Jefferson Morley
speaker
178 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Jefferson Morley’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
My name is Jefferson Morley. I'm a journalist, investigative reporter. I'm the co-founder and editor of the JFK Facts blog, which was created in 2012 and is now found on Substack. I'm the author of four books of nonfiction, three of them about the CIA, and I live in Washington, D.C.
So... Rex Bradford is the creator of the Mary Farrell Foundation website, which is the largest online collection of JFK records. And is a good friend and has created an indispensable, the indispensable website. source for anybody interested in the Kennedy assassination or frankly, the Kennedy presidency. So he and I were talking and we were looking ahead to the 50th anniversary in 2013.
And we just said, there's so much bad journalism. in major news organizations about the Kennedy assassination, that we need to have a presence there because we know that there's false statements, erroneous statements, misleading statements, a whole ridiculous discourse about conspiracy theories that doesn't interest us because we're researchers and historians.
And so we just wanted to have a presence in the continuing discussion of JFK's assassination. For me, it's a great story. I pay attention to it because it's very important in American history. It's of continuing interest to lots and lots of readers. And there's key questions and issues that are unresolved. And subject, you know, the ripe subject for good investigative reporting.
So to me, it's a very natural story to gravitate to. I like its scale. It's important. And we know that it's important. President Biden issued an order about it earlier this year. President Trump has been talking about JFK files. So, you know, it's a big deal in American culture. It always has been. So to me, it's a very appropriate subject for an investigative reporter.
Yeah. So just to back up a little bit. To understand the context of what Biden did last June, you need to understand the story of the JFK Records Act. And a lot of people don't know this, which is why I want to go into some detail about it. Congress passed the JFK Records Act in 1992 amid the controversy about Oliver Stone's movie.
And what Congress said was, we're not going to reinvestigate the assassination, but we are going to make all of the government's records on the subject available to the public. in the controversy over Stone's movie, and people pointed fingers and said, oh, Oliver Stone, you're a bad boy. How dare you question our government and our sacred Warren Commission?
To which Stone replied with telling effect, if you have nothing to hide, why are all of the records of the Warren Commission and the House Select Committee on Assassinations still secret? So Congress responded to public opinion and wrote a strong law.
And the law created an independent board, which went to all of the government agencies and said, please identify any records related to Kennedy's assassination. And here's our criteria for that. Please give them to us. And please tell us if there's any reason why any portion of this document can't be released.
The agencies were allowed to request postponement, not forever, but postponement of sensitive material, private information, secret government procedures, all that sort of thing. But the law said after 25 years, all of those withholdings should be ended.
And after 25 years, except in the rarest of cases, that was the language of Congress, except in the rarest of cases, all JFK records should be public in 25 years. Okay. So the question came to President Trump in October, 2017, And CIA director Mike Pompeo and FBI director Chris Wray went to Trump, met with him, and said, there's thousands of documents that we couldn't possibly release.
So Trump wrote an order about JFK files, and he sent out a tweet saying, all the JFK files have been released ahead of time. And that was false in two respects. All of the JFK files weren't released, and the ones that were released were released way behind time. But Trump's order gave the executive branch agencies four more years of secrecy, which is what they wanted.
That pushed the question of JFK files to October 2021, where it landed in the lap of President Biden. So the FBI and the CIA went to Biden and says, there's thousands of documents we couldn't possibly release. And so Biden gave them pass. What he did was he issued a statement and said, the agencies have not been able to comply with the law because of COVID.
So when the Washington Post called me up and asked me what I made of this, I said, this is the COVID dog ate my homework. This is absurd. They've had 29 years to prepare for this. COVID wasn't a big obstacle for 28 of those years. So it's just an excuse for more and continued secrecy. That lasted for a year.
And then in December of 2022, Biden issued another order asking federal agencies to take one last pass at declassifying everything they could, and then he would be done with it. So in 2023, federal agencies released several thousand more records in their entirety, removing the redactions that had existed, leaving about 3,500
documents related to the assassination that still contain some form of redactions. Might be a word, might be a sentence, might be a whole paragraph, might be a whole page. But there are 3,500 assassination-related records that still have redactions in them. And in June, President Biden issued what he called his final order on JFK files. And what he said is, from now on,
the release of these records will be handled by the agencies themselves. And so there is a transparency plan written by the CIA, which now governs the release or non-release of those remaining JFK assassination files. So what Biden did in June was he effectively negated the JFK Records Act.
which was a strong law precisely because it had taken the final decision about declassification out of the hands of the CIA and the FBI and invested it in an independent authority, which would consider the public interest in full disclosure, not only the agency's interest in continuing secrecy. So Biden gutted the JFK Records Act and the CIA is now in control of
of the release or non-release of those 3,468 remaining assassination-related records. So right now, those documents are secret indefinitely.
Well, that's a very good question. I mean, Alan Dulles' presence on the commission a man who had been fired by President Kennedy and who had considerable hostility towards his policies, that was a blatant conflict of interest. And it showed that the commission had been compromised or corrupted right from the start by a CIA official.
Showing 1–20 of 178 · page 1 of 9
Next →