Special Guest Episode: Larry Schnapf, Attorney & JFK Files Expert

🎉 Special Guest Episode! It was my pleasure to sit down recently with Larry Schnapf, an environmental attorney with 40+ years of experience fighting the good fight for the release of the JFK files. Larry filed a FOIA lawsuit against the National Archives to obtain the underlying correspondence related to the Trump postponements of the JFK records in 2017 and 2018. In 2021 and 2022, Larry also organized a group of open government organizations, historians and prominent JFK researchers to request Congress to hold oversight hearing on the failure of the executive branch to comply with the JFK Records Act. He also organized a similar group in 2021 requesting Biden to release all the JFK Records by the October 26, 2021 deadline established by Trump.   

Given Trump's Executive Order 14176 from January, where do things stand? I spoke with Larry to get down to brass tacks. 

Topics:

➡️ What sparked Larry's interest in this?
➡️ What about Judge Napolitano's claims that Trump told him, "If you saw what I saw, you wouldn't have released those files either" ? What's the story there?
➡️ Which agencies are still resisting the disclosure of the JFK files? What legal grounds are they claiming to have?"
➡️ Can there really still be "national security reasons" to hoard information all these decades later?
➡️ Is there a proverbial smoking gun? Or is there a collection of threads that skilled researchers will have to thread together over time?
➡️ What can John & Jane Q. Public do to push for real transparency on this?

Links:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/337920816220010

Need more? You can visit the website at: https://consaracytheories.com/ or my own site at: https://saracausey.com/. Don't forget to check out the blog at: https://consaracytheories.com/blog. 

Sara's book Decoding the Unicorn: A New Look at Dag Hammarskjöld is available now! Click here to buy it on Amazon. 

Transcript

Transcription by Otter.ai.  Please forgive any typos!

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

JFK assassination, Larry Schnapf, environmental attorney, FOIA lawsuit, National Archives, Trump postponements, Biden postponements, CIA, FBI, transparency plans, mock trial, legal efforts, congressional oversight, Carlos Marcello tapes, court of inquiry., FDR, New Deal, executive power, Supreme Court, Kennedy assassination, government accountability, administrative state, bureaucratic records, Freedom of Information Act, government transparency, public interest, open government, activism, younger generations, historical events.

Welcome to con-sara-cy theories. Are you ready to ask questions you shouldn't and find information you're not supposed to know? Well, you're in the right place. Here is your host, Sara Causey.

Hello, hello, and thanks for tuning in tonight. I have a very special episode because I have a very special guest. It's my pleasure to welcome Larry Schnapf to the broadcast. Larry is an environmental attorney based in New York City with over 40 years of national environmental experience, and he's the principal of Schnapf LLC. He advises clients on environmental issues associated with business transactions, federal and state environmental litigation, enforcement actions, administrative proceedings and private cost recovery actions. He's also an adjunct professor of environmental law at New York Law School. He's written numerous articles on environmental law, and is the author of managing environmental liability. He's the past chair of the Environmental Law Section of the New York State Bar Association and the ABA committee on environmental energy and natural Natural Resources law. He's been interested in the JFK assassination since November 22 1963 when he heard JFK was shot in his fifth grade class in college, Larry completed an independent study project on the JFK assassination and wrote a series of early articles on the flawed Warren Commission investigation. Larry is a former board member of Kappa, where he was the chair of the Kappa legal committee, he organized the two day 2017 Mock Trial of Lee Harvey Oswald held at the South Texas College of Law and the 2019 kappa mock court of inquiry. In both of these proceedings, he served as CO defense counsel. He also has lectured on various legal and evidentiary issues concerning the JFK assassination. Larry filed a FOIA lawsuit against the National Archives to obtain the underlying correspondence related to the Trump postponements of the JFK records in 2017 and 2018 in 2021 and 2022 Larry also organized a group of open government organizations, historians and prominent JFK researchers, to request Congress to hold oversight hearing on the failure of the executive branch to comply with the JFK Records Act. He also organized a similar group in 2021 that requested President Biden to release all the JFK records by the october 26 2021 deadline established by President Trump. Larry has a website devoted to the JFK assassination, which you can find at JFK csi.com as well as a Facebook page JFK the hard evidence or junk science, which, of course, you can find at Facebook. So Larry, very glad to have you here tonight. Thank you so much for joining me. Thanks for inviting me. Yeah, it's my pleasure. So many people in my audience are interested in all things JFK, and they have been for years, in most cases, but some are not. The podcast is growing month over month, and some people may not be familiar with you and your work. I like to typically call it the 10 cent tour, but I think we got a good five cent tour just in the introduction. So if you can fill in the other side of that nickel for us and tell us more about your general efforts toward getting the JFK assassination files released. I think that'd be a great place to start. Okay,

