Seeing people line up at the curve in the road where he was shot in Dallas was wild. It's literally just a curve in the road going downtown. Nothing remarkable. Too bad he didn't return a few years ago, I guess.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/who-killed-jfk/id17146...
There’s actually a mountain of evidence pointing to a horrifying conclusion.
It’s not easy to summarize, and anyhow I don’t want to give spoilers here.
More interesting to me is who had the motive and opportunity, and this podcast makes a compelling case for who was behind it.
Please read a book.
But the most damning is that apparently the FBI has an audio recording of him laughing and even giving encouragement while another man rapes a woman in a hotel room.
As long as people are distracted by some black guy's bisexuality or whatever they won't ask questions about all the underage human trafficking on epstein's lolita express with the people who are actually alive and running the government today.
Oh, and icing on the cake: it's a good pretext to remove MLK Day and that Black History Month. Guy was a sexual deviant, so clearly the civil rights movement was a giant discredited DEI sham. eg https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/defense-agency...
My coworking space is a century old hardware distribution building in Birmingham, AL. It's about a 1-2 miles away from the predominantly African American neighborhood that was constantly bombed in the 50s.
I was told the FBI searched the building a few decades ago in the hopes of finding the rifle used in MLK's assassination.
Birmingham was a wild town for many years!
See:
Sec. 3. General Provisions. (a) Nothing in this order shall be construed to impair or otherwise affect:
(i) the authority granted by law to an executive department or agency, or the head thereof; or
(ii) the functions of the Director of the Office of Management and Budget relating to budgetary, administrative, or legislative proposals.
(b) This order shall be implemented consistent with applicable law and subject to the availability of appropriations.
As others have said, declassification is a process, not a rubber stamp. Declassified records can reference things which are still classified so you need to go through each document line by line and check for such references to make sure they're blanked. Likewise if you want to be particularly helpful you'd have to also go through all previously declassified documents referencing this document and then un-blank their references and republish them, though I doubt that often happens in practice.
JFK stuff was also declassified under Biden. No one cares because there's nothing in it.
1) the CIA and/or FBI knew about the assassination plot and either couldn't, or didn't, stop it -- they failed
or 2) there is a non-zero chance the Dulles brothers engineered it, either deliberately or through deliberate inaction
my guess is #1
I am personally more interested in the MLK data than the JFK data because flawed though they were, the many eyes on that prize didn't find even the scent of a smoking gun worth much. If it had been the other side of the Iron curtain, by now they'd have capitalised on proving it. The ability to tie that era's democrat party to the mob was too delicious to keep secret if provable. (yes, even being killed by the mob taints you with the mob) so either political, foreign, or crime related I can't see how successive governments could have resisted showing-and-telling all.
MLK, I felt was swept under the carpet the way decent "folk like us" wanted. The moment of political advantage in the facts faded much faster, the underlying unease of what agencies of the state might be complicit remains. I think we all deserve a bit of clarity here. We know he had feet of clay, thats not the point. The point is how poorly the state defended a man trying to build a better america.
Neither are anything like as important as current events. The release is not just a mechanistic "I am a man of my word" moment, its a distraction from the everyday events. Any hour news online dedicates to these stories, is time not spent worrying about what dismantling the US state means in practice in 2025.
If it makes everyone in office look bad then all the better!
Yeah, unless his dementia worsens even more he's not going to release those files.
Now that we also have P-Diddy it makes me wonder just how many high class sleazy pimps with blackmail operations are operating at a given time. This must be a standard racket.
The person that I worked with partied with PD and mirrored some of the same (alleged) sort of toxic and abusive antics in their own home and social circles, which I experienced firsthand. There was a darkness emanating from this person that I haven’t really felt before or since. We ultimately stopped working together due to them violating our contract.
The public allegations so far totally jibe with my experience associating with PDs associates and my limited visibility into the world of PD. I’m very glad to have come to my senses and avoided any closer orbit of this world.
https://www.businessinsider.com/jeffrey-epsteins-ex-girlfrie...
No amount of evidence will ever be enough. See: the moon landings.
You want people to tell the truth to government investigations in the future, and not hold something back because they think in 15 years the government might just release a transcript of everything you told them.
We know who killed JFK
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/671ky4/is_th...
> Yes, the official explanation that Lee Harvey Oswald was, on his own, responsible for murdering President Kennedy is overwhelmingly accepted as correct. It has largely held up to intense scrutiny over the past 50 years and there is no substantial evidence toward any other explanation.
> As I mentioned in my older post linked elsewhere, one of the reasons why there was so much criticism of the official explanation after the fact is that the investigation was not handled well. This resulted in a lot of seemingly contradictory and unexplained information that opened the door to questioning the overall conclusion as a whole.
Classic Trump PR move. Claim he's doing something that's already done and then take credit loudly.
And, yet, they never will.
Why would you not want this to be released?
Weird.
