CHRIS CRUCIAL: The secrets of the JFK assassination, revealed!? 🤐

PLUS: The most important 2026 races 🏃‍♂️🏃‍♀️

This nightly newsletter is for paid subscribers only. Why subscribe? Read my mission statement! Become a paid subscriber today for just $6 a month or $60 for the year. That gives you access to not just this newsletter but ALL of my content. A subscription also comes with lots of other perks — including a 15-minute, one-on-one Zoom with me! 📞

1. November 22, 1963

I wrote recently about my newfound obsession with the assassination of John F. Kennedy — following a visit over Christmas to The Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas.

So you can imagine my excitement when this headline came across my desk today: “Trump declassifies JFK, MLK assassination files.”

The long and short of it is this: On Thursday, President Trump issued an executive order that would declassify all of the documents pertaining to the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy as well as the documents from the 1968 assassinations of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy.

“Their families and the American people deserve transparency and truth,” wrote Trump in the order. “It is in the national interest to finally release all records related to these assassinations without delay.”

Which, 👀.

The story of the release of the JFK records is a loooong one.

In 1992, Congress passed the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act, which, among other things, directed that:

• All materials tied to the assassination and the subsequent investigations of it be housed together at the National Archives. The Archives estimates that it has “more than 5 million pages of assassination-related records, photographs, motion pictures, sound recordings and artifacts (approximately 2,000 cubic feet of records).”

• All records tied to the assassination be released to the public by October 2017.

Worth noting: That law came in response to the furor created by Oliver Stone’s 1991 movie “JFK,” which suggested the assassination was part of a huge government conspiracy.

Days before the scheduled 2017 release, Trump sought to take credit for it:

But, it turned out to be a bit of an Al Capone’s vault situation. In the spring of 2018, Trump reversed course. Here’s how the Associated Press covered it at the time:

Trump announced on Thursday that the public must wait another three years or more before seeing material that must remain classified for national security reasons — more than five decades after Kennedy was killed Nov. 22, 1963 in Dallas, Texas.

The National Archives released its last batch of more than 19,000 records on Thursday. But an undisclosed amount of material remains under wraps because Trump said the potential harm to U.S. national security, law enforcement or foreign affairs is “of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in immediate disclosure.”

In an interview Wednesday night with Fox News’ Sean Hannity, Trump suggested that then CIA Director Mike Pompeo convinced him not to release all the files. Here’s what Trump told Hannity:

So many people have asked me to do that. And I did it with Kennedy to an extent. But I was asked by some of our government officials not to. And, you know, you have to respect them. I was actually asked by Mike Pompeo, his secretary of state, not to. And he -- I felt he knew something that maybe, you know, when he asks you not to, you sort of say why. And he felt that it was just not a good time to release him.

And you might ask him why, maybe he'll deny that even. But he did. He asked me. And some others also, though, they didn't want the Kennedy stuff released. And they're professionals and I respect them, and they're working for me and the country. They're working for the country. And so, I didn't release. But I'm going to release them immediately upon getting. We're going to see the information. We're looking at it right now.

The CIA has downplayed what’s left unreleased from the Kennedy files — noting that 99% of all materials related to the assassination have been released.

And yet…