well, like many baby boomers, you know, I was in class when the President was shot, and actually, I have, I remember that he's the precise first thought that came into my brain, because the only assassination I knew at that point in time was Lincoln. Mm, so when I was in the hallway, we were had, you know, we were leaving school just ordinarily, because it was the news. We got out of 230 which would be 130 Texas time, right? So they hadn't quite filtered in to at least my class. So my friend came up to me in the hallway and said, The President's been shot. And the first thing I thought in my mind was, well, Lincoln was hit behind, you know, while sitting. So I envisioned like Kennedy and the governor of Texas sitting next to each other in front of the desk at the governor's office, and some guy coming in behind and shooting both of them in the back of the head. So then I immediately ran to this girl that I always had a crush on to let her know this is an opportunity to talk to her President's been shot. And he goes, she goes, Oh, that's just a rumor that doesn't happen nowadays. That's something that happened only you know, in the 19th century. I said, Okay, so I walked home with her, and then when we got to my house, my mother was actually pulling up in the car, and she rolled the window down. I can see she'd been crying. I said, Is it true? She goes, yes. I said, Is he dead? And she says, yes. So go into the house. And then I call from one of my friends now we were living in New Jersey. Remember, this is 1963 jets really aren't in wide use yet. So my friend calls me up and says he heard that the assassin was in New Jersey. Now this is an hour after the assassination, and that he was on his way. He was going to probably be coming through and pass our town. So we called another friend up, and we got our boy scout knives and our rope went to the local creek because we thought he was going to be walking by the creek in our town, and we were going to and we waited. We had these little forts that we had built, and we waited in one of our forts with our rope and knives, we were going to capture this assassin with a high powered rifle, with our boy scout knives and a rope. And of course, we waited and we waited and we waited, and then it started getting dark, and we knew we had to be home, or else our parents would be very mad at us. We We then walked home with our heads down. You know that we couldn't, we couldn't capture the assassin, but that's, but that's the impact it had on me. And then I was playing, actually, touch football on Sunday, when Oswald got shot, and someone ran out, he just got shot. So I was always suspicious of, that's, that's what really Oswald getting shooting is what made me think this is, there's something going on here. And then, when I was in eighth grade, we were on split session, which meant that I went to school from 12 to five and and that meant I was able to stay up late at night. And I started watching TV shows like Joe Pine and Mike Burke. Mike Burke, I forget his name anyway. Allen Burke, Allen Burke, and they would have people like, you know, Mark, Mark lane and other people on talking about the assassination. So I started getting interested, and I read King Thompson's six seconds in Dallas book. In fact, I never returned it to the library. When, when King Thompson was involved. He became involved with the mock trial in 2017 I got him to autograph the book. Oh, nice. But I still, you know, I never, it's sort of like the Seinfeld episode when I get George didn't return the book. Yes, right. So, and then, you know, in college i i So in college is when I was this junior, when Geraldo Rivera and I was a senior, when her other Rivera had his show where they released the the first showing of the zabrita film. Yeah, I went an extra year because I double majored. And that's that fall, I did a series. I took an independent study course on the assassination I saw, you know, did in Penn study on it. Then I wrote a bunch of articles for the school newspaper. And then I graduated. And I, you know, started working on getting a job and getting work. And I kind of, I, you know, I wanted, when the hassle assassinations committee was formed, that was in 77 I was so naive. I didn't know how to actually get a job in Washington. And I always regretted not trying to get, you know, get a job with that committee. But anyway, I didn't. And and I kind of, you know, I stayed interested in a topic, but I really didn't get re engaged until 2016 Well, probably the 50th anniversary, but, but I started getting actively involved with the research community. I had cancer in 2016 had kidney cancer, and luckily I caught it very early. They just had to remove my kidney. It was an Okemo, whatever, but I knew I was I'd been given bonus time, and I said, What? What am I going to do my bonus time? So there were two things that were important to me. One was trying to get former Yankee catcher Thurman Munson into the Hall of Fame. And the other one was, what can I do? What? How can I use my legal skills to help, you know, with the Kennedy assassination. So since 2016 I have been very active. I, you know, I joined Kappa, and we started supplementing conferences that Lance was doing. And then we had the mock trial. And in 2017 a two day mock trial, Bill simpi and I were the were co counsel for Oswald, Bob Tannenbaum was on our side. He was focused on just on the grassy knoll, and we got a hung jury, which is not surprising, because there's been seven mock trials held by bar situations or law school since 1967 and all but one of those has resulted in acquittal or a hung jury. The only one that resulted in a conviction was the 1986 made for TV one with Vincent bulagosi and Jerry Spence, yes and Jerry Spence was. Really didn't understand the, you know, the data, the evidence, he kind of was doing his histrionics, and Vincent bulagosi Just out lawyered him, so, but that's the only time there's been a conviction. And, I mean, we're talking about, like, in 92 the ABA had a, had a two day mock trial with lawyers like David Boyce. So this is not like just a bunch of amateurs, you know, just cobbling together a half half fast effort to, you know, to do work. Nobody who is no lawyer who agrees to be do a mock trial wants to lose. Who's representing the prosecution wants to lose a case against Lee Oswald, right? They really don't try. Is not correct. Now, obviously a trial, a mock trial, doesn't really duplicate or replicate the exact conditions of a real trial, but what it does show is that there's reasonable doubt about many elements of the evidence of the government's case, which never got tested in a court of law because all was shot and killed in police custody. And, you know, they once said that cross examination is the greatest truth seeking device that's ever been created. And had the evidence been subjected, he have the evidence, and also the experts that the government used been subject to cross examination. You know, I think Oswald would not have been convicted, and as a result, that's why I had to be killed. So so now we fast forward to last couple years. So obviously the research community was very frustrated and disappointed when Donald Trump yes in in the fall of 2017, two days before the deadline. So take a step back for those of your listeners who don't may not know what, what, what this record business is all about when Oliver Stone's movie came out. Well, first of all, the records the Warren Commission records. The Warren Commission never had authority under the executive order issued by the President to classify its records. In fact, when Bella Abzug held hearings in in the fall of 1975 she had a committee. That was when everything the the church commission committee was making all these revelations. And so there was a lot of interest in 75 that's also when the saber film was was shown for the first time. So she held, she actually held a series of subcommittee meetings hearings, and she actually had people like David Belen, who was one of the, you know, Warren Commission attorneys, and he admitted that they didn't have original classification authority, which really was crazy, because none of the none of the staff, had gotten security clearances. Mm, hmm, maybe actual reviewing allegedly records that are allegedly was supposed to be classified. So the warrant Commission's records were improperly classified to begin with.

