NARA released 140 new pdfs from the JFK Assassination Records Collection on January 30. This post takes a look at the pdfs to see what new information has become available. Read on if you’re still interested!

The latest NARA announcement

This new release received a quite low profile announcement. The only place it got any notice was on NARA’s page for the 2025 JFK releases, under the section “Accessing the Records”, where a single line has been added: “January 30, 2026 – 10:00 AM EST Release: 11,022 pages (140 PDF files).”

Following this line, there is a box to enter a search query, not at all useful in this case, and another box to choose how many record links to display. Choose 200. The first 140 record links listed are for the new pdfs. The first record number is 104-10130-10026, and the last record number is 203-10001-10012. Add up the number of pages in these records, and just as the new info states, there are 11,022 pages.

New releases

Two of these records were not previously available. These are the two typewriter ribbons from the HSCA collection: 180-10142-10055 and 180-10142-10194.

It was something of a technical trick to get text off of these and to display it in a pdf. NARA finally published TIFF images of these records in their online catalog in December 2025, and this release now gives us a pdf version. See the “Two cents” section below for comments on these, and other records as well.

There are also another 11 “new” records in this release. New here means that these eleven were never reissued after their initial release back in the 1990s. I assume that in their initial release there was some material redacted. These records are now released in full. They include:
1 FBI record (prefix 124)
8 Warren Commission records (prefix 179)
2 Eisenhower library records (prefix 203)

The remaining 127 records were reissued between 2017 and 2025. They include:
9 CIA records (prefix 104)
102 FBI records (prefix 124)
1 NSA record (prefix 144)
1 SSCI record (prefix 157)
1 JFK Library record (prefix 176)
5 LBJ Library records (prefix 177)
1 FORD Library record (prefix 178)
6 HSCA records (prefix 180)
1 ACSI record (prefix 194)

Why all these records were reissued in 2026 is an interesting question we will look at below.

Why more releases?

To remind readers what is going on here, NARA is posting new pdfs of ARC records. For the typewriter ribbons, this is the first time these have been made available.

The 11 “new” records are first-time reissues. If a record has been released in full, no reissues should be necessary, so I assume that these records were redacted in part when they were first released. I am not sure when this was, probably between 1993-1998.

These records were NOT reissued in any of the record releases from 2017 to 2025. Apparently NARA missed these redacted records when they were going through their lists, and are now making up for this oversight. This happened with several sets of records in 2025 as well. Some of these new records are worth individual research notes.

The remainder of the January 2026 records WERE released or reissued between 2017 and 2025. These latest reissues are therefore a bit of a surprise, since I thought that these records were open in full.

The alert reader will notice that most of the new reissues are FBI records. FBI records had three types of exemptions which did keep some material redacted. These exemptions included the MLK records, portions of which were withheld due to a 1970s court order sealing some of them, exemptions for court sealed material in the JFK act, and IRS income tax returns, which were not over-ridden by the JFK Act.

These FBI records are mostly quite long, and it will take a while to see whether there is indeed new material out, and what it’s all about. In addition, most of these records were from multi-rif documents, a very confusing subject which I’ve written about elsewhere. Reviewing mult-rif docs always takes double the amount of time regular records do.

At this point, I have gone over only one of these records page by page: 124-10167-10383.pdf. This was previously released in 2022, and the new version is a page for page copy. So what is newly opened here?

There are several MLK redactions still left in the 2026 pdf, such as pages 286 and 289. These were redacted in 2022 and remain redacted today.

The only new information I found released in the 2026 release is a social security number, which appears on pages 184 and 185.

I expect that this sort of release will be the case throughout the other 101 FBI records. For fanatic bean-counters like me, it remains to be done, but I don’t intend to post on any of these records.

For other records, it seems that we are just getting better quality copies of the documents. For example, the 2026 version of 104-10130-10026 removes some colored pen marks on the version released in 2022. The text under these marks was discernible (Tokyo Station, Tokyo), but the new version is certainly clearer.

One exception to “clearer but not newer” is CIA record 104-10414-10124. This is the Mexico City Station History. The most recent previous version of this was from 2022, and it had a number of redactions. The 2026 version releases many, but not all, of these redactions.

NARA has a note on these remaining redactions: “All JFK assassination-related information within the Mexico City Station History document (RIF 104-10414-10124) is fully available to the public. The Office of White House Counsel has informed NARA that the CIA may continue withholding portions of the larger document that do not relate to the assassination of President Kennedy under FOIA exemptions such as classified information (b)(1) or information that is prohibited from disclosure by federal law (b)(3).”

I have taken a close look at the 2026 release. The new material has nothing to do with the JFK assassination, but it does release more information on CIA liaison with high-ranking officials of the Mexican government. It also releases information CIA acquired from wiretaps on foreign government embassies in Mexico City, and problems CIA had with joint operations with Mexican government agencies. For those interested in the history of U.S. intelligence gathering in Mexico City during this period, the new version is worth a careful read.

Two cents

The 2026 release has nothing in it related to the JFK assassination.

It does have some new Mexico City information. It also has some Cuba-related information in the “new” documents. I may put something up on this later. The Eisenhower documents are interesting in this respect. One of these includes several pages of Eisenhower discussing whether to break off diplomatic relations with Castro’s Cuba.

The typewriter ribbons published as documents, on the other hand, are complete garbage, as one might have expected. NARA’s attempt to preserve this office waste for posterity is a pointless technical feat.

In NARA’s defense, they were told to publish the tapes by the ARRB. That doesn’t excuse the fact that the JFK collection is slowly filling up with irrelevant, useless garbage. If anyone can find anything even vaguely useful in these tapes, let me know.