, as well as earlier editions (2023, 2022, 2021).

Other relevant resources include the 1998 Final Report of the Assassination Records Review Board, and the 1992 JFK Records Act itself. The National Archives also maintains various pages on the JFK Records Collection housed there.

The 2025 JFK Records Releases

The incoming Trump administration swiftly moved to declassify records on the JFK and other assassinations, issuing Executive Order 14176 on January 23, 2025. The first batch of electronic records were posted on March 18. That was the first of 5 JFK records batches between March 18 and April 3 of 2025; an additional set of documents was released on January 30, 2026. All told, some 2709 documents were posted, consisting of nearly 100,000 pages.

The Mary Ferrell Foundation has downloaded all of these records and incorporated them into our searchable document archive, which now features more than 2 million pages of such records.

The 2700+ JFK records released in 2025 come from 15 different government agencies. Over half of them are CIA records. A few hundred more each come from the FBI, the NSA, and the House Select Committee on Assassinations. There are several dozen each from the Church Committee, JFK Library, and Army INSCOM. Other agencies with a handful of documents each include the State Dept., House Intelligence Committee, LBJ Library, Rockefeller Commission, Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.

The Jan 2026 release was mostly FBI records, with a small number from a variety of other agencies too.

There were other document releases from the federal government in 2025, beyond those posted by the National Archives above. These include a few hundred FBI documents from the FBI's Central Records Complex, released on June 27. Also, the dogged efforts of journalist and MFF Vice-President Jefferson Morley resulted in release of additional documents on George Joannides, the CIA propaganda officer who oversaw the Cuban exile group known as DRE in 1963 during its interactions with Lee Harvey Oswald. Joannides was later put forth by CIA to be its documents liaison with the House Select Committee on Assassinations (which was not informed of his former role). Other documents related to Joannides remain classified or missing.

What's in the 2025 JFK Releases?

What's in these new records? As stated, the vast majority of them were previously released with redactions, and these new copies are mostly "clean," although some still feature redactions, apparently in contradiction of Executive Order 14176.

In many cases, what was revealed was an agent name, an operation name, or often the identity of a foreign government or foreign government agency (these are often "open secrets" when the identity is Britain or Mexico). In other cases, more substantial unredactions of entire paragraphs or even pages occurred. For the most part, the newly-revealed text fills in some details of stories already known to those following this case. None is a "smoking gun" - we are at a point where the government's information directly related to Kennedy's assassination, as encoded in government files, may be largely known.

But there are nonetheless details of interest in these files. Sometimes they are more related to the context of Kennedy's presidency than the assassination itself. For example, a 1961 post-Bay-of-Pigs memo entitled "CIA Reorganization" from White House aide Arthur Schlesinger to Kennedy was finally declassified in full. What was in the page-and-a-half blacked out until 64 years after this memo was written? What the CIA itself had been withholding was Schlesinger's detailed complaint about "Controlled American Sources" - CIA personnel operating under cover abroad - which Schlesinger described often comprised half the staff of US embassies, where the CIA chief of station exerted more power than the US ambassador. The National Security Archive has written about this as well as other such revelations in the 2025 documents, including new details further suggesting US involvement in the assassination of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo.

Another new unredaction, from a 1962 William Harvey memo, names countries in which CIA tapped Cuban official installations. In another document, details of CIA officer David Phillips' career were revealed, including many new pages on a 1952 operation in Chile (PBGROVEL). In another document with newly revealed text, CIA confirms that InterArmco, a major arms supplier in the 1950s and 1960s, was a CIA-owned proprietary until sold to Sam Cummings in 1958 (the 1963 AMWORLD project to offshore Cuban exiles in their efforts to overthrow Castro under Manuel Artime, apparently purchased arms from InterArmco).

Closer to the heart of the assassination of President Kennedy may be the records concerning the Cuban exile group DRE, code-named AMSPELL. Perhaps due to the mysteries around DRE members' dealings with Oswald, the CIA for a long time tried to hide its funding of the group during this period. One new release lists AMSPELL members and funds delivered to them by CIA's Miami Statiion (JMWAVE) in November 1962.

The DRE's handler CIA officer from late 1962 into 1964 was George Joannides. The 17 months of reports created about the DRE by Joannides are said by the CIA to be missing and perhaps never created at all; the latter is absurd on its face for an organization receiving substantial CIA funds. But the newly available Joannides records further the story. Among them, for instances, is a memo regarding a driver's license issued to Joannides under the alias "Howard," an alias Jefferson Morley uncovered almost two decades ago and which the CIA denied knowledge of for years.

