The U.S. government was in danger Thursday of missing the deadline to release a trove of previously classified records from the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, adding an unexpected twist to a saga already rife with rumors and conspiracies.
The National Archives needs the official approval of President Donald Trump to begin releasing the 35,000 documents online and meet a deadline to divulge the papers set by Congress 25 years ago by The John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act.
But as of Thursday afternoon, the memo specifying which material the CIA, State Department and other agencies still want to keep under wraps had not made it to Trump’s desk, U.S. intelligence officials told NBC News.
“There’s a mad scramble going on in the executive branch to get this done,” one official told NBC News.
The CIA is asking only for some redactions, not for all the documents to be held, the official said. But the other agencies involved in the process have not yet finished their submissions.
So only a handful of documents were expected to be released on Thursday, not the entire batch, officials told NBC News.
Trump, who is no stranger to peddling conspiracy theories about the Kennedy killing, had appeared to be especially eager to get the latest JFK documents out.
This is likely to be the last JFK document dump, and it remains to be seen whether it finally satisfies people who still dispute the finding of the Warren Commission that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone when he gunned down Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963.
The assassination shocked the nation and spawned a conspiracy industry that continues to pump out alternate theories about who was really behind the killing.
Officials at the National Archives have made a point of trying to tamp down expectations that the newest batch of documents contain any blockbuster revelations — and have noted repeatedly that about 90 percent of the available records related to the assassination are already public.
Related: What Could Be in the New Kennedy Assassination Records?
Clint Hill, the Secret Service agent who used his body to shield the mortally wounded president and first lady Jacqueline Kennedy after the first shots rang out in Dallas, said earlier Thursday that he hoped the latest declassified papers shed light on why Oswald pulled the trigger.
“I’m hoping that within that material — and there’s lots of it — there will be some indication as to the motive, the reason why he did what he did,” Hill told MSNBC.
Hill said he still blames himself for not reacting faster when the presidential motorcade came under fire.
“Deep down I still have that sense of guilt that I should have been able to get there quicker, and I didn’t,” he said. “I was the only one who had a chance to do anything.”
The paperwork that was scheduled to be unveiled on Thursday had been vetted by the Assassination Records Review Board, a panel created in the aftermath of Oliver Stone’s 1991 conspiracy film “JFK,” which popularized the notion that Kennedy was killed by rogue FBI and CIA agents.
The ARRB released the bulk of the JFK assassination paperwork two years after it was founded. The new documents were marked “NBR,” or Not Believed Relevant, the panel’s chairman, John Tunheim, said in March at a National Press Club conference in Washington.
“It’s not that important to keep protecting it,” he said. Still, he added, “I think there will be stuff interesting to researchers.”
Some 200 pages of the new batch are expected to delve into the six-day visit Oswald, a onetime Marine who had defected to the Soviet Union, made to Mexico City just before Kennedy’s assassination.
One of the juiciest stories is likely to be that of June Cobb, a CIA spy who was working in Cuba and Mexico who reported that Oswald had been spotted in Mexico City.
Cobb, born Viola June Cobb in Ponca City, Oklahoma, died on Oct. 17, 2015, in New York City, where she was living in a Manhattan senior center, an official there and her former sister-in-law told NBC News.
Tunheim said the CIA, State Department and other federal agencies balked at releasing the Mexico City paperwork “because it was thought to be detrimental to our relationship with the Mexican government at the time.”