This is the second note in a series updating release information in NARA’s JFK Database. The first note is here.
The JFK Database is a compilation of identification aids for the JFK Assassination Records Collection (ARC). It is an essential tool for working with the ARC. For details on both the database and the Collection, see the first note.
This second note looks at the details of how NARA released records in the Collection. It is based first of all on information in the latest update of the JFK database from 2021. Release information in the database is out of date by several years, so there has been much confusion on the status of records in the collection and how they were released.
This note will clear up much of that confusion by looking at the current status of Collection records released online by the National Archives (NARA).
Background
The JFK Collection was created by the JFK Act. The Act was signed into law by President George H.W. Bush (pere) on October 25, 1992. The main purpose of the Act was to gather as many government files related to the JFK assassination as possible, and to open the files to the public as quickly as possible.
To do this, the JFK Act created an Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) consisting of five board members (four historians and a lawyer). Together with a staff of about 30, they worked from 1994 to 1998, assembling a collection of over 300,000 records, of which 88% were fully available (open) to the public when the Board finally shut down in September 1998.
Information held back from public release was said to be “postponed.” The JFK Act mandated that “postponed” information would be released 25 years after the Act was signed, i.e., October 26, 2017.
Prior to that, records with postponements were mostly available to the public with passages held back (redacted). A very small percentage were not available to the public at all, except for some basic data (withheld).
The incomplete 1998 release
Why didn’t the ARRB complete releasing all the information in the ARC by 1998? The Board had only a limited term, and chose to spend a good part of it looking for new records to add to the records collected by previous government inquiries: the Warren Commission, the HSCA, the Schweiker-Hart sub-committee established by the Church Committee, and so on.
The Board put aside records from these earlier investigations which they determined were largely, or entirely, irrelevant to the assassination. They did include these records in the JFK Collection, for the most part, ensuring their eventual release after October 2017. But they chose to spend much of their time looking for new information, and for records not previously reviewed or released.
At the same time, they were careful to make sure that truly relevant records, those central to the assassination, were reviewed in full and released as much as possible to the public.
Thus the idea that there was a lot of important information in the records the board put aside was false to begin with. A careful look at the discussions of records and passages released since 2017 shows exactly how little new and relevant information on the assassination has come out.
Nonetheless, the releases since 2017 were mandated by the JFK Act and this information is worth a careful, critical look. In addition, the records have, in some cases, extended our understanding of the historical background of the JFK assassination. For historians, they remain a valuable resource well worth looking at.
Releases from 2017 and later
If the JFK Act had simply stipulated that all information held back in the JFK Collection was to be unconditionally released on 26 October 2017, there would be very little to write about in this blog and I would long ago have found another research interest.
But the Act did not do that. Instead, it allowed departments and agencies to request the President to continue postponing release of information in the JFK Collection, if “continued postponement is made necessary by an identifiable harm to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or conduct of foreign relations” and if “the identifiable harm is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in disclosure.”
This section of the Act, aka 5(g)(2)(D), was the basis for continued postponement of information in the JFK Collection for another 9 years, until 2026. In fact, there are still records where “postponed” information has not yet been released in full. Section 5(g)(2)(D) remains the legal basis for holding back this information from the public.
This section (call it 5(g) for short) has made the release process for records in the JFK Collection very complicated. There have been 17 separate releases of records and information in the Collection since 2017. Keeping track of the tens of thousands of records in these releases is a bean counter’s nightmare, and there have been many false and/or exaggerated claims about the status of records in the collection.
This note gives a correct, detailed overview of these releases. If that’s not what you are interested in, skip this post. But if you want a more accurate, complete picture than what is available elsewhere, read on!
Release totals vs. record totals
As discussed in the first note in this series, NARA has posted pdf copies online of all the JFK records where information was previously held back.1They posted a few audio files as well. There have been 17 of these online releases, and a total of about 74,600 pdfs were posted. This is the release total.