The MFF's JFK Database Explorer is a relevant tool for researching these new records, beyond just browsing and full-text search. You can find documents by filtering the entire set by release date, agency, and other relevant metrics. You can also use the Explorer to compare a given document against previously released versions of it.

Gleaning the full import of these documents is an ongoing project, given the nature of these releases - mostly further details on stories already known by those doing research over recent years. See the JFK Facts substack for one place where the stories in these files continue to be revealed.

RFK Assassination Document Releases

The other two most prominent political assassinations of the 1960s, those of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., also featured document releases in 2025. Between April and June of 2025, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) released nearly 2,000 pdf files consisting of over 80,000 pages from the RFK assassination investigations, along with 17 audio recordings.

The MFF's RFK Assassination Document Archive has incorporated all these records, in some cases consolidating multi-part NARA releases into a single combined document. See the MFF's searchable set of these files.

The RFK records feature photograph collections in addition to reports, memos, interview transcripts, and more. Given that these are federal government files, they do not include important collections such as the LAPD's Special Unit Senator files, Sirhan Sirhan trial transcripts, and more.

The 2025 RFK records fall into a few categories:

• State Department (April 18). 10 sets of State Department records, mostly condolence letters which poured into the LBJ Administration following RFK's murder.
• FBI Documents (April 18 and May 7). These consist of FBI files from Headquarters files and various field offices, most prominently the Los Angeles Field Office.
• CIA Documents (June 12). Some of these come from the JFK Collection and have "RIF" metadata (and are thus available in the JFK Database Explorer); others were released by CIA outside the JFK Collection.
• Miscellaneous Agencies (June 12). 35 records from various agencies including the LBJ administration, Gerald Ford library, and others.
• The "FBI Experience" (May 7). 119 folders of material prepared for inclusion in the "FBI Experience," an education center at FBI Headquarters in Washington DC that opened in 2017.

The "FBI Experience" set is especially interesting, in that it includes a great many photographs. Amazingly it includes RFK's post-mortem photographs. The MFF has taken the unusual step of omitting these photos from our copy; they are too gory for a public website, and are not really of use to forensic investigators given that they do not include close-ups of wounds. Other photographs in the collection include pictures of the Ambassador Ballroom, LAPD crime scene photos, photos of shell casings, photos taken in the pantry after the shooting, Sirhan family mug shots, and much more.

MLK Assassination Document Releases

On July 21 of 2025, the National Archives released a large collection of files on the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., almost all of them from the FBI. The release consisted of 6,302 pdf files representing almost a quarter-million pages, along with 1 audio recording.

As posted, these files were somewhat disorganized, and often single documents were broken into 50-page sections. The MFF devoted substantial effort to combining these files and organizing and retitling them to make them more accessible, as documented in our feature which accompanied their reposting on MFF.

The MLK files are divided into three major sections:

• FBI MURKIN HQ files. The Headquarters files of the FBI's MURder of KINg investigation. There are over 300 serials (volumes) of file 44-38861, along with a couple dozen serials from other files. Individual serials/volumes are typically a few hundred pages in length. They consist of reports, memos, airtels, and more, and include abundant "bulkies" which contain large sets of photographs of evidence, people, and more.
• FBI MURKIN Field Office Files. These are the FBI's field office files for 50 cities, including important ones for this case like Memphis, Atlanta, Birmingham, New Orleans, and Kansas City.
• Other Miscellaneous Files. These include almost 1000 CIA files from the JFK Collection, a 7-part set of MURKIN index cards, and 150 miscallenous files from various sources.

Overall, this is a major release of government records on the assassination. The majority of pages had been previously made public, but often with redactions and not contained in a single collection.

In addition to a voluminous set of reports and memos, these FBI files also contain an abundance of photographs of a variety of evidence and places - the Memphis crime scene, James Earl Ray and his Mustang car, ballistics evidence, and much more. The files also include a 1977 Justice Department Task Force Review of the 1968 assassination investigation, and a strangely redacted 1998 investigation into the allegations of Memphis bar owner Lloyd Jowers. These files are a major addition to the MFF's collection of primary source documents on the King assassination, which also includes the House Select Committee on Assassinations's 13 volumes of reports.

