Kennedys and King Test host626

Tag: CURRENT EVENTS

  • When to admit you’re wrong: JFK’s lessons for Joe Biden

     

  • JFK Assassination Records—The Picture is Getting Clearer

    JFK Assassination Records—The Picture is Getting Clearer

    I have written a series of articles for Kennedys and King  regarding the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 (the “JFK Act”).  The main focus of the previous articles has been the failure of agencies and the Executive Branch to timely release all assassination records by October 26, 2017.  That was the mandated date under the JFK Act for final declassification of all assassination records.  This article will focus on the actual steps taken by agencies and the Executive Branch to delay the process of declassification since 2017. We will also examine what can be done to ensure compliance with the JFK Act at this point in time.

    In recent months, I have been working with a group of skilled lawyers in an effort to determine why, in 2021, the American public still does not have access to tens of thousands assassination records.  Let me say that again.  In 2021, agencies and the Executive Branch are still classifying tens of thousands assassination records: almost 58 years after the Kennedy Assassination.  Even worse, we do not have a valid explanation from the Executive Branch as required by the JFK Act.  We will get back to that point later in the article.

    Brief Early History of the JFK Act and Declassification Efforts

    Congress overwhelmingly passed the JFK Act in October of 1992.  Only one member of Congress did not vote in favor.  The JFK Act required the formation of the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB): an independent panel of academics, archivists and/or attorneys to begin the declassification process.  In the opening declarations of the JFK Act, Congress made its intent very clear.  Congress stated that all assassination records carried an immediate presumption of disclosure, and that only in the rarest of cases would continued postponement be possibly warranted.  Remember, Congress declared that in 1992, almost 30 years ago.

    The ARRB did a tremendous amount of work between 1994 and 1998.  The result was declassification of thousands of assassination records, which was a significant step for American citizens and researchers who seek to understand the history of the Kennedy Assassination.  It is worth noting that the “Public Interest” was a compelling reason for the creation of the JFK Act.  The JFK Act itself states that the “Public Interest” means the “compelling interest in the prompt public disclosure of assassination records for historical and governmental purposes and for the purpose of fully informing the American people about the history surrounding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.”

    The ARRB, by Congressional mandate, completed its term by 1998.  Congress then left further declassification efforts in the hands of agencies and the Executive Branch.  That is where we start to see the problem.

    The JFK Act required agencies to engage in a process of “periodic review” after the winding down of the ARRB.  Even if the ARRB had initially determined that an assassination record warranted postponement under the evidentiary standards of the JFK Act, agencies were still required to review those determinations from the 1990’s and “address the public disclosure of additional assassination records.”  The purpose of the “periodic review” by agencies was to continue the downgrade and the declassification of protected assassination records.  Further, for any records initially approved for postponement by the ARRB, agencies were required to deliver to the Archivist (and publish in the Federal Register) an unclassified written description of the reason for continued postponement.

    Brief Explanation of the Mandated Deadline—October 26, 2017

    Agencies and the Executive Branch were given 25 years to complete the declassification process for JFK Records.  As discussed above, this started with disclosures to the ARRB and requests for continued classification.  Then, the agencies had between 1998 and 2017 to complete the declassification process through periodic review and additional disclosures to the Archivist.  As of October 26, 2017, precisely 25 years after the passage of the JFK Act, only the President had authority to postpone the release of certain individual records, based on specific standards in the JFK Act. Specifically, President Trump was required to certify that 1) continued postponement was made necessary by an identifiable harm to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or conduct of foreign relations; and 2) the identifiable harm was of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in disclosure. 

    What happened instead?  On October 26, 2017, President Trump authorized a six (6) month “temporary” postponement for government offices and agencies to comply with final disclosure under the JFK Act.   We do not know exactly what President Trump reviewed, or did not review, in terms of actual assassination records that posed an apparent “concern” for agencies.   We do know that President Trump did not issue a record-specific certification for each record that agencies and/or the Executive Branch sought to postpone, as required by the JFK Act. 

    We also now know that a legal rationalization for “temporary postponement” was provided to President Trump on October 26, 2017.  That rationalization was in the form of a legal opinion from Curtis E. Gannon, who was then an Acting Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel. The rationalization proposed, in contravention of the Act, a delay of only “a few months.”  In apparent reliance on the Gannon Memo, President Trump issued an order authorizing a 6-month delay for agencies to complete their review and disclosure obligations and comply with the JFK Act.  As explained in this article, the Gannon Memo does not correctly interpret the JFK Act as written and was, from the outset, clearly designed to justify a certain outcome desired by agencies who wish to continue withholding assassination records from the American public.

    Brief Review of the “Temporary Postponement” Period

    Following the 6-month postponement discussed above, the President should have been in a position to authorize the release of all assassination records. At the very least, the President should have been in a legal position under the JFK Act to certify postponement of a handful of records and with record-specific explanations. That is not what happened. In fact, matters became far worse. On April 26, 2018, President Trump then authorized an additional three year period for agencies to “re-review” withheld assassination records and report to the Archivist on their continued requests for postponement.  In that same executive memorandum of April 2018, President Trump established a new deadline of October 26, 2021 for the Archivist and the President (now President Biden) to make final decisions on the release of assassination records.  Yes, you read that correctly – October 26, 2021.  The 6-month delay, and the multi-year delay, were completely unwarranted under the JFK Act, and mark a clear departure from law.

    It is now clear that President Trump’s decisions in October 2017 and April 2018 were based on the October 26, 2017 Gannon Memo. The Gannon Memo concluded that a delay of a “few months” was warranted based on purported concerns of the Archivist in terms of agencies not following the procedural and evidentiary requirements of the JFK Act.  The Gannon Memo did not, however, discuss the Archivist’s concerns in any detail, nor did the Gannon Memo provide the complete written report or findings of the Archivist.  Regardless, even if the 6-month delay in October 2017 was arguably warranted based on legitimate concerns of the Archivist, there is no legal justification for the President’s decision in April of 2018 for a multi-year postponement of legal obligations under the JFK Act. 

    The Gannon Memo Explored

    Gannon’s analysis is contrary to the provisions of the Act. There is no authority in Section 5 of the JFK Act for a “temporary certification” authorizing postponement.  Section 5(g)(2)(D) of the JFK Act clearly states that all assassination records were to be disclosed in full by October 26, 2017.  The President only had authority to postpone release of records past this date with a written certification “as required by this Act.” 

    The words “as required by this Act,” as cited in Section 5(g)(2)(D) of the Act, are critical to a proper legal interpretation of the JFK Act and explicitly require that Section 5(g)(2)(D) be read in context with the JFK Act as a whole.  Starkly absent from the Gannon Memo is any reference to the applicable provisions in Sections 5, 6, and 9 of the Act, which set forth the specific requirements and standards under which the President may authorize postponement.  Specifically, when the JFK Act was enacted in 1992, each Government office was promptly required to: 1) determine whether its assassination records, and particular information therein, were covered by the standards for postponement of public disclosure; and 2) specify with particularity, in an identification aid, the applicable postponement provision contained in Section 6 of the Act.  An identification aid is a standard form for identifications or findings for use with each assassination record subject to review under the JFK Act.

