Nothingburger: The 2025 JFK Assassination document dump.

This past week, on March 18, 2025, the National Archives, pursuant to an executive order, released about 64,000 documents in their files that they had marked as pertaining to the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy. This was in partial fulfillment of a promise by President Trump—himself a paranoid conspiracy theorist—to release the remaining documents. In a major disappointment to believers in a conspiracy to kill Kennedy, the documents fall far short of indicating anything of the kind. In fact, the document dump is pretty inconsequential, what you could definitely call a nothingburger. I completely expected this outcome as soon as the document dump was announced a few months ago, and now that I’ve had a chance to browse some of the documents and read various analyses of them, I see that I was right. The result of these documents is 100% consistent with the conclusion we have known, from historical evidence, to have been true for the past 62 years: Kennedy was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, without the help of and not under the orders or direction of anyone. There was no conspiracy.

Three years ago, in 2022, I made a series of long videos for my YouTube channel entitled “Oswald Acted Alone” (Part 1), (Part 2), in which I carefully laid out the evidence—which is absolutely overwhelming and incontrovertible—that Oswald did it, and did it alone and on his own initiative. I’ve written occasionally about the JFK case on this blog, but until this week I’ve paid little attention to the subject for nearly three years, as I long ago moved on to making videos (and classes) on other historical topics. Occasionally I get emails or social media messages from people about JFK-related matters. Some, though by no means all, are hostile. Conspiracy theorists generally turn sour and vituperative when you don’t validate their delusions and false narratives of history. A few people who liked and appreciated my “Oswald Acted Alone” video series asked me recently to make a video on the new documents. I considered it but ultimately decided the subject didn’t rise to the level of something worth making a new video about, or slowing down my progress on the deep dive video I’m working on now, which is about the 1789 mutiny on the Bounty. But I thought as sort of a consolation that I’d at least do a blog post on the subject, so here it is.

As I’ve said a couple of times in various YouTube comments, I’m frankly surprised that the National Archives managed to find anything to release this time. The notion that “the government is holding back the JFK documents!” has been quite widespread for decades, but the truth is that almost everything it had was released decades ago—if not in the 1960s and ‘70s, certainly in 1992, when an act of Congress, sparked by the popularity of Oliver Stone’s conspiracy fever dream of a film JFK, mandated the release of what was left with a few narrow exceptions. It’s those “narrow exceptions” that conspiracy theorists have pinned their hopes on for the last 33 years, somehow convinced that the CIA, FBI or White House was somehow sitting on an explosive “smoking gun” document that would prove that Oswald had help, or was innocent, or was actually a space alien from Zeta Reticuli, or something. In reality, the remaining holdbacks had to do with protecting the names of CIA agents and disclosing methods of CIA information collection and internal procedure. This week’s document release makes that abundantly clear. Not only is most of what I saw in the package mundane and boring bureaucratic business, but a good portion of it isn’t even related to the JFK assassination at all, or related in only the most tangential and inconsequential ways.

Example: look at this document, no. “104-10107-10059,” dated October 7, 1976. It’s a memo to the CIA’s Personnel Division from somebody named Joel E. Keys, requesting that a letter agreement be drafted for payments to a company called “TOPHONE/1.” What is “TOPHONE/1” supposed to do for the CIA? It’s not stated. Possibly tapping phones in Europe, as the “Europe Division” is mentioned. The revelation that the CIA did business to tap phone lines in Europe should be about as surprising as the revelation that Grant is buried in Grant’s tomb. What does this have to do with the Kennedy assassination, which occurred 13 years earlier? Beats the hell out of me. Yet here it is in the document dump. It has nothing to do with Oswald, or gunmen on the “grassy knoll,” or Kennedy, or anything. It’s dull bureaucratic business.

Let’s look at another document, No. “104-10105-10120.” This is a memo, again from 1976, from Robert R. Kierce, Chief of the Special Security Unit, for the Chief of the External Activities Branch. (You’ve got to love the CIA’s important-sounding office names). This memo is an analysis of a manuscript, unpublished at that time, by a former CIA agent named David Phillips. At least this document is related to the assassination. Evaluating part of the manuscript, Mr. Kierce says:

“Considerable inside information is provided regarding Lee Harvey Oswald and his activities in Mexico. The SSU defers to LA Division [and others] regarding the advisability of inclusions of this material in this manuscript.”

Now that sounds incriminating, right? Conspiracy theorists have tried to make much of Oswald’s September 1963 visit to Mexico, where he somewhat desperately tried to get a visa to enter Cuba, the Communist country he greatly admired and had convinced himself would be a paradise he wanted to live in. This was months before he even got the idea to assassinate Kennedy. However, the evidentiary value of this memo collapses when one realizes that the manuscript Kierce was commenting on was eventually published, by David Phillips in 1977 as The Night Watch: 25 Years of Peculiar Service, which you can get from your local library. Phillips made numerous unsupported accusations about conspiracy in the JFK case throughout his retirement, until his death in 1988. None were ever substantiated with evidence. In any event, this memo from 1976, released this past week, contains nothing new. In fact, if you look on the cover sheet of the document you’ll see a stamp reading, “APPROVED FOR RELEASE 1993 CIA HISTORICAL REVIEW PROGRAM.” Which means this document had already been released and has been in the public domain for over a generation. Not much of a “smoking gun.”