And

so we have, we had 5 million pages of records that you know, hadn't been released to the public. The only thing really was released was the Warren report. Some records got released through the actions of some researchers, particularly Harold Weisberg, under the Freedom of Information Act. But the Freeman Information Act has limitations because there's exclusions for, you know, for law enforcement and national security grounds. So Oliver Stone's movie comes out at the fall of 91 and that causes an uproar. And so Congress and at the end of the movie is, most people might remember there was a trail, a trailer at the end, indicating all these records have been withheld from the American people. Yes. So Congress passed this JFK Records Act, which did two things. One was it instructed government offices to scour their records, because there were no there was no centralized location of JFK records. So first, they were instructed to scour their their their files for JFK records and transmit the records to the National Archives so they could be centralized in one location. Number two, they created assassination records review board, which was then to review the records and determine if the records could be disclosed in full or in part. And the statute basically said that there was a presumption of of disclosure and only if A record posed imminent, immediate, identifiable harm, sorry, identifiable harm to national security. Could they that was of such gravity that it outweighed the strong public interest in disclosure, that could the record be postponed so the ARB was in existence for about four years, and initially most of the objections were coming from the F. The Eye of all places. Actually there was, there was an appeal process where the org review the record, and then they would make a preliminary determination of whether it could be released or not, and if it and if they made a decision that the record could be released, the agency that had the equities in the document, and this is the agency to own the information. Could appeal to the President, and the FBI made made significant use of that appeal process, but the president's chief of staff kept telling you know, the ARB and the agency work it out. So the FBI was a principal objector to releasing records. The CIA was a little more cunning, because they just kind of like slow walk things until the point where, like, they did the same thing with the Warren Commission and the House Select assassination committee. When you have an agency or a body that's on a clock, you can run the clock out. And so they delayed, delayed, delayed until at the last year, the ARB was had to change its procedure for reviewing records, because they wouldn't finish the effort if they had to go through review each record individually. So they ended up a streamline proceeding, procedure where they didn't see every records they took, like certifications from the agencies that these records were what they were. So the art went out of business at the end, end of September of 98 but it doesn't didn't mean their job was finished. They just ran out of financing. At the time that the art went out of business, there were still outstanding search requests out to the FBI and the CIA. They had been in negotiations with the RFK family trust because RFK had taken records out of the Oval Office about an hour or so after the assassination. Probably a lot of them pertain to Cuba, but there's probably the ones that were personal in nature that could be embarrassing, and so the ARB was trying to negotiate for the release of those records. There was also records that Walter Sheridan, who had been Robert Kennedy's right hand person at the Department of Justice, and who also had done some private investigation work for Bobby on the assassination. He had taken his personal records and put them at the JFK Library, and when the ARB tried to get those records, some of them related to the investigation work he had done for NBC about the garrison investigation, Sheridan sent all those records down to NBC. The ARB sued the Sheridan estate at that point he died, I think, in that last year or something, so they sued the estate to try to get the records, and NBC intervened and objected to the release of the records and the grounds of reporters privilege, and then you are going out of business, so those records are not in the collection. In fact, interestingly, there was a lessons learned memo that the EPA, I'm sorry, the CIA, issued in 1999 basically reviewing. They were used to doing things under FOIA, and this JFK Act specifically said that the reason it was necessary was because the way that the FOIA was being implemented, and the National Security executive order issued by the president was preventing the full disclosure. So they were they? What the memo was, was talking about lessons learned from this experience and make sure it doesn't happen again. So when the art went out of business, they entered into a three way agreement with the CIA, where the CIA agreed they to pursue, continue to pursue, the outstanding search requests. And Nara was going to be National Archives, was going to be the agency that would supervise the CIA's compliance. This is a 98 and then in 2000 the National Archives moves, the ARB had issued regulations defining what an assassination record was and was very broad, and it extends to both public and privately held records. So the National Archives moved those old our regulations into its section of the of the Code of Federal rules. And when it did that, it said in the federal register that it is the successor in function to the R and it's continues to process JFK records. Well, the R National Archives never really followed up with the CIA. In fact, in the late 2000s and around. 210, and like the early 10, 2010s there was no assistant archivist that was designated to be in charge of the collection. It kind of just languished. There was no follow up, really, after the ARB. Now, when the ARB went out of business, there were the ACT said that if the records are postponed, they're supposed to be periodically reviewed with the archivist and the agency. But there was an outside date of october 24 2017 when all records would have to be released unless the president certified that again, that there was clear and convincing evidence that there was a national security risk, that there was identifiable harm to national security that was of such gravity that would outweigh the public interest in disclosure. So beginning in 2017 I guess in the 2015 16, narrow started hiring staff to sort of get the records in a position that they could be reviewed, and then in the beginning of 2017 now I what I'm going about to tell you is what I learned from my lawsuit. Because I so I filed a lawsuit after Trump came out, was out of office to get to find out what happened. Unfortunately, no one in the in the research community thought about doing this, and it was only you know, after I really got myself very familiar with the JFK Records Act, I said, what happened here? Because I hadn't really focused on the ACT, as much as you know, just basically be reviewing forensic evidence in the case as a lawyer. So and what I learned from my lawsuit, because I followed the lawsuit, they immediately, the government immediately, because I filed so what happened? I filed a FOIA request, and they didn't respond to it. So then I filed a lawsuit, they immediately settled and produced 1000s of records, and this was about the underlying communications that went on between amongst Nara, the White House, the Department of Justice, the various agencies. So what I learned was, first of all, the National Security Council hijacked the process. They were tasked with supervising the process of reviewing and postponing or releasing the records. So you have the spooks now in charge of the process. Number one, the NSC asked the National Archives to develop a guidance document to provide guidance to the agencies, because when they are postponed, the records they gave grounds based on the statute. So if it's national security or if it was law enforcement, they would indicate the ground, one of the statutory grounds for postponement. And presumably what was supposed to happen was, when the review occurred, they would go see the reason for the postponement, and they would go back to the agency and see if that ground was still a valid ground under the test by the agency, I mean by the statute. So the first mistake was narrow. Produced a guidance document that had a clause in there that went beyond what the statute said. It said that the grounds for postponement could include impact on current operations, which is not in the statute. So that was the original guidance that was used by NARA. They communicated this guidance document to all the agencies. And over the summer of 2017, basically narrow said to the agencies in I think it was July, we're going to release the records unless, unless you object. Well, the CIA and the FBI were the principal objectors to releasing information, and the National Archives actually tried to. They wrote memos, and I have these memos where the National Archives, the archivist actually was the Chief Executive Officer of Nara, advise the CIA and the FBI that their grounds for postponement did not comply with the statute and was inconsistent with the interpretations of the ARB. But because the National Archives does not have original classification authority, they don't have the ability to overrule like the ARB did. So basically, their recommendation was ignored by the NFC and the agencies. And in fact, not only was their recommendation that you can't postpone these records. But the National Archives was then asked to send a memo to the president requesting postponement. So they had to do a 180 they basically had to fall on their sword to be good bureaucrats with this request. And so the interest. Thing is, when President Trump went on Twitter, like on two days before the deadline, and said, I'm going to release the records, what was really going on behind the scenes was there were executive orders, drafts of executive orders, circulating between amongst Nara, the NSC, and the agencies postponing the records. So he had no idea that this was going on. Now, presidents don't draft their executive orders. It's always drafted by staff. But again, this was his first year in office, and I don't think he had full understanding of or control over the process. And so basically, when he went on Twitter, version 12 of a draft Executive Order have already been circulated amongst all these parties. So much of the dismay of the research community President Trump postpone the records for six months. The reason the alleged, allegedly because there was not enough time, not enough time at the 25 years. But, okay, that was grounds, right, right? So then they repeated the process again in the spring of 2018

and same thing happened.

