MFF President Rex Bradford has a new post up on the “State of the JFK Releases 2026”, available here. As usual, Rex B is well worth a careful read.
His main conclusion: “The year 2025 finally saw the full declassification of the bulk of the records collected in the 1990s under the JFK Records Collection Act.”
This was also my conclusion in March-April 2025. For those interested in my comments at the time, see my posts in 2025 Releases category of the blog.
How many docs “released” in 2025?
Bradford now estimates that 2709 records in the ARC had redactions released. I will come back to this point in a later post after I have gone over these numbers more carefully.
Release content
As Bradford notes, “the vast majority of JFK records [released in 2025] were not “new” – they were re-releases of formerly redacted documents, this time with all the remaining redactions lifted (with some exceptions). There were a handful of brand-new JFK releases as well.”
And how does this new information help us understand the JFK assassination? According to Bradford,
In many cases, what was revealed was an agent name, an operation name, or often the identity of a foreign government or foreign government agency (these are often “open secrets” when the identity is Britain or Mexico). In other cases, more substantial unredactions of entire paragraphs or even pages occurred. For the most part, the newly-revealed text fills in some details of stories already known to those following this case. None is a “smoking gun” – we are at a point where the government’s information directly related to Kennedy’s assassination, as encoded in government files, may be largely known.
It is good to see this finally stated upfront in the MFF. I have been saying this for the last several years, but only about a dozen or so people read my notes. Maybe others will get the message now. Or not.
My blog posts for the 2025 releases go into detail on what was in the records with the most extensive redactions, and it was almost all irrelevant to the JFK assassination. These ‘not assassination related’ documents, NAR as the JFK Collection designates them, were the subject of widespread, random, and naked speculation online. None of this was even close to right.
As an example, the “PBGROVEL” project, which Bradford references, comes from David Phillips’ 201 file. It is from the early 1950s and has zero to do with JFK, JFK’s presidency, or JFK’s assassination.
Readers might also note that Bradford acknowledges the “Schlesinger memo”, a subject of constant attention in Jefferson Morley’s Substack blog “JFK Facts”, was actually “more related to the context of Kennedy’s presidency than the assassination itself.” I wonder if Morley now agrees with this?
Still unreleased
The JFK Act authorized, in fact mandated, the release of a vast range of materials in the JFK Collection, but as Bradford points out, it did not authorize the release of everything. Doc types not authorized for release include income tax returns and tax info, grand jury information, court sealed documents, and records gifted to NARA with restrictions in the deed of gift.
Most of these materials are in the ARC’s FBI records: there are 2000 plus FBI records that still redact this type of information, and there is no sign that Congress has any interest in revisiting this part of the JFK Act. So that’s that. Or is it?
There are a handful of records in the ARC that redact other information in addition to the four types explicitly exempted from release. For example, as noted previously, there are five CIA records that still have whole page redactions, including the CIA’s Mexico City Station History.
There is at least one record that still redacts nuclear information, and possibly one or two records with military or strategic information that remain redacted.
There also remain records with redactions dating back to 1993-94 which were never reissued. As NARA continues to scan the Collection and publish it on line, these records are usually posted as separate documents on NARA’s JFKARC webpage.
AI and the JFKARC
It is refreshing to see Bradford shares my scepticism over the utility of generative AI in analyzing the content of the ARC. Without a careful page by page analysis and classification of the docs, there is little that AI can do. And once you have done the analysis, what do you need AI for?
Two cents
As Bradford recognizes, the declassification of the JFKARC is 99.97 percent done. The information released last year as a result of this was often quite interesting, but almost wholly irrelevant to the JFK assassination.
Now that this is finally over, we can look forward to what I think will be a much more interesting phase: publication of the ARC online. Guaranteed most of this will be far more interesting, and far more relevant to the JFK assassination.
There is still lots of grist for this blog to grind, so stay tuned, all six of you!