When Congress passed the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act in 1992 agencies throughout the Federal Government transferred assassination-related records to the National Archives which established the JFK Assassination Records Collection. The Collection consists of approximately 5 million pages of records. Approximately 88% of the records in the Collection are open in full. An addition 11% are released in part with sensitive portions removed. Approximately 1% of documents identified as assassination-related remain withheld in full. All documents withheld either in part or in full were authorized for withholding by the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB), an independent temporary agency that was in existence from 1994 to 1998.
According to the Act, all records previously withheld either in part or in full should be released on October 26, 2017, unless authorized for further withholding by the President of the United States. The 2017 date derives directly from the law that states:
Each assassination record shall be publicly disclosed in full, and available in the Collection no later than the date that is 25 years after the date of the enactment of this Act, unless the President certifies, as required by this Act, that –
- continued postponement is made necessary by an identifiable harm to military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement or conduct of foreign relations; and
- the identifiable harm is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in disclosure.
The Act was signed by President Bush on October 26, 1992, thus the final release date is October 26, 2017.*
The documents listed below have been authorized for release under the Act after undergoing a review from the equity holding agencies.
When constituting the JFK Assassination Records Collection, NARA retained the archival organization of the files by Record Group and thereunder by series. In addition, every document was assigned a unique record identification form number (RIF) and metadata for the documents was loaded into the JFK Assassination Records Collection database and made available via archives.gov here: http://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/search.html
The newly released documents are organized for viewing on the following linked pages in accordance with their archival arrangement and each document is thereunder identified by their unique RIF number. For more information about this release and how to find images of specific documents, we recommend that you view the short informational film (video?) on NARA's YouTube page here: [insert link once video is made]