And I actually have an email from between the CEO of Nara and the archivist where they've been informed that the decision has been made that the records are going to be postponed for another three and a half years, and the CEO, the CEO of the NARA, tells the archivist the President is going to have to live with this date. So they were clearly unhappy that this process occurred, but they didn't have the ability to to overrule anybody. Now your readers may your listeners may have heard a story that Judge lapolitano had told yes, that he asked President Trump, why did you postpone the records and President Trump alleged, said, allegedly told Judge Napolitano, and I have no reason to not believe what Judge just Paul tunnel was actually told this. He said that if you President Trump said, if you saw what I saw, you would you would know why it did that. Well, I will tell you that based on the 1000s of records that was produced to me, there's no evidence that President Trump ever saw any documents? At best, I believe, was he got a a spreadsheet of documents. Now, what we know is that Mike Pompeo and I could see that. You could see this in my in the in the correspondence that was disclosed to me during the postponement objections by NARA, the department defense and was one of the agencies, but also CIA, where they said that the director or the secretary reserves the right to bring this to the President. And that's what happened this. Mike Pompeo, when he was director of CIA, went to the president, said, Mister President, it's, it's too early to release these records now. Donald Trump, two months ago, I guess in February or January, was on Tucker Carlson, and that's when he actually said a more accurate statement, where he said, I was, I was asked by my Mike Pompeo to postpone the records, and my and I thought, gee, well, you know, he's a good guy. The people the NSC, are good people. They're trying to do what's best for the country. So I went along with them. But that is more accurate the story that Jasmine Politano said, although that may be what he was told, that's not what was reflected in the records that I got. And in fact, I think what President Trump said most recently is more is reflective, what I what I saw in the records, in the you know, that was that were produced to me. So then we have this postponement, and everyone in the community is shocked. And I then, you know now that once I get known in the community, I what I do, then one of my skill sets is to I can I help organize people. I can organize things. So once I kind of, after going to couple conferences and getting to know people, I've had some ability to, now to mobilize people. So in the in 2021 I started reaching out to open government types and, you know, researchers and historians and create and basically what we did, I did two things. One is I put together a team of lawyers, and we did our own legal memo on the JFK Records Act. And we put together a letter, which was attached to it was a legal memo asking President Biden, saying, when the deadline comes up in October of 2017 you know, release the records. We believe that the president, the president. Trump's postponements did not comply with the law, and here's why. And we had like, a 12 page memo just going through all the, you know, all the ways that what the law required and how President Trump didn't comply with the law,

and that went nowhere. Then

President Biden postpones the records, allegedly on grounds that COVID has prevented the review process, right, and he postpones for another year. I have strong doubts, personally, that President body never signed any those executive orders he issued. I think they were just his was auto signature. And I think he, you know, I think the NSC was in charge of the process, and they just stamped his signature on the executive order. That's just my just knowing what I know about how that administration was run. He was very detached from, you know, the rest of his cabinet. And I think that he just let all the heads do what they wanted to do, and the National Security Council was going to give in to the concerns of the Department of Defense and the CIA. And it's like, you know, you're having the, what's the old saying about the the cats being in charge of the, oh, the chicken, charge of the chickens or something, or,