Excellent point that I hadn't considered. We're already flooded with executive orders and news of Musk's capricious wrecking ball. Ultimately who killed JFK or MLK doesn't matter all that much today, except as a matter of historical accuracy. But it's something that people will certainly talk about, distracting us from the real dangers going on in this administration.
Ultimately I don't think we'll learn much from this anyway. I expect any juicy documents (if any existed) were destroyed long ago, and the departments in custody of any related files are still free to redact whatever they want, or simply decide not to release the parts they don't want to release.
Another possibility is that the remaining files contain something incredibly damaging to a group or agency he hates. Like say the MLK files implicate the FBI somehow. Trump hates the FBI now (which was not the case during his first term), and files pointing the finger at the FBI would be more ammunition for purging and remaking the FBI.
Oliver Stone cares, of that I am sure.
Come on those would be the most high profile murders in the US in the 20th century?
This post is not political whether you believe or do not believe Trump is up to you.
We used to call this confirmation bias....
Have you considered that releasing these files is just fulfilling a campaign promise? Or that if a non-Trump admin had done this it would've been celebrated?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Harvey_Oswald
Just because the government messed up the first investigation in a rush doesn't change the fact that they came to the correct conclusion as the following decades has shown. It's possible there's something embarrassing to the fbi in those files but it wouldn't be assassination of prominent figures
I'm all for releasing all the known evidence about the case, but a large swath of people will never be satisfied unless they hear exactly what they want to hear. There are still a sizable number of people who think the Moon landings were faked, despite all evidence to the contrary.
He's explicitly at war with the deep state and existing institutions. Trying to tear them down and seize power. If these files make the FBI and/or other TLA(s) look bad, further public eroding trust and support, he wins.
The Republicans are also starting to win back non-white voters. Shedding light on the MLK assassination certainly does not hurt that effort.
The FBI was out for MLK.
In his first term Trump liked the FBI so he allowed them to redact the JFK files he was legally supposed to release to the public.
But in 2025 they’re his bogey man so releasing it so Kash Patel has an even easier time remolding it in his image makes a lot of sense.
Its shifting the goal posts when the call has to been release all the documents, and when they do just that, saying it wasnt in fact all the documents...it would be impossible to have evidence of it, or verify it. Just unsubstantiated claims, but thats enough for some
Very funny watching flerfs realize other flerfs arent actually willing to look at real evidence without making it a conspiracy.
no I don't. I literally said it was a honest question. I truly just want to know more about the underlying mechanisms of why governments classify and declassify things because I don't know much about that.
A post about it is trending on HN so saying "no one cares" is a dismissal about the interest on this topic. Your very contribution to the post ironically contradicts the content of your message
The point is if you're in a position to declassify banal documents, you probably don't care to do it. You look at them. You see they're banal. You move on.
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by boringness.
I’ve never heard that variation on the saying. I like it
People care about the idea of the story, not the reality.
JFK investigation documents have been declassified repeatedly, and no one even has any common reference points they bring up about them because ultimately there's nothing there. So this is just the new fantasy: "now, NOW! They'll totally declassify the memo ordering the CIA hit on JFK using mob money and then framing Oswald for it! They've had it the whole time!"
I remain unconvinced that is going to actually happen, unfortunately. They will present a plan that simply excludes any really revealing documents and what they do release will be a nothing burger. That doesn't mean that there is nothing there, just that they don't genuinely intend to release the goods.
I maybe said it badly. I think MLKs unanswered questions have more current value, than JFKs because I think they tell us more about morally corrupting behaviour in US institutions. I don't tend to think any US agency paid a part in JFKs assassination, although they bungled the aftermath.
I've been to the book depositary. Sad place. Banal even.
From Wikipedia, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_in_World_War_I
> the correct figure now is about 3,600 documents in the collection of 320,000 documents still contain redactions. That might mean we might have most of the document except for a sentence, a word, a name. In other cases, you know, several pages or, you know, I don't think there's any document that's withheld in its entirety. But, you know, it's still a lot of records. The bulk of those are CIA records. A lot you can tell from the context, like Mark says, stuff about surveillance techniques, covert arrangements with foreign governments. They're very -- they guard those very closely. That's one of the things that they're still keeping. But, you know, why is this necessary? I mean, again, to step back, you know, the JFK Records Act, all this stuff was supposed to be made public in 2017. Judge Tunheim, the head of the review board, I asked him, I said, What did you expect after 25 years? How many records would have to be -- remain secret? And he said, Out of the stuff that I saw, you know, maybe 100 documents. Not, you know, and when in 2017 the CIA and FBI came to Trump and said, We have 14,000 documents that have redactions that we couldn't possibly remove. So it's like, why is the presumption around a Presidential assassination that we're going to keep -- you know, keep these secrets for good?
My dad had classified knowledge from his time in the air force, and he wouldn't even discuss the category of information let alone give an overview of the contents, 50 years onward
LLMs may help convert the text into a form for the constraint solvers, but they're not the tool I'd use for actually connecting the dots.