But there remains another major collection of federal records on the MLK assassation which is still classified. That is the files of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, which in the late 1970s investigated the murders of both JFK and MLK. Only the files of the JFK side of their investigation have been made public.

Is the Declassification Complete?

Is the JFK Collection fully released in full now? The answer is "almost, but not quite." First off, it's important to note that there are records lawfully withheld under sections 10 and 11 of the JFK Records Act - these are mostly IRS records and some court documents, which are exempted from disclosure and remain withheld. Importantly, this category of withheld records includes "deeds of gift," which includes letters written by Jackie Kennedy to LBJ in the assassination aftermath, as well as interviews of Jackie and Bobby Kennedy conducted by author William Manchester in 1964.

Beyond those expected withholdings, perhaps inevitably there are records which have "fallen through the cracks", and still feature redactions. For example, the CIA's Mexico City Station History excerpts, which had its last release in January of 2026, still features redactions on many pages.

There are other documents with redactions. An exact count is difficult as they must be found via inspection of each page of every document. At the end of 2025 MFF had counted over 50 of them, but most of these were re-released in full in January 2026. Only a small handful of that set still feature redactions as of this writing (April 2026). They include 124-10271-10027 and 124-10271-10293, both featuring the same redaction. Also, 180-10142-10321 is a document with a single still-missing identity, 194-10013-10371 still has the title [RESTRICTED], and the latest release of a Rockefeller Commission file named Luis Angel Castillo (in 2022) consists of 6 black pages (this may possibly be a computer glitch of some kind).

It is also difficult, nigh impossible, to really know the full state of affairs regarding the JFK Collection. Among the 2025 releases was a President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board meeting of Nov 9, 1962, just days after the Cuban Missile Crisis. Newly unredacted text revealed discussion of whether the CIA, not just the FBI, might participate in "investigation of leaks" related to a pre-crisis New York Times article, despite concern that such "might ultimately lead to the establishment of some kind of internal Gestapo" (note that such domestic operations would be in violation of the Agency's charter). This document was released in full in 2025 (well, the document is actually just a portion of the full meeting writeup, which remains out of reach). But the document was never part of the earlier 2017+ releases in any form, and was among several "unexpected" records released in 2025. The MFF's only other (redacted) copy comes from a 1998 release obtained by MFF from the National Archives many years ago. So then are there documents which slipped through the cracks entirely and remain redacted in paper form at NARA, and never put online?

But despite these stragglers, it appears that the vast bulk of the Collection is now open in full. Particular documents called out in the 2025 edition of this essay are now unredacted. These include the names of the members of a Castro assassination infiltration team, CIA sources working for the Miami News, details of the plot to kidnap/assassinate Chilean General Rene Schneider, CIA officer Sam Halpern's involvement in an operation to make a fake porno film intended to discredit Indonesian leader Sukarno, and others.

The JFK Collection, which consists of records processed by the Assassination Records Review Board in the 1990s, is of course not the full universe of relevant documents. There are of course also many sources of information outside this set, vast as it is. The Joannides records obtained in 2025 were outside the Collection, as one example.

Other relevant documents remain "at large." RFK aide Walter Sheridan removed files from the JFK Library and transferred them to the custody of NBC, where they remain. The files of William Illig, the attorney who contacted the HSCA on behalf of his client White House Physician George Burkley, with information that "others besides Oswald must have participated," were not given to the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB). There are many other records which may still exist, among them the CIA Miami Station's aborted investigation of Cuban exile groups immediately following the assassination. And there are many documents which are missing and likely destroyed, including the DRE monthly reports during 1963, Church Committee transcripts which the ARRB could not find, and more.

But without discounting the potential importance of those records in existence but not available, and those possibly lost to history forever, it is worth celebrating the fact that, 9 years after documents placed into the JFK Collection were supposed to be released in full, that goal has now largely been met.

Will further documentation related to the JFK assassination, become available in the coming years? It's very likely new bits of information will continue to emerge, but it seems like the era of large-scale releases is done. In any case, the attention of the federal government has moved on, to the Epstein files, to serving the ongoing politicization of federal agencies, and to other urgent matters including war.