yeah, the fox guarding the hen house. Yeah, that's

it. That's it. Yes, yes, yes. I'm a city boy. I'm not really good with animals, farm animals. Anyway. So then when Trump, when Biden, postpones the records in 2017 I mean, I'm sorry, 2021 I say, okay, obviously this approach to directly divided is not working. So then I cobbled together another group, and it happened to be that my Congress person, Carol Maloney, was the chair of the Oversight Committee in the House, and the Oversight Committee has continuing jurisdiction under the JFK act to, you know, monitor its compliance. So I wrote her a letter, and I had other people sign it as well, and basically I had also sent the letter to the National Archives that spring as well, kind of memorializing also what we were writing to Biden, and also we were identifying records that are not in the collection, that need to be searched, which was that was an interesting issue, because We came across email communications between researchers and the archives, where the archive said to the researchers, if you become aware of records that are not in the collection, let us know. Because, you know, the government has the right to order these records, whether they're private records or public records, they have the right to to have these transferred into the collection. That's statute requires that, um, anyway, i i My request to my representative was forwarded to the person that was in charge of the top Democratic Representative on the committee, and basically I was told that there was not enough time for a public hearing. The schedule was already crowded. What was really going on is they did not want to embarrass the president. A democratically run committee was not going to hold hearings that could embarrass the president right before midterm elections. But they and then this is also when the Newark David Ferraro, the the archivist retired, and Biden was nominating a new archivist. So I tried to i i kept pressing this person, and she said that they would I said, Well, when you have your hearing to the archives, maybe you could talk about this at the hearing. No, no, we'll do that on the staff level, behind the scenes, and allegedly, the Oversight Committee had back channels with the White House about the JFK act, but nothing was public. And as you can see, as your listeners know, Biden postponed the records twice, three times, actually, the third time he actually said that this his executive order was the final act required under the statute, which is not true. The statute says that it continues until all the records have been released in accordance with the statute, and the archivist certifies that this requirements of the statute have been passed or have been complied with. And that did not occur, but the President made this statement. In addition, he created, or he instructed the national security, the the national declassification center to use he had the National Archives. Uh. Was tasked with developing transparency plans, a classically Orwellian term, yes, with each of the agencies who had records still postponed to come up with a plan for declassified these records, and the transparency plans did not comply with the statute, and yet, the archivist certified to the President that these transparency plans would implement that the requirements of the statute the transparency plans had non statutory criteria, and what the transparency plans call for is not Automatic declassification, but certain events or circumstances that would arise at which point in time there would be a review of those records. Now, Congress passed the JFK Records Act because in 1991 at that point in time, the records that were being withheld would not be released until 2029 now the transparency plans, ironically and actually infuriatingly, provide for the earliest of the reviews is not till the 2040s Wow. And if there are any records that involve our allies with which we have a strategic relationship. Ie NATO, those records are never to be released.