Other possibility: they really didn’t do it, but there’s some classified record which sure makes it sound like they did. e.g. some record of J. Edgar Hoover joking about doing it
If a bus driver for a federal prison snapped and shot him we could say the same thing.
Where is the line between agency and private party if it's not drawn on the record?
Fun fact: there is a statue of MLK at the FBI academy in Quantico.
Even if nothing substantively new is released it gives him a chance to rant about the FBI as part of his mission to seize power and discredit the "deep state" while cosplaying as a supporter of truth, justice, people of color, etc.
None of this is really explainable by the official story.
This has been explained ad nauseam. The bullet went in a straight line.
> Oswald as known CIA asset (CIA reports show this)
I’m sure the CIA has used a lot of unstable people all over. It’s not inconceivable that one of them went on to commit an assassination without being directed to by the CIA. Sometimes things are just boring.
That said, the public deserves to know the extent of the CIA's involvement.
I would be wholly unsurprised if it turned out to be some Mujahideen type deal where taxpayers invested a bunch to up-skill this guy, left him alone once the reason for the investment was over and he eventually came back around to shoot at us.
'they' works wonders in such cases :) (hope this is not seen as snarky or whatever)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiding_in_Plain_Sight_(Kendzio...
*If the director asked, and we know that he asked, then it is on the record.
*If the director asked off the record, then it's called classified.
*If there is a conviction then it was a rogue cell.
The agency is clear in all cases whether we like it or not. Same as a corporation, but worse.
But, it still can be judged guilty or innocent in the court of public opinion and the accounts of future historians
It would have taken thirty seconds to Google "President Trump administration priorities" and come up with https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/2025/01/pres...
The efficacy or utility of those priorities doesn't matter - the fact is that the claim that "the only (or top) priority is reducing waste" is trivially easy to invalidate, in addition to making the gross logical error that good uses of taxpayer money (of which "making sure that the taxpayers are aware of what their money is being used for" is one) and bad/inefficient uses of taxpayer money are equivalent, which doesn't even require a Google search to understand is wrong.
Comments like this shouldn't be on HN. The guidelines directly state "Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle." (which is what this comment did) and that HN is for intellectual curiosity, which also didn't happen because it took less than a minute to invalidate the core premise of this comment. HN is explicitly for intellectual curiosity and thoughtful discussion like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42874301 - not this.
Are the Dulles still alive ?
you probably also think that mk ultra is a conspiracy theory.
If they interviewed everyone at that parade, what they were doing etc, and some of those people were completely uninvolved but maybe having affairs, or doing something immoral (whatever that is), then shouldn’t they be afforded privacy? Eg Imagine one would be mortified to have what sex toy was in their pocket at the time documented in public transcript.
The first thing that comes to mind is Sandy Hook. Those poor parents being harassed by people accusing them of being “false flag” actors and all that nonsense. If you were a key witness in the JFK assassination you can bet nutjobs hell bent on some conspiracy theory or another are going to track you down and harass you.
Not to mention the way more vanilla stuff: people whose testimony incriminated friends, family members etc etc
FTFY
I also remember that story, but it's no justification for keeping something with this much public interest secret.
And don’t forget that cases ‘pertaining to national security’ get thrown out all the time. [https://www.fjc.gov/content/overview-7]
Either because key evidence is classified, or witnesses are, or testimony would be considered a threat to national security, etc.
There were people in the crowd who can easily be identified, too. For example, Zapruder’s testimony would have to leave out that he shot a movie and was life on television that day, and quite a few other details to anonymize it.
i hate the wall of text on this site. i hate how some people feel entitled to tell others their remarks aren't welcome.
it truly takes away from this site to see the police show up on almost every single thread.
You either did not read my comment, intentionally and maliciously lied about what it said, or accidentally responded to the wrong comment, because it's extremely clear that I never said anything remotely like "you're not allowed to post anything except a wall of text arguing with someone".
> i hate the wall of text on this site.
Then go somewhere else. Hacker News is explicitly for intellectual curiosity, which involves thinking, which involves writing[1][2]. If you don't want to think, then this is not the place for you.
> i hate how some people feel entitled to tell others their remarks aren't welcome.
Your remarks are not welcome if you're going to violate the guidelines and engage in political flamewars. Just like in real life, there are things you can't or shouldn't say. That shouldn't be a foreign concept.
> it truly takes away from this site to see the police show up on almost every single thread.
If the "police" are those calling out violations of the guidelines - you're factually incorrect. The guidelines add to the site, because they're crafted in a way to allow intellectual discussion. Comments such as yours, and the grandparent comment, take away from the discussion by pushing aside curious thought and replacing it with emotional outburst and base instinct.
Notice that you didn't make a single logical point in your comment, nor did you inform or enlighten me or satisfy my intellectual curiosity - you just spoke about your feelings and your hatred. Why would I go to HN when I can read that on Twitter or Bluesky?
[1] https://paulgraham.com/words.html [2] https://paulgraham.com/writes.html