There’s Probably No ‘Smoking Gun’ in the JFK or Epstein Cases. We Should Be Allowed To Look Anyway.
The CIA’s coverup about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy is unraveling. Despite the agency denying that it knew anything about assassin Lee Harvey Oswald before the murder, newly declassified documents shed light on the links between Oswald, a Cuban guerrilla group known as the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil (DRE), and CIA case officer George Joannides.
Several months before the assassination, Oswald had offered to work for the DRE, a CIA proxy overseen by Joannides. Years later, Joannides—operating under a fake name—became the CIA’s liaison to Congress during a congressional investigation into the assassination. The documents add to a pile of evidence that the CIA had been following Oswald for years and deliberately covered it up afterward.
Oswald “really wasn’t alone, he had the CIA looking over his shoulder for four years,” said Jefferson Morley, a historian who has long pushed for opening the Joannides files, in an interview with The Washington Post.
Decades of dogged investigative work have poked plenty of holes in the official story around Kennedy’s assassination. But they haven’t produced a smoking gun, a single document that demonstrates what the CIA wanted out of Oswald or what knowledge it had about his fatal plans. And that smoking gun may never turn up; Morley and others speculated to the Post that Joannides was running an “off-the-books” operation through the DRE.
The same is likely to be true about another case that’s in the news this week: that of the late sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. After he died in custody in 2019, calls have grown for the government to release the “Epstein client list.” As I argued several months ago, such a list likely doesn’t exist. What does exist is a scattered patchwork of evidence about the people Epstein associated with and leads waiting to be followed up on.
To be clear, the official story on Epstein has some troubling inconsistencies. Last week, the Department of Justice and FBI released a memo stating that they found “no credible evidence found that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his actions.” But it has been publicly reported that Epstein attempted to extort tech tycoon Bill Gates over Gates’ (legal) extramarital affair.
The Trump administration has not exactly inspired confidence in its transparency or diligence. Attorney General Pam Bondi said in February that bombshell information was “sitting on my desk,” then released a heavily redacted set of documents labeled “Epstein Files: Phase 1,” most of which were already public. Last week, the Department of Justice claimed it would release “raw” surveillance footage from Epstein’s prison wing on the night he died, then published a sloppily compiled video clip with a minute of footage missing.
President Donald Trump himself told his followers on Saturday
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