    In addition to the process referenced in the preceding paragraph, Section 5 of the Act then required a specific reporting action from affected agencies for any continued postponement.  Again, this was required in the early 1990’s. In 2017 and 2018, agencies had no basis to request continued postponement without providing written and unclassified reasons for postponement under the Act.  Specifically, under the agencies’ periodic review obligations, Section 5 of the JFK Act required:

    [A]n unclassified written description of the reason for such continued postponement.  Such description shall be provided to the Archivist and published in the Federal Register upon determination.” 

    In other words, without the unclassified reporting from agencies for each record sought to be postponed, the President was required to release the remainder of the protected JFK collection on October 26, 2017. The “temporary certification” of an unspecified group of records, as recommended by the Gannon Memo, can only be viewed as the Executive Branch acquiescing to last-minute appeals from agencies that did not follow the standards of the JFK Act.

    Gannon Memo Prevents a “Premature” Release Based on a
    “Strong Likelihood of Sensitivities”

    Notwithstanding the clear requirements and procedures set forth in Sections 5, 6 and 9 of the Act, the Gannon Memo, twenty-five (25) years after the creation of the JFK Act, speculated that President Trump was somehow authorized to order a “short-term” postponement necessary to avoid a “premature” release of records.  It was further supposed that said “premature” release would constitute the “identifiable harm” which would satisfy President Trump’s decision under Section 5(g)(2)(D) of the Act—although there is no clear evidence that President Trump was even aware of what specific records were being withheld and what the identifiable harm was with regard to such withheld records.  A vague presumption of a “premature” release is not a specified identifiable harm under the JFK Act. However, that appears to be the legal justification given to President Trump.

    Further, the Gannon memo presupposed a “strong likelihood” that many of the records in question would implicate the kinds of sensitivity about national security, law enforcement, and foreign affairs contemplated by the JFK Act. 

    One searches in vain for any factual or legal basis in the Gannon Memo for such a sweeping presumption. Instead, the unsupported assertion of any such “strong likelihood” that the withheld records pose an identifiable threat stands contrary to both the spirit and letter of the JFK Act.

    The Gannon Memo Creates an Escape

    Finally, and most notably, the Gannon Memo hypothesized that President Trump could satisfy Section 5(g)(2)(D) of the Act by determining that a “group” of records somehow warranted postponement, but that the President was not required to articulate record-specific justifications for further postponement of each individual record.  Again, a proper reading of Sections 5, 6 and 9 of the Act does not support the “temporary postponement” certification for an unspecified “group” of records.

    The JFK Act is void of any authority for a “short-term postponement,” or any postponement at all without the evidentiary findings required by Sections 5, 6 and 9 of the JFK Act.  Agencies had an obligation of periodic review starting with the enactment of the JFK Act in 1992, which “served to downgrade and declassify security classified information.”  By 2017, according to a tacit admission in the Gannon Memo, each record already had gone through “an extensive and individualized multi-year review process to verify that public disclosure would have been harmful in the 1990’s and would continue to be harmful through October 26, 2017.”  The Gannon Memo acknowledges that the ARRB and responsible agencies had already gone through the scrutinizing review process required by the Act, but at the same time the Gannon Memo recommended a “temporary postponement.”  Even worse, President Trump in April of 2018 authorized an additional multi-year extension for final compliance with the Act, relying on the same Gannon Memo.

    The bottom line is that, by October 26, 2017, the Executive Branch should have had at its disposal anything necessary to certify a record-specific postponement based on clear and convincing evidence and unclassified explanations filed in the Federal Register.  Yet, as acknowledged and admitted in the Gannon Memo, there are still approximately 31,000 assassination records (an indeterminable number of pages) withheld in full or in part.  The President has an obligation to either release the JFK assassination records or certify the specific reasons for continued postponement, even if agencies did not fully meet their declassification obligations under Sections 5, 6 and 9 of the JFK Act.  The evidence for postponement is available to the President based on the findings of the ARRB and a 25-year obligation for periodic review by agencies, and the American public is entitled to an unclassified certification for any records that may warrant continued withholding under the standards of the JFK Act.  President Trump, according to the Gannon Memo, had the data necessary in order to issue the proper record-specific certification under Section 5(g)(2)(D) of the JFK Act.  President Biden presumably has access to the same data and the authority to ensure compliance with the Act.

    As of the date of this article, we have not seen anything from the White House or Office of Legal Counsel in terms of resolving the purported “significant concerns” of the Archivist.  Under President Trump’s executive order of April 26, 2018, all agencies were required to report back to the Archivist by April 26, 2021 on their efforts to properly continue declassification of withheld records.  Any such reports’ existence should be a matter of public record. What is of public record, is a letter dated March 26, 2018, from the Archivist, David S. Ferriero, to then President Trump, wherein he clearly stated that, “I further recommend that you only certify further postponements through 26 October 2021, contingent upon any further recommendations for postponement being made in writing, on a document-by-document basis, by 26 April 2021 (to allow sufficient time for review by NARA and consideration by the President).” The Archivist recommended that a postponement certification by the President be contingent on a document-by-document review of a written request.  The Archivist’s statement strongly suggests that he had an interpretation of the Act that departed from the conclusions in the Gannon Memo. The Archivist’s statement is the correct interpretation of the Act.

    If the agencies did not fully or properly perform what was required under the Act, their neglect (whether intentional or not) should not be rewarded with unwarranted postponements.  This in turn places President Biden in the position of having to issue yet another executive order that does not comply with the JFK Act. 

    Crucial Difference between FOIA and JFK Act

    Unlike the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)—and this is a key point—the burden under the JFK Act is on the government offices and agencies to meet their evidentiary burden on each assassination record before continued classification is legally warranted.  Regardless of the Gannon Memo’s interpretation of the President’s certification authority under Section 5(g)(2)(D) of the Act, the American public is entitled to a record-specific and unclassified explanation of the reasons for postponement under the JFK Act.  A broad and unsubstantiated assumption that the withheld records could contain sensitive information, is contrary to the historical and legal foundation of the JFK Act.  The operative mandate of the JFK Act is that the relevant records are presumed to be declassifiable. 

    The Gannon Memo concludes, however, that President Trump was authorized, under Section 5(g)(2)(D) of the JFK Act, to issue a temporary postponement of a “group” of records without record-specific explanations.  The rationale in the Gannon Memo is that Section 5(g)(2)(D) of the Act is “silent” as to whether the President must make a certification regarding each individual record, or whether he may make a certification applicable to a group of withheld records that raise an unspecified identifiable harm. 