However, many of these pdfs were copies of the same record. This is because the information held back in the records was released “incrementally”. Records with several words or passages held back often had one word or passage released on one date, and another word or passage released on another date. A release therefore does not equal a “record.”
How many distinct records were in these 17 releases? As we saw, there were about 37,226. This is the record total. This note will focus on record totals.
Record totals by year
A total of 37,226 records were released from 2017 to 2026. Remember that many of these records were posted by NARA multiple times, as different word and passages were released. Rather than ask just how many pdfs were posted each year (we saw that in the previous note), we might ask how many unique records were first posted in each year?
Here is what I found:
| year | uniq recs posted/th> | pct of total |
|---|---|---|
| 2017 | 35434 | ~95% |
| 2018 | 1141 | ~3% |
| 2021 | 74 | <1% |
| 2022 | 473 | ~1% |
| 2025 | 94 | <1% |
| 2026 | 12 | <1% |
These numbers show that in 2017, NARA posted 35,434 of the overall total of 37,226 records. From 2018 to 2026, only 1792 more unique records were posted. That means over 95 percent of all records released were available at NARA by December 2017.
This does not mean that all these records were open in 2017! Many of these records were released with redactions, i.e. words and passage were still held back.
On the other hand, by December 2017 all “withheld” records eligible for release were released at least in part.2Eligible for release refers to information other than income tax returns, court sealed documents, grand jury records, and documents gifted to NARA that are restricted by a deed of gift.
Based on FOIA documents released by NARA in 2023-24, this was a strategic decision by NARA. NARA was not able to unilaterally declassify records. It was, however, able to press reluctant departments and agencies to declassify as much material as possible, and to post all records with newly opened information as early as possible.
RIF records by release
As the numbers above show, by checking which records were posted when, we are able to state when a pdf of any given record first became available online at NARA. We are not yet sure, however, when any given record was first released in full (RIF). Is there a way to do this? In fact, there are two ways.
First, we can simply inspect every page of every pdf posted online at NARA. As the first note in this series pointed out, redacted material is replaced in these pdfs by an empty rectangular box. Find all the pdfs that have boxes and you know that record is not released in full. It is still redacted. This is, of course, a vast task. There are 76,400 pdfs posted online at NARA. many of them are dozens of pages long, some of them are thousands of pages long.
Second, we can use several shortcuts to simplify the task of checking for redacted records. For instance, as noted above, many records are only one page long. These can be very quickly inspected for redaction boxes. I have done this several times, and I am confident all such records are now open. I am also confident that I know which release the final redactions in these records came off. There are a number of other simple heuristics that allow us to skip most of the pdfs that were not released in full.
The following table gives the results of all this checking. It includes basic release information for ARC records posted by NARA, listing release number, release date, total number of records released on that date, records released in full (RIF) on that date, and the percentage of RIF releases.
| # | rel date | total rel | RIF rel | pct RIF |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| #1 | 2017-07-24 | 3793 | 3788 | 99% |
| #2 | 2017-10-26 | 2891 | 2888 | 99% |
| #3 | 2017-11-03 | 676 | 96 | 14% |
| #4 | 2017-11-09 | 13213 | 0 | 0% |
| #5 | 2017-11-17 | 10744 | 8342 | 78% |
| #6 | 2017-12-15 | 4256 | 1780 | 42% |
| #7 | 2018-04-26 | 18897 | 5525 | 30% |
| #8 | 2021-12-15 | 1491 | 1483 | 99% |
| #9 | 2022-12-15 | 13235 | 8830 | 67% |
| #10 | 2023-04-13 | 422 | 422 | 100% |
| #11 | 2023-04-27 | 355 | 355 | 100% |
| #12 | 2023-05-11 | 502 | 501 | 99% |
| #13 | 2023-06-13 | 290 | 288 | 99% |
| #14 | 2023-06-27 | 1106 | 228 | 21% |
| #15 | 2023-08-24 | 21 | 5 | 24% |
| #16 | 2025-03-18 | 2565 | 2549 | 99% |
| #17 | 2026-01-30 | 139 | 137 | 98% |
This detailed breakdown can offer us insights into some of the more puzzling aspects of earlier releases, especially the 2017-2018 releases, which were quite confusing. Going into the details of this would make this post much too long, so I will put this off for now.
