The Biden administration released over 1,000 previously classified documents relating to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
The 1,491 documents include reports that Kennedy's assassin Lee Harvey Oswald visited the Cuban and USSR embassies in Mexico in order to get a visa in the months before Kennedy's killing. According to a version of the CIA, one of the people Oswald spoke to was the Soviet embassy's consul, who had ties to the KGB's assassination department. The documents say they spoke about Oswald's efforts to get a visa to go to the Soviet Union.
Some of the tips that investigators chased did not pan out.
In 1962, a report was revealed that the Australians had received a tip from a man who claimed he was a driver for Soviet diplomats that there was a plot to kill Kennedy. Officials tried to confirm parts of the man's story and concluded that he was a crank. The U.S. wanted to reveal information about the tip decades ago, but was asked not to by the Australian government.
The documents were originally scheduled to be released earlier this year, but President Joe Biden ordered an extension for the National Archives to produce the documents in October, after the archivist said their work had been slowed by the Pandemic.
The National Archives was supposed to have released all of the remaining classified records by October 2017 under a 1992 law inspired by the Oliver Stone movie JFK.
The National Archives released a large amount of documents a month ago, but held back others at the request of then-President Donald Trump. Trump said in a memo that executive departments and agencies have proposed to me that certain information should still be redacted because of national security, law enforcement, and foreign affairs concerns. The final set of documents is expected to be released by December 15 of next year, and was the largest number of documents to be declassified since then. In his October order, Biden said that all the information should be released unless the redaction is necessary to protect against an identifiable harm to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or conduct of foreign relations that is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in disclosure.