By Simon CrerarShareNewsweek is a Trust Project memberOfficials working for Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard turned up unannounced at a secret CIA records warehouse in early April and forced the transfer of thousands of classified files on the Kennedy assassinations to the National Archives, Reuters has reported.
Acting “on a mission” from Gabbard, the team asserted legal authority over the documents and stayed at the facility until about 2 a.m. the next day, when a “massive trove” of papers was moved out of CIA custody, per the news agency's report.
The purported files transfer, previously unreported, highlights tensions between the agency and Gabbard’s Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), as Trump-era appointees raced to fulfill the president's order to rapidly declassify data related to the assassinations of former President John F. Kennedy (1963) and his brother, ex-U.S. Attorney General and Senator Robert F. Kennedy (1968), among the most shocking acts of political violence in modern American history.
Why It Matters
The reported April warehouse operation underscores an apparent power struggle at the heart of the U.S. intelligence community over who controls some of its most sensitive historical records: Gabbard’s ODNI, which oversees 17 agencies including the CIA, versus the Central Intelligence Agency itself.
Trump signed an executive order in January directing agencies to declassify records on the JFK, RFK and Martin Luther King Jr. assassinations. A 45-day deadline for reviewing the RFK and King files expired in late-March, and frustration was mounting inside Gabbard’s team over what they saw as CIA foot-dragging, Reuters reported.
...For more than 60 years, official investigations have found that President Kennedy was killed by lone gunman Lee Harvey Oswald and that Sirhan Sirhan assassinated then-Senator Robert F. Kennedy. But polls show many Americans remain unconvinced, and decades-old questions around the Kennedy killings continue energizing conspiracy-minded parts of Trump’s MAGA base, alongside newer obsessions such as QAnon and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
What To Know
In early April, a small team of officials arrived without warning at a classified CIA archive facility in the Washington, D.C., area, according to Reuters.
Upon arrival, the ODNI team presented a document asserting that Gabbard’s office had the legal authority to seize the files without CIA approval and warned that anyone who impeded the process could be held accountable, Reuters reported. One person familiar with the operation said ODNI took this step “because they (CIA officials) were not cooperating up until that point. So the director kind of put her foot down.” Other accounts described the CIA as cooperative.
Among those present that day was Amaryllis Fox Kennedy, a former CIA officer and daughter-in-law of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., according to Reuters. Fox Kennedy arrived in a minivan and initially lacked the required badge to enter the warehouse but was waved in. She spent about an hour inside, focusing on efforts to digitize the enormous paper archive ahead of transfer to the National Archives.
After CIA security called in officials already working on the Kennedy files, the agency agreed to transfer the documents to the National Archives, using government vehicles and procedures to preserve “chain of custody,” Reuters reported.
Gabbard’s office said the interactions were professional and reflected a shared recognition that “while the timeline was short, it had also been 60 years” since the assassinations and it was time to move forward with declassification.
In an April 10 Cabinet meeting, Gabbard told Trump she had dispatched “hunters” to scour CIA and FBI archives for assassination records, saying: “We are actively going out and trying to search out the truth.”
At that meeting, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. praised the search for documents. The health secretary has long voiced suspicion that the CIA was involved in the killings of his father and uncle, allegations the agency has denied.
What People Are Saying
White House spokesman Steven Cheung told Reuters that Trump had full confidence in both Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe: “Efforts by the legacy media to sow internal division are a distraction that will not work.”
In a joint statement, Gabbard’s office and the CIA said the two agencies “have and will continue working hand-in-hand to release and declassify documents of public interest and execute President Trump’s mission of restoring trust in the intelligence community.”
What Happens Next
The April warehouse sweep fed into a larger declassification effort now underway at the National Archives, which is digitizing and releasing the assassination records.
The ODNI did not make Fox Kennedy available for interview.
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