Well, transparency

plans were just completely non compliant with the law. This was an, again, this was, I think, a way for the NSC to say we're tired of having to devote resources to this every six months or every year. We're going to just come up with these plans, and they're going to just have to do this down the road. They're pumping it down the road. Now, one of the things that the transparency plans do is they allow for names not to be released until the person is dead. In fact, the FBI and the CIA use a default 100 year rule that if they can't determine if a person is alive, they will not release their name until 100 years after the person's birth date. And the statute doesn't say you can't release names until you die. The statute says you can't release the names if you can show there's an imminent or substantial risk of harm to that person. And none of those showings were made. And that was part of the of the of the archivist objections in 2017 to the postponement of the records. Now the official story that the CIA and the Department of Defense and the FBI are saying is that we made promises to people in the 1960s that if they worked undercover for us or were informants, that we would never reveal their names. So therefore, if we now release their names while they're still alive, that's going to interfere with our ability to get new people to try to do undercover work or act as informants for us, which is, which is a complete ridiculous idea. Now, some of the postponements clearly are just bureaucratic over over cautiousness. For example, there was a record that was released in 2019 about Oswald activities in Japan. Now, there was nothing in that memo that we did not already know. The reason the memo was postponed was because we had a listening station in Australia that had gathered that information and issued that memo. Apparently, we had made a promise to the Australian government in the 1960s that if they let us have a listening station on their soil, we would never let it be known to their citizens that we had a CIA station, you know, in their land, well. So this is this record is is being withheld even in the mid 20 teens, when the number one TV station in Australia is, yes, Pine Gap, which is about our CIA station in Australia. Oh, why? I now another reason so there were records in Mexico City and Mexican government records that were being withheld. And the reason that we being withheld was because Mexico had agreed and, you know, and let, let us tap the phone lines of the Cuban and Russian embassies in Mexico City, and it was feared that if this information came out, it would lead to the collapse of the Mexican government. But that was the Mexican government in 1963 not now. And interestingly enough, we learned when some of these. Were released that the Mexican government was was given dupes of the recordings. So, you know, the CIA claimed that the recordings of Oswald, the alleged person that went into this CIA, I mean, the Cuban and Russian embassies, they claimed it was Oswald. They destroyed the records routinely, recordings routinely, because they were preserving tape so they could reuse a tape. But if this is correct, there may be dupes of those destroyed record, those destroyed tape sitting somewhere in a warehouse in Mexico, interesting and and we actually tried judge Tanay, who was the chair of the ARB, said that he tried to get those records, and the State Department interfered, just like we were trying to get records about Oswald in Japan, the ARB was and Ambassador Mondale. This is Fritz Mondale, who used to run for ran for president and was a former senator. He was, at this point in time, during the Clinton administration, the ambassador to Japan. Apparently, some of the records would have revealed some things about what we did with some groups that were trying to take down the Japanese government in the 60s, or something. And he actually requested that the records not be released because it would damage relations with Japan. So people that you think are would be advocates for releasing records actually aren't. So when Biden did the final transparency when he did his transparency plans, that's when we finally Bill simpic and I were able to convince Mary Farrell to and Gary Aguilar and Josiah Thompson to greet let us represent them in a lawsuit against President Biden and The National Archives on the grounds that President Biden didn't comply with the Records Act, and the National Archives failed to do its failed to comply with its requirements as well. When it said it was the it said it was the successor in function to the R and of course, the federal government has we went up against the best lawyers in the federal government, which was a nice professional competition. It was fun to do that, but we, unfortunately, we filed in in the Northern District of California, because we thought that that district, and that's in a nice circuit, have been very receptive during the Trump administration to questioning Trump orders. Usually, the President gets extreme deference when you file, you know, in the DC Circuit, in the DC courts. So we were hoping that we would get a different result in out there, but we got a judge that just did not. He just didn't want to, yeah, I don't think he liked the case. First, he first, he removed President Biden from the lawsuit, and then he claimed that, well, narrow really didn't, didn't really say what they said they were, they said, or they couldn't have said what they said. They said that they really couldn't be the successor in function. And so we, we actually filed, we want, we wanted injunctive relief. We wanted an order from the court saying, Mister, mister Biden, withdraw these transparency plans and redo it with, you know, complying with the law and and we also with the same with the the archives. So our motion for our motion for injunctive relief, was denied. The President was removed from the case, and we were about to now go into the next phase, which was summary judgment on the National Archives. And that has been basically put in stasis right now until we see what happens with President Trump's executive order now, after President Trump issued so President Trump issued an executive order in January. Now he could have said, he said one good thing at the beginning of the order, he says, I hereby find it's in the public interest to release all the records. Great, great statement. The next thing he could have said would been, and therefore, I hereby direct the National Archives to immediately release all the records in the JFK collection. He did not say that. He said, I therefore direct the Attorney