    Again, the rationale in the Gannon Memo fails to account for the entirety of Sections 5, 6 and 9 of the JFK Act.  The entire purpose of the Act is to require declassification and public disclosure of all related assassination records based on specific standards.  Those standards are set forth in Section 6, and the specific statutory reason for postponement must be in unclassified form and available to the American public even if postponement is properly authorized. Section 5(g)(2)(D) of the Act cannot be interpreted in a vacuum, as was attempted in the Gannon Memo.  Doing so would unjustifiably allow the President to authorize postponements in perpetuity based on vague and opaque requests from agencies that seek to maintain secrecy, contrary to the express purpose and provisions of the Act.     

    An example of the crucial difference from FOIA, and an abuse of the JFK Act by agencies, is found in an identification aid discovered by our group of lawyers. This particular record we found listed section 5(g)(2)(D) of the JFK Act as the grounds for postponement. The evidence apparently provided was “Approval by the CIA.” Let that sink in. This is one of the most egregious things I have seen in my research of the JFK Act. What this means is that records have been withheld upon “approval by the CIA.” That is not the legal standard under the JFK Act! Only the ARRB had the legal authority to approve postponements in the 1990’s, and only the President had the authority to approve postponement in October of 2017. And if the President did authorize postponement, such a decision required unclassified written descriptions from the agencies under the JFK Act.

    Continuing Effect of the Gannon Memo

    In the broader scheme of the JFK Act, it would be completely antithetical to the entire purpose of the JFK Act to simply abandon all of the required grounds for postponement under section 6, and the detailed procedural, reporting and transparency requirements under sections 5 and 9 of the Act.  However, that is exactly what the Gannon Memo did.  Such a scheme has encouraged the various agencies to wait out the clock on the release deadlines, and then seek to postpone the release of the records on an ongoing basis for perpetuity. This is what happened at the October 26, 2017 statutory deadline, and also the April 26, 2018 and April 26, 2021 “deadlines” authorized by President Trump. Such actions are in flagrant disregard of the general purposes and the specific procedural requirements of the JFK Act, and contrary to the will of the American people as expressed by Congress when the JFK Act was enacted.

    Conclusions and Remedies

    Congress made its intent very clear in the Declarations of the JFK Act.  Specifically, Congress declared that the “legislation is necessary because Executive Order No. 12356, entitled National Security Information, has eliminated the declassification and downgrading schedules relating to classified information across government and has prevented the timely public disclosure of records relating to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.”

    Executive Order 12356 was issued by President Ronald Reagan in 1982, in the middle of the Cold War.  Classification levels included “Top Secret” information, “Secret” information, and “Confidential” Information.  Under this Order, the President and agency heads were given classification authority under one or more of these classification levels, all on the grounds of “national security.”  A broad assertion of “national security” is not sufficient for classification under the JFK Act.  In the JFK Act, Congress clearly declared that historical executive orders have prevented the timely disclosure and declassification of assassination records, and that legislative action was required to ensure proper and timely declassification.

    Section 11 of the JFK Act is also crucial for a proper legal review of the President’s obligations under the JFK Act.  Specifically, Section 11(a) of the JFK Act states:

    When this Act requires transmission of a record to the Archivist or public disclosure, it shall take precedence over any other law (except section 6103 of the Internal Revenue Code), judicial decision construing such law, or common law doctrine that would otherwise prohibit such transmission or disclosure, with the exception of deeds governing access to or transfer or release of gifts and donations of records to the United States Government.

    In other words, when evaluating the government’s obligations for accounting to the Archivist and disclosing assassination records to the American public, Congress declared that the JFK Act is the law of the United States with only very few and extraordinary circumstances.

    The President can and should meet his legal duty to either 1) release the assassination records in full (now almost 60 years from the date of the assassination), or 2) order agencies to comply with the law and certify continued postponement only in the rarest of cases and based on record-specific findings and the “clear and convincing” evidentiary standard in the JFK Act.  Failure to do so would be an abuse of power and contrary to the intent and clear language in the JFK Act.

    I believe it is appropriate and legally warranted that President Biden rescind any prior executive orders or memoranda issued by President Trump, with respect to the JFK Act, since October 26, 2017. There is clearly a legal basis for rescission of those orders.  Regardless, President Biden should take the appropriate measures to release all assassination records without further delay; or comply with the clear and express language of the JFK Act and issue record-specific and unclassified reasons for continued postponement, based on clear and convincing evidence, as required by the JFK Act.

  • The JFK Records – Will President Biden Obey the Law?

    The JFK Records – Will President Biden Obey the Law?

    If you are interested in the public release of the JFK assassination records, this is a critical point in time. If you have paid a little attention to this subject, the logical questions are: “Weren’t all the JFK records released in 2017 as required by the JFK Records Collection Act?” And, “Why is this a critical point in time?”

    The answer to the first question is that over 15,000 assassination records are still withheld partially or in full by the National Archives. The answer to the second question is that the President, the National Archives, and agencies still withholding these records are facing critical deadlines in 2021.

    You may be asking: “Why is the government facing critical deadlines in 2021, when all records were supposed to be released by 2017?” Here is what happened and I will also explain why the American public should be angry and demand action.

    As I’ve written about previously, the JFK Records Collection Act of 1992 (the “JFK Act”) required the full public disclosure of all assassination records by October 26, 2017. This was not a random deadline. The deadline was precisely twenty-five (25) years following the creation of the JFK Act, which required each assassination record to be publicly disclosed in full by October 26, 2017.

    The only way President Trump could sidestep this complete declassification was through written certification stating that:

    1. continued postponement was necessary because of an identifiable harm to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or conduct of foreign relations; and

    2. the identifiable harm was of such gravity that it outweighed the public interest in full disclosure.

    As investigative journalist Jefferson Morley wrote about last month, some 15,834 assassination-related records are still withheld in full or in part by the Executive Branch and agencies who created these records. You can read Mr. Morley’s excellent article on this subject at the following link: Federal Agencies Face April Deadline on Secret JFK Files (justsecurity.org).

    So, what actually happened in October of 2017? A week before the October 26, 2017 deadline, President Trump tweeted that he was looking forward to the full release of the JFK assassination records and that all records would be released by the deadline. Well, that did not happen. Even worse, Trump and the Executive Branch blatantly violated the JFK Act. On the eve of the deadline, presumably after meeting with CIA Director Mike Pompeo, Trump issued an executive “memorandum” giving the federal agencies another six (6) months to comply with their obligations under the JFK Act. There was no mechanism or authority in the JFK Act for President Trump to do this. To justify postponement past October 26, 2017, Trump was required to issue a written certification explaining, for each and every record, why postponement was proper under the clear standards of the JFK Act. I have written in the past in detail about those clear standards. Essentially, Trump was supposed to explain in writing, for each record, why 1) continued postponement is made necessary by an identifiable harm to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or conduct of foreign relations; and 2) why such identifiable harm is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in disclosure.