However, there is an important caveat is need here. Remember that “open” records — records that have all the text/content opened to public — are only one of three record states in the ARC. Once a record is open, of course, redaction counters like me no longer follow it.
A record with text held back, i.e., a record that still has blank redaction boxes in it, can be a much more slippery item to keep track of. In records with multiple redactions on multiple pages, it often happens that some redactions are released, and some are not. This is not be reflected in the table above. If a record had even one redactions, I didn’t count it, even if hundreds of paages were newly released.
The total number of redactions and releases in the collection is at least an order of magnitude greater than the total number of records with redactions; counting all of these exceeds my time and energy. All I counted is records where all the redactions were gone. The table is therefore an incomplete picture of how records were released. Readers should bear this in mind throughout the discussion.
From redacted to open: year by year counts
The total number of records released in full (RIF) for 2017-2026 was 37,216. Following the table above, we can track these records year by year. Here is a summary table:
| year | RIF recs posted/th> | pct of total |
|---|---|---|
| 2017 | 16894 | 45% |
| 2018 | 5525 | 15% |
| 2021 | 1483 | 4% |
| 2022 | 8830 | 24% |
| 2023 | 1799 | 5% |
| 2025 | 2549 | 7% |
| 2026 | 136 | <1% |
The summary table shows us how records were released under Trump 1.0, Biden, and Trump 2.0 Trump 1.0 was responsible for the RIF docs in 2017-2018: this amounted to 60 percent of the total. Biden was responsible for all the RIF docs from 2021 to 2023, or about 33 percent of the total. The last two years were Trump 2.0, with 7 percent of the total records released in full. This means Trump released about two thirds of the redacted records that remained in the collection as of 2017, while Biden released the other one third.
These percentages differ from the vague, general discussions common online. If you have tried to follow these, you may well have come up with an impression in some ways the opposite of what actually happened.
Trump 1.0 is often portrayed as releasing in full only a small fraction of the total number of redacted records. Biden’s releases were also often portrayed as minor, leaving all lengthy redacted passages untouched. The fact that Biden released in full almost one third of all redacted records in the collection has never been acknowledged online or in any of the numerous podcast discussions of releases.
Indeed, it was only after the 2022 releases that some writers conceded that all the withheld records had been released in part, if not in full.
In contrast, the relatively minor 2025 releases from Trump 2.0 have sometimes been cited as larger than they actually were. This is not entirely unwarranted. This last major set of releases did see the result of many records that were only partially released once prior to 2025. That one partial release was the 9 November 2017 release, which consisted of CIA and NSA records.
Many of these CIA/NSA records saw repeated incremental releases later, but never in full. Many researchers convinced themselves that there was highly relevant information on the assassination in these long postponed passages.
I have written elsewhere about these records, which I examined carefully. I found almost all of them completely irrelevant to the JFK assassination. My own judgement is that both the number of passages released in 2025, and the significance of these releases, were exaggerated.
The most recent releases from January 2026 are trivial, in some cases simply providing clearer copies, rather than full releases.
My two cents
I should remind readers again that there are still records in the ARC that are not yet released in full. The most notable set, as I have said elsewhere many times, is the microfilm version of the CIA’s 201 file on Lee Harvey Oswald. Because this copy supposedly duplicates the hard copy version, which has been released in full, it has apparently been put on a back burner.
This is a mistake, I believe. In any case, the microfilm copy (which is over 30,000 pages long) is an integral part of the JFK Collection and should absolutely be released in full.
There are a handful of other records listed in the JFK database that have also not been released in full. The careful reader may have noted that I write of 37,226 records released and 37,216 records released in full. This does indeed indicate that there are at least 10 records that were posted at NARA from 2017 to 2026 which are still not released in full to the public. There are almost certainly a few others in addition to these, but that is a subject for another day.