General, the National Security Advisor, that's the NSC, and the directive national intelligence to come up with a plan for declassification and is submitted to me and the me meeting the President and the White House Counsel within 15 days. 15 days was February 5, I think, or February 7. I forget which Friday that was. There was one report. Letter from ABC news that a report that a plan had been issued, but we've never seen it, and I have a mutual friend to the White House Counsel, so I sent the White House counsel a letter, which the purpose of the letter wasn't to educate him on the JFK assassination, per se, but it was to let him know that there are still records not in the collection that need to be put into the collection and be released if the American people are going to get to see all the records pertaining to the assassination. And identified some of the records. We identified the Joe and Edie's files. He was the CIE liaison to the Cuban exile group Dre that is the one that had interactions with Oswald in New Orleans, and the ones that promoted that bit came out, you know, within 12 hours or so of the assassination with Oswald's full bio, we asked for the RFK files. I asked for also Carlos Marcello was the subject. Carlos Marcello was the most powerful mafia guy probably ever because he was independent. His his empire generated a billion dollars a year in the 60s, which is bigger than probably US Steel and probably GM. He had probably the biggest company in the country. In essence, he was the victim of two sting operations, or victim he was he got caught up in two sting operations. The first one was called brilab, and there, there were some statements. He allegedly said in the bride lab sting operation that the ARB reviewed the transcripts of the of those recordings and they released 13 of them, saying they were JFK records, Assassination records, the ARB somehow was unaware that there was a mid 1980s second sting operation called cam Tex, and that he was in Texas. Marcelo was in the Texas jail. And what happened, and Lamar Waldron is the first person, I think, to release this story. But allegedly, the Marcelo cell mate was Jack Van langingham, and I guess Marcelo was getting friendly with him, and Van laging Ham was trying to cut a deal for himself, so he went to the FBI, and they agreed he'd be an informant, and they put a radio in the cell that recorded their conversations, and allegedly, Marcelo admitted that he was behind the assassination, that he knew Oswald, Oswald's family. In fact, Oswald's uncle was a runner for Marcello, you know, bookie, and that Marcello basically said he wished he had been able to kill Kennedy himself. Wow. So we have memos. So what came out in in the late 20 2000s in Lamar waldrons book was that there were these memos written by Van laging, him saying, Hey, I did my I did my site. You know, my part of this? You know, where's my relief? Basically, um, those tapes have been sealed because the information was never used in for the Carlos Marcello lost, uh, trial, so therefore they were sealed. But they've been sealed all this time. The ARB never saw this. I don't think the ARB was even aware of this second sting operation. And so that's one another record that I asked that we need to have not just a transcript, but we need to hear the tapes, also the tapes of the first brilab Sting as well, because you get different information when you listen to a person speak Yes, like when I listen to Ruth Payne, I could, I think I've identified a tic when she lies. And really, yeah, yeah. So you know you can the way a person speaks, their inflections. It just you can learn a lot from the way they communicate. And so we need to hear the tapes in addition to the to the grand scripts. So I sent that letter off to the Warrington, the the White House Council. And then the other piece that's happening now is that the Oversight Committee is finally decided to exercise some oversight. But fortunately the the. They formed the Task Force on federal secrets, and unfortunately, the JFK assassination has been wrapped up into the MLK, the RFK, UAPs and the Epstein files. Hm, Now Anna Luna is the chairperson of the task force. She's best known for wearing a very sexy bathing suit before she became a congress person, she's She apparently has a steep learning curve, but she has been interacting with Pam Bondi to try to get information. They want to see records as well. And I have contacted her as well. I don't have a mutual contact with her, so all I can do is send her letters and go on her Twitter, her x page, but I basically let her know about everything that happened with the Oversight Committee, and also advised her that, you know, this committee needs to get those records that are not in the collection, in the collection, they need to search for them. You know, one of the things that's frustrating, because it is 100 year rule, they start releasing names after people die. So one of the most important records that came out, I think it was in 21 was this memo from Donald Heath. Donald Heath had been a person at the CIA, and over the weekend of the assassination, he was tasked to go down to Miami and conduct an investigation of the exiles in the Cuban and the Castro loyalists, to see if any of them down there had been involved in the assassination. The CIA always denied that they had done this right. And this was, this was a memo written to the HSCA May of 77 and in this memo, he refers to site situation reports that he had seen as late as 1973 in this guy, Don McLean, not. Don McLean, some McLean. Dom McLean is the is the songwriter. This guy, McLean in his office at the CIA, and he actually indicated what office that was. And his name wasn't released until he died. And so we can never talk to him, and we don't know whatever happened to these situation reports. So I've also asked both Luna and Warrington to see if they can find these situation reports. But this is part of the frustrating thing is they don't release the names until people die. And you know, there are people that have were never interviewed by the CIA, about by the Warren Commission or the HSCA or the ARB, for variety of reasons, or their interviews were very they didn't really weren't designed to get to the truth, and a lot of people could be re interviewed and really have a more a more pointed conversation to try to get illicit facts. But they're in their 80s and 90s, and we argued before the court that, you know, these people are dying now, right? And we need to get in. The court didn't see that was as an emergency to to grant any relief. So that's sort of where we are right now, I guess.

