A non-profit archive sued the Biden administration on Wednesday over Biden’s decision to delay the release of government records related to the assassination of John F Kennedy.
The suit was filed by the Mary Ferrell Foundation (MFF), which has a comprehensive online database of records related to the president’s 1963 assassination in Dallas by Lee Harvey Oswald. Kennedy’s death has long been the subject of intense interest, speculation and conspiracy theories.
In the suit, lawyers for the group cited a 1992 federal law, the President John F Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act, which set 27 October 2017 as the deadline for the government to make public records related to the incident. But when that date came, then president Donald Trump pushed back the release of some records until 2021, citing national security concerns.
Last October, Biden signed a memo delaying release again until 15 December this year.
The delays have blocked the release of about 15,000 records, MFF lawyers wrote in their suit, “depriving … members, researchers and historians with the ability to learn about the assassination.
“These failures have resulted in confusion, gaps in the records, over-classification, and outright denial of thousands of assassination-related files, five years after the law’s deadline for full disclosure,” the group said on its website.
Many of the documents remaining are sensitive, NBC News reported. Seventy percent are controlled by the CIA, according to the outlet, and 23% are controlled by the FBI.
The lawsuit, filed in federal court in San Francisco, asks a judge to declare that Biden’s memo violates the JFK act and to release all records at the “earliest possible date”. It also seeks to compel the government to explain all of the redactions and why it has chosen to withhold certain records.
“It’s a ‘dog ate my homework’ argument,” Bill Simpich, an MFF attorney, told NBC News. “This case is all about delay. The agencies always have new and better excuses.”
