The 2025–2026 JFK files

Executive Order 14176, signed 23 January 2025, said that continued withholding of Kennedy records “is not consistent with the public interest and the release of these records is long overdue,” and ordered a plan within 15 days. [1]

Under a presidential directive of 17 March, the Archives said, “all records previously withheld for classification” in the collection were released, “without redactions.” It posted 31,419 pages and then 37,127 pages on 18 March 2025, 14,318 on 20 March, 53 on 26 March, 704 on 3 April, and 11,022 on 30 January 2026. [2]

Separately, the FBI, which had opened a Central Records Complex in 2020 and was inventorying closed case files from its field offices, found more JFK records. It delivered them on 20 February 2025 and more between March and June. They were released with grand-jury material redacted, as the law requires. [2]

Information still closed is limited to grand-jury material, court-sealed records and tax returns, under sections 10 and 11 of the Act. [2][3]

The National Security Archive’s analysts found the newly unredacted files most revealing about CIA operations generally: a break-in at the French consulate, the director’s dealings with the Vatican, an inspector general report naming CIA officers who helped plot the 1961 killing of the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, and payments to swing a Bolivian election. “There is no doubt that the JFK Records Act has advanced public knowledge of CIA covert operations… more than any other declassification in the history of access to information,” said Peter Kornbluh. [1]

At the House hearing on 1 April 2025, journalist Jefferson Morley said a newly released transcript showed CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton had lied under oath to the House committee about the agency’s surveillance of Oswald’s mail while he lived in the Soviet Union. He called Angleton the third senior CIA officer known to have lied about what the agency knew about Oswald, after Richard Helms and George Joannides. [2]

The files also included personnel records on Joannides, released in May 2025, that confirm his role running Cuban exile student groups from Miami in 1963; see the Joannides file. [3][4]

The Archives acknowledged that, “in an effort to maximize transparency,” some records were released with the personal identification information of living people, and said it was working with the Social Security Administration to contact them. The privacy group EPIC testified about the problem at the April hearing. [1][2][3]

An independent site, JFKrecords.org, has documented what it calls “silent updates.” In one case it archived a 182-page FBI file on the socialist activist Peter Camejo that the Archives released on 30 January 2026, and found that by June the file at the same address had been replaced by a 17-page version with most of its contents withdrawn. The Archives did not announce the change. The 2022 short version and the 2025 full version are both still on the Archives’ site under different addresses. [4][5][6][7]

The Archives says all assassination-related information in the CIA’s Mexico City station history is public, but that the White House counsel told it the CIA may keep withholding portions that do not relate to the assassination. [1]

The National Security Archive reported on 1 October 2026 that the withheld parts include nearly ten fully redacted pages about CIA operations against left-wing student groups before the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre, passages on the Mexican security official Miguel Nazar Haro, and liaison with the ruling party. [2]

In February 2026 a federal judge in San Francisco ruled that the 2025 release had largely mooted the Mary Ferrell Foundation’s lawsuit for records held by Congress, that the Archives need not chase down unredacted originals held by agencies, and that records the plaintiffs said were destroyed were “fatally lost.” [3]