“It’s information the Russian government was in charge of releasing, and I’m sure that you’ll see that information coming out here pretty soon,” Luna said during a NewsNation interview previewing the release of the documents at some point this fall. “There is some level of open communication, and so as a result of that, that information will now be available in the coming months to the American people and also to JFK researchers.”
Kennedy was killed in 1963 in Dallas as he campaigned for reelection. Questions have lingered for decades about who was behind the assassination attempt. The U.S. government, through the Warren Commission, determined the assassination plot was carried out solely by Lee Harvey Oswald, a Marine said to be fluent in Russian who briefly lived in Russia and married a woman from the Soviet Union.
Luna, the chairwoman of the House Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, said the Trump administration is finally obtaining files from Russia surrounding the assassination after the United States previously tried and failed in the 1990s to obtain the documents.
She suggested the coming files could shed light on speculation that the CIA was involved with Kennedy’s assassination or helped cover up information related to the killing. Oswald’s connections to the CIA have long been debated, although the government has historically downplayed such conjectures.
Oswald qualified as a sharpshooter in the Marines and was believed to have fatally shot Kennedy from approximately 265 feet away. However, Luna said Wednesday that the files set to be released show that when he was living in Russia, the KGB, a Soviet-era intelligence agency known as the secret police, observed that Oswald “was actually not a good shot.”
“This is not the only piece of information that we have,” the Florida lawmaker added. “The whole story that was the official narrative has been going to pieces within the last week.”
Luna also commented on files released by her House task force earlier this month related to CIA officer George Joannides. The formerly top-secret files were released in July under the Trump administration’s push to declassify information related to Kennedy’s assassination.
While the CIA has long claimed it had little or no knowledge of Oswald’s activities before Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963, the new Joannides documents indicate the agency’s allegations were false, according to the House task force, which has suggested the federal 1964 Warren Commission report omitted evidence from its investigation into the former president’s death.
The documents show that Joannides, who specialized in psychological warfare, ran an operation that came into contact with Oswald before Kennedy, the uncle of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., was killed in Dallas. The files indicate that the CIA lied for decades about Joannides’s role in the Kennedy killing before and after the assassination, according to Luna and experts on the case.
“This was probably one of the biggest breaks in the JFK assassination in the last 60 years,” Luna said this week on the release of the Joannides files. “It disproves the lone gunman theory.”
She continued to cite witness testimony that Kennedy was shot from both the front and back, indicating multiple shooters.
UKRAINE BENEFITS FROM TRUMP’S FRUSTRATION WITH PUTIN, BUT VOLATILITY REMAINS
The government released more than 2,000 files connected to Kennedy’s assassination in March after President Donald Trump in January signed an executive order directing the release of all documents related to the death.
Those documents caused less of a stir. They are available online or in person, in hard copy or analog media formats, at the National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, Maryland.