    Instead, on October 26, 2017, President Trump issued an executive memorandum stating that he had “no choice” but to continue postponement for an additional 180 days because of concerns over “national security, law enforcement and foreign affairs.” Trump, in regards to an assassination that occurred 54 years in the past, asserted that full public disclosure of the JFK Records would allow potentially “irreversible harm” to the Nation’s security. Trump then ordered all agencies to re-review each and every withheld record over that 180-day period and failing a demonstration from the agencies that a record met the standard for proper postponement under the JFK Act, public disclosure would be required for all JFK Records by April 26, 2018.

    A six (6) month delay was frustrating, but seemed reasonable given that the Executive Branch and agencies in charge of these records seemingly did nothing since the winding-up of the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) in the 1990’s. So, what happened? On April 26, 2018, based on a recommendation from the (National) Archivist, President Trump issued a second executive memorandum giving agencies an additional three (3) years to review withheld records and make recommendations to the Archivist regarding its intent to postpone disclosure past October 26, 2021. Yes, you read that correctly. October of 2021.

    In that memorandum of April 26, 2018, Trump claimed that all executive departments and agencies had complied with his prior order to review all information within postponed records and inform the Archivist of the specific reason(s) for continued postponement under section 5(g)(2)(D) of the JFK Act. He cites the “identifiable harm” standard from the JFK Act discussed above and then broadly states that he “agreed with the Archivist’s recommendation” that continued postponement is necessary under the standards of the JFK Act. He then ordered agencies again to “re-review” any redactions (in the records) or decisions on complete withholding over the next 3 years. While Trump’s April 26, 2018, statement contained the key “buzz words” in the JFK Act for decisions on postponement, this action again did not come close to meeting the standards of the JFK Act for postponement. By October 26, 2017, at the very latest, all government agencies were required to provide to the Archivist an unclassified “identification aid” stating the specific facts, based on clear and convincing evidence, warranting a legitimate postponement decision. Those facts must deal with a threat to current military or intelligence operations, a current living person or agent who would be at risk from disclosure of records, or other current sources and methods that required legitimate protection in 2018. President Trump essentially let the executive branch and other agencies skip over this critical identification step in the JFK Act, meaning that continued postponement past October 26, 2021 is almost a certainty due to a lack of accountability. Was skipping this step just lethargy, or is it a continued attempt to withhold assassination history from the public? The only way we will know is seeing the records.

    There has been no media attention on the most recent deadline, which was April 26, 2021. In Trump’s April 26, 2018 memorandum, he required each agency (that seeks postponement past October 26, 2021) to identify (to the Archivist) the specific basis for continued postponement under the JFK Act. The Archivist is supposed to make recommendations on continued postponement to President Biden no later than September 26, 2021. Then, President Biden will have 30 days to make final decisions on disclosure by October 26, 2021. This is very interesting because, according to Trump’s memorandum, all agencies had purportedly done their jobs by April 26, 2018, satisfied the Archivist, and then Trump supposedly had agreed with the Archivist’s recommendations on over 15,000 records. If this was the case, why did the agencies get another 3 years to do the same job? And how is the Archivist supposed to do the job by September 26, 2021 without the identification aids from agencies? And how in the world is President Biden supposed to finish the job in 30 days when September 26, 2021 arrives? The simple answer is that the President and the Archivist cannot do their jobs, because the executive branch and other agencies have seemingly ignored the JFK Act and Trump’s executive orders. If they are paying attention to the act and presidential orders, and not ignoring them, the clear reason for inaction is that the agencies don’t want the President, the Archivist, and the American public to know what is in the JFK records.

    If the status quo continues, it is easy to see how the President, the Archivist, and various agencies can keep using their “discretion” to continue these unjustified and illegal delays. They will continue postponement by making it appear that they are complying with the JFK Act, but they are really not. The public is entitled to unclassified and specified written reasons for postponement under specific criteria in the JFK Act. If there are legitimate reasons for postponement under the JFK Act, so be it. The law is the law and it is a very good law in terms of public interest and transparency when it comes to the JFK assassination. This article is not aimed at proving a conspiracy in the assassination. It is simply about compliance with the JFK Act and our government offices and agencies following the law.

    Fortunately, experienced researchers and attorneys are paying attention. Attorney Larry Schnapf has sent a letter and legal memorandum to Rep. Carolyn Maloney, chair of the House Oversight Committee, calling for oversight hearings and enforcement of the JFK Act. That letter can be viewed here: (jfkfacts.org)). I strongly encourage readers of this article to contact these Congressional committees in support of Mr. Schnapf’s excellent and thorough letter. Congressional oversight committees clearly have authority and a duty under the JFK Act to require action from the Executive Branch and government agencies that are withholding these records from the American public. The Public Interest Declassification Board (PIDB), which advises the President on declassification issues, intends to address the status of JFK Act compliance on May 18, 2021. That is a very good development. Hopefully the PIDB will properly advise President Biden on the clear standards of the JFK Act and the need for compliance.

    If Congress and the PIDB do not collectively act on this important issue, there are also legal remedies. I am working with Larry Schnapf and a group of attorneys to develop a plan for private legal action, should that become necessary. Our hope is that there is enough information before Congressional oversight committees and the PIDB, but considering the unjustified and illegal delays we have seen since 2017, there will be a plan in place to get the federal courts involved.

    The one thing I do agree with in Trump’s April 26, 2018, memorandum is the following statement:

    Any agency that seeks further postponement beyond this certification shall take note of the findings of the Act, which state, among other things, that only in the rarest cases is there any legitimate need for continued protection of such records. The need for continued protection can only grow weaker with the passage of time from this congressional finding.

    The President said this in 2018, when Congress had already declared in 1992 that postponement of records should be rare and that clear and convincing evidence was needed to withhold a record from the public.

    We have to remember that two government bodies concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald killed President Kennedy. In 1964, the Warren Commission (WC) concluded that Oswald killed Kennedy on his own and that there was no evidence of a conspiracy. The WC also concluded that there was no connection to the murder of Oswald by Jack Ruby. The House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) also concluded in 1978 that Oswald killed Kennedy, but that there was a probable conspiracy involving two gunmen. The HSCA concluded in its final report that anti-Castro Cuban groups and organized crime, as a group, did not assassinate Kennedy. But the HSCA also concluded that “the available evidence does not preclude” those possibilities. If one or both of these government bodies’ conclusions are correct regarding the JFK assassination, there should have been no legitimate reason for postponing release of records in 1978. In 1992, Congress then declared that protection of JFK Records was legitimate only in the rarest of cases. In 2017 and 2018, it would seem ludicrous for the President and the Archivist to continue to find proper reasons for postponement, especially when you consider the conclusions of the WC and HSCA. Yet, the Executive Branch and agencies got 3 more years to “re-review” the JFK Records. April 26, 2021, has come and gone with no announcement from President Biden or the Archivist confirming that the work has been done by the agencies. Congress has yet to hold any oversight hearings to ensure compliance. Enough is enough, especially after 58 years.

