In recent days, various high profile commentators have been having a conniption about the fact that the Trump administration and the National Archives have not yet released new records about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy after Trump signed an executive order to create a “plan” to declassify and release new documents.
This hit a fever pitch last week when Tucker Carlson suggested that a “very serious force” was acting on the administration to prevent the release of the documents. In reality, a source at the National Archives, which is working on uploading new records, tells 404 Media that one of the mysterious forces slowing the release of new records is the tedium and care associated with cataloguing, scanning, and digitizing paper documents from more than 60 years ago without damaging them. And the Archives’ official line is that scanning the documents is painstaking work that necessarily takes a long time and is “ongoing.”
“There's no conspiracy, just a shitton of staples to remove,” a National Archives source familiar with the process told 404 Media. “The conspiracies are funny, everyone is acting like not getting instant responses for complicated, broad searches is malice. A lot of it is just very unexciting. [Scanning] five practically identical copies of a report for 30 different reports, that kind of thing.” 404 Media granted this source anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak to the press.
“Digitizing two-sided paper records takes longer because fronts and backs have to be included with no creases that might hide text, so if a scanner can only do one side at a time, that's doubling the scanning time,” they added. “It is possible to spend an entire day removing staples and not be done with a single box. Not all of them are that bad, but prep can take a ton of time depending on the records. It's just time consuming and there are various inevitable bottlenecks in getting stuff out.”
There is still a declassification process, which itself is ongoing, but actually digitizing any new records (and previously declassified ones that are not online yet) is incredibly time consuming.
Compare this very reasonable explanation with the way Carlson and others have been talking about the JFK records in recent days, and you will perhaps learn something about our information ecosystem and the ease with which someone like, say, Elon Musk is able to paint the entire government workforce as a bunch of incompetent and/or malicious losers whose expertise can be replaced by a mix of AI and workers he plucked from his companies.
“Less than two months ago, you have a sitting member of the United States Senate whose main goal is to keep those files secret. And then you have to ask yourself, why?,” Carlson said on his podcast on March 10. “We have the file numbers of most of the files that have not been disclosed, so it's like Trump issues an executive order on January 23 saying we're gonna release this stuff. They kind of can't not release it. And yet now it's the first week of March and they haven't released it.”
“So pressure is currently being applied on the administration not to release those files,” he added. “All I'm saying is we can say with certainty that there is a force that is acting on these people—a very serious force to the point that they are embarrassing themselves because they promised they would release this and they haven’t.”
Carlson was referring to Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) who said Carlson's claim is “completely made up” and that he “does not oppose releasing the JFK files.” NewsNation published an article with the subhed “Pressure being applied to keep Kennedy files from being released.” Jacob Hornberger, who runs the libertarian Future of Freedom Foundation, has sown further doubt with an article in which he posits that “the CIA simply will not permit Trump to release those long-secret records” and that “Trump is too embarrassed to let people know that the national-security establishment (e.g., the CIA), not the president, is ultimately in charge of running the federal government.”
Actual experts, meanwhile, say that there is a declassification process, a records-keeping process, a digitization and archiving process, and more that needs to happen. The records do not just magically appear online, especially when considering that one of the agencies responsible for doing so has had its leadership fired by the administration. In fact, the Archives has been engaged in a years-long effort to digitize and upload the more than 6 million JFK assassination records that have already been declassified, and that process is not even fully done yet. Meanwhile, the FBI says that it has found thousands of new documents relating to JFK in the last few months.
Since Trump signed the executive order, the National Archives created a landing page of previously released records and says that as part of the process it will work to upload new records.
“The National Archives began a concerted effort to digitize all records in the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection in 2023. Those efforts are ongoing and have been prioritized since the issuance of Executive Order 14176,” the page says. “The National Archives is ready to receive and process any further declassification decisions made by President Trump or by other agencies of the United States Government. As determinations are made and records are digitized, the National Archives will post the records online, at this webpage, on a rolling basis.”
The JFK document scanning process highlights, like many things we have seen over the last two months, that one man cannot snap his fingers and magically fix everything, and that it is important to have civil servants with expertise and who care about doing things correctly around to handle important tasks.
NARA did not respond to a request for comment.