The Mary Ferrell Foundation Lawsuit

In October of 2022, the Mary Ferrell Foundation and two of our members filed suit in federal court seeking full enforcement of the JFK Records Act. Among the issues: President Biden's authority to replace the JFK Act release process with the so-called transparency plans, Presidential authority to withhold records of legislative bodies past 2017 (HSCA, Church Committee), lack of investigation into destroyed and missing records, and serious problems with the record-keeping of the JFK Collection as required by the Act, particularly the "central directory of identification aids" which describes each released record.

Lawsuits proceed slowly. In the meantime, some aspects of the case have become effectively moot, including the so-called transparency plans and the withholding of legislative records. With the 2025 records release discussed on this page, thousands of important documents have finally been released to the public. The MFF is proud to have played a role in applying the pressure and supplying the analyses to help make that happen, alongside of course the efforts of many researchers and the public at large.

As of the spring of 2026, some aspects of the lawsuit remain in play. One of them is the National Archives' failure to create a complete "central directory of identification aids." This is a directory of the metadata associated with each JFK document in the Collection (e.g., the data on the "rif" pages); NARA currently makes it available as a set of 6 Excel spreadsheets. But the records of 5 entire agencies - NSA, NSC, Secret Service, Army/INSCOM, and PFIAB - are completely missing; not a single record from these agencies is present in the metadata. There are many other records whose metadata is also missing from the central directory, along with other problems including thousands of redactions. See State of the JFK Releases 2025 for more details on the state of this important resource.

Another aspect of the case relates to NARA's failure to actively enforce the JFK Records Act, and the need to continue to seek additional records such as the Sheridan papers previously mentioned.

See the JFK Records Lawsuit page for more details, including PDF copies of important court filings and judgments.

Where Are We Now?

The search for the truth in the assassination of President Kennedy continues more than 60 years on, but we have reached a major milestone in the quest to have the federal government make available the information in its files.

New information does continue to emerge - just this week Jefferson Morley pointed to an unpublished manuscript by Kennedy's secretary Evelyn Lincoln, who made it very clear that she was among the many government insiders who believed Kennedy was felled not by Lee Harvey Oswald, but rather by "a group in government who wanted him removed from office."

It should be noted that while the JFK Collection is now public essentially in full, it is not all available online. Despite the efforts of the Mary Ferrell Foundation in that regard, we have only roughly 30% of the Collection available, obtained from the National Archives, the Assassination Archives and Research Center, History Matters, and other private sources. But large numbers of important transcripts and files of the House Select Committee on Assassination, as well as the Assassination Records Review Board, remain available only via in-person visits to the National Archives II facility in College Park, Maryland.

NARA has begun a project to digitize more than just the small portion which it has already put online, but the pace of that project seems very slow. So online access to the full collection remains a barrier to full transparency.

NARA's "central directory of identification aids," the metadata which powers the JFK Database Explorer, remains an inadequate tool due to thousands of missing entries and other problems. See the 2025 edition of this essay for more details on an data set which remains unchanged over the past year.

But as the quest for more and better historical data on Kennedy's assassination winds down, and as witnesses and others from that era pass away, there remains the question of what new insights can be gleaned from more than 60 years of investigation. The government files, after all, are largely the by-product of flawed investigations that, despite some pronouncements of their participants, clearly did not have "truth as their only client." So at best they are an indirect path to the truth, as Peter Dale Scott has noted. The best analyses to date come from people with wisdom and judgement who have steeped themselves in this matter, and written books that convey what they know.

Which brings us to Artificial Intelligence (AI), the latest tool which some are already applying to this project. As a software developer, I am keenly aware of both the astounding progress AI has made in the last 5 years alone, as well as its limitations. The ability for ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Anthropic's Claude, and other such tools to provide clearly written and detailed answers to questions is an amazing feat of technology development.

But an old computer adage goes "garbage in, garbage out," and it applies here. The more than 5 million pages that makes up the Kennedy assassination's JFK Collection is a giant mass of contradictory statements and evidence. Smart people look at the same data and draw different conclusions.

AI excels at certain tasks like text summarization and information extraction. Tools like Google's Notebook LM can allow querying of documents with excellent results, and the MFF is exploring to what precise use tools like this may be best put. But beware asking AI "who killed Kennedy?" How would you verify the answer anyway?

Over the coming year the Mary Ferrell Foundation will be upgrading the software that drives this website, in hopes of continuing to provide better ways for engaged people to learn what these records have to offer. Stay tuned for further announcements in this regard.

- Rex Bradford, April 2026