  • James Moore, JFK, and QAnon

    James Moore, JFK, and QAnon

    James Moore is the chief business commentator and a regular columnist for the British online newspaper The Independent. The day before Valentine’s Day, Moore penned an article called “JFK’s assassination greased the wheels for QAnon and Covid-Deniers.” This was the sub-title to this column:

    The same type of thinking fuels the Kennedy conspiracy theories and the venomous fiction concocted by extreme right-wingers, that we see today. It needs to be laid to rest.

    You have to wonder, did Moore crib his column from the piece that Steven Gillon wrote for the Washington Post? Gillon’s was published on the 57th anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination and made much the same false equivalency argument that Moore does here. (Click here for my discussion of this)

    Gillon was wrong on every point he made in his faux comparison. QAnon is not something that say, Mark Lane, would have gone within a mile of if he were alive. To compare the arguments in the two cases is simply bizarre. The initial critics of the Commission, like Mark Lane and Harold Weisberg, showed that, although the MSM accepted the Warren Commission’s work, they should not have. Because contrary to what reporters like Tom Pettit of NBC and Walter Cronkite of CBS trumpeted, the Commission had not proven its case that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman who killed President Kennedy. Yet, on the evening of the issuance of the Warren Report, both CBS and NBC, with those two reporters, stated to an unsuspecting public that the Commission had done just that.

    So here is the question I would like to post to both Gillon and Moore: How did those two men read 888 pages of the Warren Report—which was not subject indexed—and put together a broadcast show in less than 24 hours? The answer is they could not have. These two programs were in production well before the report was even issued. Therefore, what the rational reader can conclude is that both CBS and NBC were leaked the Commission’s findings well in advance of publication. And they made some kind of implicit or explicit agreement not to challenge those findings in return for the information. In fact, at the end of the CBS program, Cronkite made the stunning statement that it would be hard to imagine that a more thorough inquiry could have been done.

    In fact, it was even worse than that. For we later learned from film director Emile de Antonio and journalist Florence Graves that CBS instructed their on-camera witnesses to parrot the Commission’s conclusions. (Florence Graves, Washington Journalism Review, Sept/Oct, 1978) Documentary director de Antonio saw the outtakes from the 1964 CBS program. When a witness was asked where the shots in Dealey Plaza came from, and they replied with “the knoll area”, they were asked the question again. Only the take where the witness finally said, “the Texas School Book Depository” was shown to the public. De Antonio later told Graves, “The interviewer was more like a prosecuting attorney leading a witness to support the state’s case.” Graves found out that the CBS production was actually months in the making. (Click here for details)

    I would like to ask Mr. Moore: Is this your idea of journalism? Would you go along with such an illicit and unethical scheme to endorse an official story for the British government? Would you instruct a witness to change his story on camera? Would you produce a program endorsing a report months before that report was even published? Because that is what happened with the Warren Report.

    Recall, this was in the early period of the controversy. People like Weisberg were writing that the Commission had not proved its case beyond a reasonable doubt. It was way before the declassifications of the Assassinations Record Review Board (ARRB). What those declassifications revealed, and what authors like Gerald McKnight proved in Breach of Trust, was that there was no case against Oswald at all. The FBI, Secret Service, and CIA fed the Commission an incomplete and faulty record. The Commission accepted and published it. With the new information available after 1998, critics like McKnight, and several others, could finally prove the fraud in the Commission’s performance—to a legal standard.

    Such is not the case with QAnon. That movement has little or nothing to do with investigatory data or a court room legal standard. QAnon was begun by an anonymous poster at the 4chan website in late 2017. That website was often characterized as being extremist and racist. Who the man who started it really was, we do not know. He claimed to be a high ranking military officer. This person announced that Hillary Clinton was going to be arrested. It was part of a scenario that depicted a grand battle going on: good vs evil. President Trump and his Pentagon advisors were working to take down a global alliance of Satan worshiping pedophiles. That alliance included politicians, Hollywood celebrities, and figures in the media.

    According to QAnon, the battle will end with two great apocalyptic events. The first is The Storm, which will result in mass arrests of thousands of people; it will be a day of reckoning. The second event is the Great Awakening, the day everyone will realize that QAnon was correct. This will be the opening of a new utopian era. (Click here for details)

    Many commentators believe that the birth of QAnon was preceded and perhaps derived from the whole Pizzagate imbroglio. That resulted in an attack on Comet Ping Pong Pizza in Washington DC by a man named Edgar Maddison Welch. This occurred in December of 2016. Welch had a rifle, a handgun, and a shotgun. That fruity incident was based on similar themes: namely that the Clinton campaign was running a child molestation ring right out of the basement of the pizza shop, which had no basement. Promoters of this bizarre scenario were Donald Trump backers like Alex Jones, Michael Flynn, and his son Michael Jr. The motivation probably being that it went after Hillary Clinton. Mr. Welch actually thought she was murdering children. (See Huffpost, story by Hayley Miller, 12/16/2016; Esquire 7/24/20, article by Michael Sebastian and Gabrielle Bruney)

    There is no cognitive/intellectual relationship between what people like Mark Lane, Gerald McKnight, or Harold Weisberg did and Mr. Welch’s beliefs or what the backers of Pizzagate or QAnon do. The latter are mythological concepts. The former are based upon data and evidence. JFK writers can today demonstrate that the Commission was wrong on many key points. What can QAnon show? Another pizza shop with a child porn ring in the basement?

    As I pointed out with Gillon’s rubbish, in its historical origins, again there is no relationship between QAnon/Pizzagate and critics of the Commission. The followers of the former stem from over a decade prior to Mark Lane’s Rush to Judgement. The QAnon troop are mostly successors to the anti-government, pro-gun, rightwing militia corps. It was these groups that helped create the John Birch Society and helped found its sister association, the Minutemen. From the election of Ronald Reagan, the GOP has drifted more and more to the right, especially during the Bill Clinton presidency. At that time, party leaders like Rush Limbaugh advocated for every conspiracy theory out there about the Clintons: Whitewater, Vince Foster, the Rose Law Firm. None of which two Republican special prosecutors could convict him over. I might also add that Limbaugh, in February of 2020, dismissed CV-19 as being as innocuous as the common cold. (Rolling Stone, 2/17/2021, article by Bob Moser) This intellectually unmoored, anything-goes attitude eventually allowed QAnon to spread into the modern elected GOP (e.g. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert). In my view, it was this anti-intellectual, ahistorical, politically packed attitude that led to the Insurrection of January 6, over another Limbaugh/Trump myth: a stolen election. As a consequence, eight people died—five were killed, three took their own lives. No such pattern exists for the critics of the Warren Commission, because the critical community is not fundamentally political and not based on a spurious, ethereal, ideological belief system.