Let’s look at one more. This is at least a document that conspiracy theorists might like, if they ever discover it. No. “104-10068-10142” is a memo apparently from some intelligence office stationed in Sydney, Australia to another one in Canberra, the Australian capital. It’s dated November 25, 1963, just three days after the assassination. It says:

“Asst. ALUSNA [a U.S. intelligence office] received telephone call on 23 November from person claiming to be Polish driver of Russian vehicle. Information touched on several areas including possible Soviet connection supplying money to individual in U.S. to assassinate President, possible Soviet implication in USS Thresher incident, etc.”

The USS Thresher was an American submarine that suffered a catastrophic accident and imploded off the Massachusetts coast in April 1963. So, wow! We’ve got a connection between Soviet agents and the assassination, and a link to the Thresher disaster! This really does count as a revelation, doesn’t it?

No, actually not. This piece of paper documents a phone call received from somebody in Australia who alleged these things—without evidence. Were U.S. intelligence agencies sifting through potential leads, three days after Kennedy’s death, to determine whether the Soviets or some other foreign power was behind it? Absolutely they were. Did they find any evidence that this was the case? Not a thing. This is a document from the investigation phase, even before the Warren Commission came out. As we know, there is no evidence that the Soviet Union was behind or involved in the assassination—so whoever called that agency in Australia on November 23, 1963 was probably just a crank.

There’s a broader point to be made here, and it’s exactly the reason why I knew, even before I saw any of the documents, that they would not indicate a conspiracy and indeed not be of much consequence no matter what they said. Documents on the assassination held back by the U.S. government, for whatever reason, could, by definition, not be the only place in which one could find evidence of a conspiracy, if there had been one. If all the evidence, public since the very day of the assassination, shows that Oswald fired three shots from the Texas School Book Depository from his rifle, a weapon that was proven (on the very afternoon of the assassination) to be his, no document suddenly unearthed from a file after 62 years can indicate otherwise. The vast totality of the evidence in the assassination proves that Oswald did it, and did it alone; making that case was the entire purpose of my video series. If that is true, it has always been so, and the documents, when released, could only be consistent with those facts that we already know, and have known for 62 years, to be true. Whatever the CIA was doing behind the scenes, even if revelations about it turn out to be salacious, cannot change the basic facts of what happened.

Conspiracy theorists generally don’t like me. At best, they think I’m a buffoon, a moron, a gullible dupe or a bad historian. One fellow tried to comment on one of my JFK videos last night, “Where’d you get your Ph.D., a Cracker Jack box?” (I didn’t let the comment through moderation). At worst, they think I’m an active participant in the cover-up of JFK’s assassination; I’ve been accused of being a CIA agent numerous times. (Please sign up for the paid tier of The Garden of Memory, the CIA needs all the funding it can get!) What struck me about the run-up to this document release was how badly many of them want me to be wrong, and how much they look forward to me being publicly humiliated when the “facts” that they believe are true finally come out and prove that it was a conspiracy all along. I received an email to this effect, from a total stranger, a few weeks ago. Another attempted comment a week or so was something to the effect of, “The documents are coming out soon! How does it feel to be so badly embarrassed?”, as if the documents, which no one outside the U.S. government had seen yet, had somehow already proved that Oswald did not act alone. Conspiracy theorizing involves a great deal of wishful thinking. But facts speak for themselves.

The irony in the latest JFK document dump is that Trump did not fulfill his promise: there are apparently still 16,000 documents that the government is going to continue to hold back, presumably for the same reason the 64,000 made public this week were held back from the 1992 dump—exposure of the CIA’s dirty laundry. In a couple of years, after the 2025 fiasco has faded from their memory, JFK conspiracy theorists will continue to claim, “If Oswald acted alone, why is the government still holding back documents?” and this whole silly cycle will begin again, as if what happened this week was a mirage. The buffs prefer it that way. One thing I do know about conspiracy theorists is that they will never in a million years give up their beliefs, no matter how much evidence is produced to prove them wrong. They cling to them like life preservers and security blankets.

Philip J. Klass, a lifelong skeptic of UFOs/UAPs, left a notorious quote that has come to be known as the “UFO Curse.” It was originally published in 1983, though Klass actually died in 2005. It was a bit of spite directed at UFO believers who hated him, but it’s equally apposite to other woo beliefs like the Kennedy assassination. So, in the following quote, substitute “JFK conspiracy” for “UFOs,” and you’ll get a taste of the future that believers in this nonsense are doomed to live out forevermore:

“No matter how long you live, you will never know any more about UFOs than you know today. You will never know any more about what UFOs really are, or where they come from. You will never know any more about what the U.S. Government really knows about UFOs than you know today. As you lie on your own death-bed you will be as mystified about UFOs as you are today. And you will remember this curse.”

If you want to read the recently-released JFK documents for yourself, they’re available from the National Archives website. Have at it, here; but you’re in for a very boring weekend. For a summary of what they do (and don’t) contain, the New York Times has a good write-up, here. I now need to get back to working on the Bounty video.

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