    This leads us to the key sentence in Moore’s screed. He writes that “The Kennedy conspiracy has become a respectable conspiracy theory. Almost.” The idea that Kennedy’s murder was caused by a conspiracy is today not a theory. It is a forensic fact. And because of the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB), we can show that in a number of ways with the so-called “hard evidence” (i.e. the ballistics and the autopsy). We can also demonstrate that previous inquiries were simply wrong in these aspects. And show why they are wrong.

    Moore scores Oliver Stone’s 1991 film JFK on this point. He does so using a sleight of hand trick. He says that JFK posited a combination of nine different organizations that wanted Kennedy killed. He actually includes groups that, after about six viewings of the film, I still don’t see (e.g. pro-Castro Cubans, the Russians, Hoover’s FBI, and the Mafia). What the film really says is that a combination of the Power Elite and the military schemed to kill Kennedy over his policies in Vietnam and Cuba. Most of the other groups are mentioned in passing, or posited as a part of the cover up.

    But Moore’s kind of trickery obscures the point of the film. The film was trying to show that, almost three decades later, we did not really know who killed Kennedy. As everyone recalls, except perhaps Moore, the end title card to the film said one reason for this was because the files of the HSCA were still classified over a decade after they closed shop. Why? This is a question that Moore does not want to deal with. Neither does he want to deal with what those files revealed once they were declassified. If he did, the problems with his lousy column would be exposed.

    Moore writes something just as bad just a couple of sentences later. He actually states that there is really not much reason for questioning the JFK case. Why? Because the doubts are only “backed by little more than the feeling that one man simply couldn’t have, on his own, changed history as Oswald did.”

    In other words, those 2 million pages of ARRB declassified documents, their inquiry into the medical evidence, the work of scientists and physicians like Dave Mantik, Cyril Wecht, Randy Robertson, Mike Chesser, and Gary Aguilar, all of this new writing, evidence, and analysis amounts to a feeling?

    Moore then doubles down. He now says that with all the declassifications, plus the studies by ballistics experts and physicists, all of these have concluded that the fatal bullet came from Oswald, which exposes him as a charlatan. Does Moore not know that Vincent Guinn’s Neutron Activation Analysis—the test that the HSCA relied upon to seal its case against Oswald—has now been exposed as “junk science”? (Journal of Forensic Sciences, July 2006, pp. 717–28) How about ballistics? Gary Aguilar, Tink Thompson, and John Hunt have shown that the Magic Bullet, CE 399—the Commission’s keystone of their case against Oswald—has no chain of custody to it. Thus, it would blow up in a prosecutor’s face at trial. (The Assassinations, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, pp.282–84; and click here) This lack of knowledge further exposes Moore as indulging in ignorant quackery.

    Yet, near the end of Moore’s Comedy of Errors, he again says that both the JFK case and QAnon lead people down the same rabbit hole. Not so. With QAnon, there is no end to the rabbit hole; since it is at best a myth, at worst a hoax. In the JFK case, by following the best that has been written of late, one can find some definite evidentiary conclusions. Moore is either unaware of them or does not want to mention them, since it would blow up his column.

    The column ends the only way it could. Moore endorses Gerald Posner’s “exhaustively researched” book Case Closed. Well, if one wants to read what was essentially a rerun of the Warren Report, fine. But the remarkable thing about that book is that it was written before the creation of the Review Board. So how could it be “exhaustively researched”? The major part of Posner’s footnotes relied on the volumes of the Warren Commission. Meaning it could have been written in 1965 or ’66. Posner endorsed the Single Bullet Fantasy, which we know today did not happen. (Click here for details) We also know that there is a problem with the interviews Posner did. Some of the people who he says he interviewed do not recall talking to him. (Probe Magazine Vol. 5 No. 5, p. 14)

    Further, in the original edition of Case Closed, Posner wrote that there was no credible evidence that Oswald knew David Ferrie, a major character in the film JFK. (See p. 148) In fact, Ferrie had told the FBI he did not recall Oswald. (Commission Document 75, p. 286) Within weeks of the publication of that book, PBS Frontline produced a photo of the two men standing together at a Civil Air Patrol barbecue. In the declassified files of the HSCA, there was further evidence via affidavits of CAP members who recalled the rightwing, CIA associated Ferrie with the alleged communist Oswald at meetings. (Op. CIt. Probe Magazine, pp. 15–16)

    To top it off, we now know through at last three sources that, within days of the assassination, Ferrie was visiting and calling people to recover evidence that linked him to Oswald. (Ibid, p. 17) This included both his library card and the above-mentioned picture. In other words, far from not knowing Oswald, Ferrie was involved in the act of obstruction of justice in order not to incriminate himself in perjury. This is a rabbit hole?

    So much for Mr. Posner. And also Mr. Moore.

  • Caitlin Johnstone, JFK, and the Insurrection

    Caitlin Johnstone, JFK, and the Insurrection

    Caitlin Johnstone is one of my favorite journalists. She is well-informed, bright, witty, and her sympathies are in the right place. In fact, we write for two common publications: the online Consortium News and S. T. Patrick’s paper magazine garrison.

    As everyone knows, January 6, 2021, will go down in history as one of the most frightening days of the new millennium. The only thing I can compare it to is the so-called “Brooks Brothers riot,” that took place in Dade County in 2000 that helped give George W. Bush his illegitimate presidency. That, of course, was not really a riot. It was arranged by people like Congressman John Sweeney and Republican political operative Roger Stone. The idea was to stop a recount of votes in the Miami area that would have likely given the election to Vice-President Al Gore. Through violent and intimidating means, it succeeded in that aim.

    What happened on January 6, 2021, was much more lethal. So far eight people have passed on because of that insurrection. Five died as a direct result of the violence and three took their own lives afterwards: two policemen and one man who was about to be arrested. Caitlin Johnstone has been trying to tell her audience that we should discount what happened on that day; it really was not an attempt to overturn the election and thereby keep President Trump in power. (Click here for details) Besides that, she says if we did maintain it as such, we may unleash something even worse; like attacks on and censorship of the web and social media. This could be used against progressives.

    Again, let me reiterate, I like Caitlin. But I beg to disagree with her about this importance of this event. To me, that scene at the Capitol resembled the climactic, surreal riot scene from Nathaniel West’s The Day of the Locust. It was so disturbing that I went out and bought a 12-pack of beer to dull the pain of watching it. To me, it is not something to discount or try to forget anytime soon. How does one forget a gallows constructed across the street from the Capitol while the insurrectionists were looking for Vice President Pence? Another insurrectionist was looking to shoot House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said that, while in hiding, she literally feared for her life. (Click here for details) She should have, since another insurrectionist has now taken back his threat to shoot her.

    We, who study the John F. Kennedy assassination, should be able to point out certain similarities that betray the event as not simply a spontaneous Westian outburst. The night before at a “Stop the Steal” rally in front of the Supreme Court, Roger Stone compared Trump to Abraham Lincoln and cheered on the crowd by saying the president had “Freed This Slave!” (Click here for details) There were credible reports that there were explosives set outside both the Democratic and Republican National Committee headquarters. Investigators later theorized that the alerts about these bombs were diversions, meant to distract police from the marching crowd, but there were not many police on hand to distract. Because, as with the security stripping around President Kennedy in Dallas, there was definitely a real problem in supplementing the terribly outnumbered Capitol Police force. (Click here for details)

    Authors Michael Kurtz and the late John Davis noted reports of people being in Dealey Plaza and looking like they were lining up targets two days before the assassination. (Kurtz, Crime of the Century, second revised edition, p. 218) In the January 6th case, there are various reports by congressmen that fellow representatives were showing people with MAGA hats around the building in the days before the insurrection. One of the “Stop the Steal” rally organizers, Ali Alexander, admitted that he received help from three representatives in organizing the insurrection. (Click here for details) At least one of the men Alexander named—Representative Mo Brooks—spoke at the rally on the Ellipse before the insurrection. The two others named by Alexander reportedly requested pardons from Trump before he left office. (Click here for details)

    This would seem to suggest that the insurrection was, at least partly, an “inside job.” There are numerous parallels to this in the JFK case. I will name just two. On the recovered Air Force One Tapes, General Curtis LeMay’s aide de camp is seeking him right after the assassination, as LeMay is flying in from Toronto to Washington DC . The Air Force officer was reportedly seen at the autopsy that evening. (Click here for details) In the film, The Parkland Doctors, there is witness testimony that either a Secret Service man or an FBI agent pulled Dr. Malcolm Perry aside after he told the press that Kennedy had been shot from the front. This man told Perry, “Don’t ever say that again!” This was about 90 minutes after the assassination.

    While the insurrection was in progress and a mob was seeking Pence, Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani were not seeking to quell the violence. They were calling in to the besieged Capitol, trying to locate certain senators in order to attempt to stall the tallying of the Electoral College final vote. (Click here for details) This recalls the military interference with the official JFK autopsy, exposed by Dr. Pierre Finck at the trial of Clay Shaw in New Orleans.

    What should make all of the above even more distressing is that the January 6th insurrection was not, as Caitlin would like to characterize it, an outlier. Six men have been indicted in a plot to kidnap Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan. That indictment was handed down just over two weeks before the insurrection. (Click here for details) As people in the JFK field know, there was an attempt to kill President Kennedy in Chicago about three weeks before he was gunned down in Dallas.

    As readers of this site will recall, I criticized historian Steven Gillon six weeks before the insurrection. He had written an editorial for the Washington Post saying that those who had tried to create confusion over the results of Trump’s election loss were doing so under the influence of the late Mark Lane. (Click here for details) I replied that Gillon was utterly wrong on this. The section of the populace espousing such subterfuge seemed to me to originate with the rightwing followers who had fallen prey to the Red Scare demagoguery of Joe McCarthy, Roy Cohn, and later, the fruitiness of the John Birch Society. From the results of January 6th, I was correct on this and Gillon was wrong. I await his apology. But since Gillon worked on the JFK case with the likes of Dale Myers, I know I will not get one.

    President Kennedy was fully aware of the burgeoning power of these ultra conservative minions. He had requested reports on them, made speeches against them, and fully understood how they hindered what he really wanted to do as president. After UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold was murdered—and Kennedy had received reports that such was the case—Kennedy called in a Swedish diplomat to pay his respects. Kennedy told him that, in his opinion, Hammarskjold was the greatest statesman of the 20th century. He could never equal that stature, because he had to worry about the power of these reactionary forces and their leaders in the United States. I will point out two examples. Domestically, General Edwin Walker and the John Birch Society had organized the demonstration at Ole Miss to stop James Meredith from integrating the university. This turned into a full scale riot which killed two people. As many researchers have written, Kennedy was planning his withdrawal from Vietnam around his re-election in 1964. He felt he had to, since he told his confidantes he knew he would be pilloried as an appeaser if he did it beforehand. (Ken O’Donnell and Dave Powers, Johnny We Hardly Knew Ye, p. 16) Finally, we all know how upset JFK was when he read the infamous black-bordered negative advertisement against him in the Dallas News on the morning of his death. He told his assistant Dave Powers not to let his wife see it. (Ibid, p. 24)

    This movement has mushroomed in recent decades (e.g. QAnon). On January 6th, they came armed and dangerous. Since the security on the Capitol was so unprepared, only about 70 people were arrested that day, but the arms cache discovered was formidable. It included IED bombs, Molotov cocktails, assault rifles, thousands of rounds of ammunition, a crossbow, brass knuckles, stun guns, and “stinger whips.” (Click here for details) There were reports that some of them brought climbing equipment. God knows what would have been recovered if there would have been a systematic search of all the perpetrators. How can one dismiss an armed, frenzied mob that was searching for people to execute, especially when it had been warmed up by previous demonstrations?

    In mid-November, the Proud Boys had arranged a march in Washington. During the rally, Trump drove past in his motorcade. That evening after fights had broken out in the street, Trump tweeted, “ANTIFA SCUM ran for the hills today when they tried attacking the people at the Trump Rally, because those people aggressively fought back.” (Talking Points Memo, 1/25/21, by Tierney Sneed and Matt Shuham, hereafter referred to as TPM) On December 5th, at a rally in Georgia, attorney Lin Wood and former NSC member Mike Flynn endorsed a call for martial law. Wood tweeted that the governor of Georgia and the secretary of state would “end up in jail,” if they did not help Trump overturn the election. (TPM)

    On December 12th, there was another “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington DC. At this one, Trump did a helicopter flyover as the organizers pleaded for him to call up a citizen militia “now while he is commander in chief.” (TPM) That evening, there were several stabbings and over a dozen arrests, as the Proud Boys set aflame Black Lives Matter banners which had been torn down from historically Black churches. (ibid)

    At about this time, political activist Amy Kremer of Women for America First began a bus tour through the south, including the deep red states of Tennessee, Kentucky, and Louisiana. She and other speakers would arrive in a red bus, marked with large white lettering: “March for Trump.” The idea was to recruit the crowd for January 6th. Kremer’s effort was in large part financed by Mike Lindell, the CEO of My Pillow company and a vociferous Trump backer. Kremer would stop and then speak at a prearranged gathering from a stage. She would say, “It is up to you and I to save this Republic. We are not going to back down, are we?” (Reuters, 1/11/21, story by Joseph Tanfani) These Kremer rallies were televised by the Right Side Broadcasting Network. That network was started for the purpose of giving Trump’s rallies more broadcast exposure. On December 19th, Trump tweeted for his followers to be at the Ellipse on January 6th.

    In addition to Kremer’s group, Charlie Kirk of Turning Point Action also sponsored the January 6th rally. This is a conservative campus student group. Kirk also helped finance seven busloads of students in his group to attend the rally. (ibid)

    To say the effort paid off is putting it mildly. The rally itself had to have been attended by tens of thousands. The Trump clan was assembled in what appears to be a tent off of the Ellipse, monitoring the crowd through TV screens. They are laughing and joking while urging Mike Pence to do the right thing. If you have not seen this video, you should. (Click here for details) All the while the late Laura Branigan is singing her smash hit “Gloria” in the background. (CNBC report of 1/8/21 by Dan Mangan)

    During the rally, the two main speakers were Trump and his attorney Rudy Giuliani. One can cherry pick parts of their addresses, in order to defend both men. But taken as a whole, I think there is little doubt that those two speeches caused the crowd to march to the Capitol under Giuliani’s pretense of “trial by combat.” The aim was to somehow pressure the House, the Senate, and Pence to reject the electoral college vote tally and send it back to the state legislatures to be reconsidered. There had been a prior attempt to do this in 1960 by certain deep south electors who did not want Kennedy in the Oval office, but would have accepted Lyndon Johnson with Kennedy as his VP. (Washington Post, 12/12/21, story by Ronald Shafer)

    What makes this maneuver a bit bracing is this: Giuliani had prepared for it by visiting certain gatherings of state legislators and briefing them on how the election had been stolen by Biden’s allies from Trump. (TPM) Some of the states visited were Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Georgia. In the first instance, Trump spoke to the legislators directly by speaker phone.

    The problem with all these pre-planned efforts to claim a stolen election is this: Trump could not even get his own elections supervisors to back them. Chris Krebs is a lifelong Republican who had worked security for Microsoft before coming to Washington. He was Director of Cybersecurity, meaning that, if asked, he would check all voting systems states used in advance. His goal was to get as close as possible to a complete paper ballot back up system. He decried Trump’s claims of voter manipulation. He stated under oath that the 2020 presidential election was “the most secure in American history.“ Before the senate, on December 16th, he took the time to debunk several of Giuliani’s specific claims. He was fired. Bill Barr, Trump’s Attorney General also refused to back him. He was forced to resign. Trump tried to get the officials in Georgia to go along with his fraud claims. After all, Georgia’s votes had been recounted three times. There is a now famous recorded phone call of the president talking to Georgia’s Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, asking him to “find” 11, 800 votes for him. Raffensperger declined to cooperate. After the call, Gabe Sterling, his chief operating officer, took the time to, again, debunk individual claims. He later showed how Giuliani had edited a tape to make it mean something it did not. He concluded one of his press conferences by saying all of these propagandistic and incendiary claims were going to result in someone getting hurt, shot, or killed. He was correct. (Click here for details)

    But perhaps the most surprising scheme that Trump dreamt up did not surface until recently. Apparently, Trump was going to also terminate his acting Attorney General Jeff Rosen. He would replace him with Jeffrey Clark, because Clark was willing to do what Rosen would not: pressure lawmakers in Georgia to overturn their election results. The only reason this did not come to pass is there was a threat of mass resignations in the Justice Department if it did. Trump did not want to face a reprise of the infamous Saturday night Massacre of Richard Nixon. (Seattle Times, 1/24/21) But part of the plan seems to have been enacted, since Trump did replace the US attorney in Atlanta after he would not go along with the scheme.

    In light of the above, I personally think it is untenable to try and maintain that there was not a serious effort in the White House to overturn the results of the 2020 election, an election which even Republican officials in Washington and Georgia say was not rigged. In fact, I do not think it is an overstatement to write that Trump spent over two months trying to overturn that election by any means at his disposal: legal or illegal.

    Trump’s agents actively recruited his followers to come to the January 6th rally. They brought arms and explosives with them. They constructed a gallows. They were looking for Pence, Pelosi, and Ocasio-Cortez. Reportedly, a newly elected representative actually tweeted about Pelosi’s location as she was hiding. (Boston Globe, 1/12/21, by Shannon Larson) During the insurrection, the mob itself communicated through the computer platform Parler, set up by the rabidly conservative Mercer family. In other words, all the elements of a criminal conspiracy to overturn the election by violence were there. What more evidence would one need: Ocasio-Cortez and Pelosi’s dead bodies? A noose around Pence’s neck? The floor of the Capitol exploded by an IED?

    On December 4, 1964, at Beverly Hills High School, there was a debate over the Warren Report. Mark Lane fiercely criticized the work of the Warren Commission. One of the defenders of their work was A. L. Wirin, a famous liberal lawyer of that era. During the proceedings, Lane was shocked when Wirin stated that we should all be happy with what Chief Justice Earl Warren had done, because if he had not, there might have been pogroms against the left. The idea being that the Commission was correct in its lone assassin conclusion, and the assassin, Lee Oswald, was a communist.

    Unfortunately for Wirin, and the rest of us, Earl Warren was wrong on both counts. Oswald was not a communist and he certainly did not shoot President Kennedy. Those of us who follow that case understand it to be an utter failure of justice, which had severe ramifications. That should not happen again.

    This author is not one of those who despises Donald Trump. Neither do I think he is the worst president in history. Anyone who thinks that does not realize how bad some of the American presidents really were. In fact, I actually agreed with some of his early foreign policy decisions. And I appreciate the fact he did not start up any new wars, but what happened on January 6th was a heinous crime against the American system of government. And there was no legal basis for it. Back in 2000, Al Gore actually did have an election stolen from him. He pursued every legal avenue he could to overturn the result. He deliberately refused to turn it over to a mob. When faced with that alternative he replied: “What do you want me to do, put blood in the streets?” It appears to this author that Trump and Giuliani took that alternative.

    The country needs a full, rigorous, no holds barred criminal inquiry into what happened on January 6th, one that is not afraid to reach into the Capitol or the White House. And if it was in any part an inside job, that needs to be exposed to us all. As Jim Garrison said, “Let justice be done, though the heavens fall.”

    Below is a link to an article by Seth Abramson which links the Trump family and his own representatives to a “war meeting” the night of January 5th at a Trump-owned hotel. The FBI should thoroughly investigate this lead. If it is accurate, it clearly suggests that Trump, his family, and his inner circle understood what would happen the next day. The name of Ali Alexander seems central to any real inquiry.

    January 28, 2021