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Well, okay, so you you touched on a couple of things that I want to dig into a little bit deeper. So after I read David Talbot's amazing book that I highly recommend, the devil's chessboard, I was horrified, but not surprised, not only as somebody inside the JFK community, but also as dag hammer Schultz biographer, learning about the maneuvers of somebody like Allen Dulles in particular was pretty depressing. And I'd like to ask from your perspective, which agencies do you feel like are resisting a full disclosure, a real full transparency, and what kinds of legal justifications are they using in order to do it

well, clearly, well, the two top ones are the CIA and the FBI.

The Department of Defense is also asserting

postponements as well, and they're all claiming national security on the grounds that this would be. Uh, you know, either it would, it would harm national security, or it would reveal methods and procedures. I mean, I'm really if we're still using the same methods of 1960s I think that's that's kind of discouraging. But this is just again. So, you know, they're trying to use the national security exemption under the statute. And, you know, courts give the president lots of discretion when it comes to national security because he's commander in chief, he's constitutional separation of power. So that's what they're saying. And the CIA is also so there, the CIA is relitigating issues that they lost with the ARB in the 90s. They're claiming that, well, these aren't really records about the assassination, um, because they don't involve the day of the assassination. And again, you know, they made those arguments in the 90s, the ARB said no, and there's relitigating as if they were never argued before. And I think you know, most of the records that the FBI withheld were mafia records, oh, records involving mafia informants.

So

you know that's interesting that?

Yeah, that is interesting. Wow. Okay, wow. That's a little bit mind blowing to me. Yeah, the standard government argument is always that, well, it's to protect national security. We can't tell you. We can't tell you why. We can't tell you, but just, you're going to have to trust us. Wink. And so it's like, All right, we have these murders. As you said, they've all been sort of tied together in a basket here, JFK, RFK and MLK, these murders that occurred in the 1960s it's now 2025 so as you said, if you're still using the same methods that you used back then, if your surveillance or your national security tactics haven't evolved over all these decades. That's really quite telling. Do you feel like that's just a smoke screen? Is that something that we're being told is kind of the plebs and the peons? Does it hold any water at all? Or do you think it's just a BS tactic?

I think again, they're they're saying that if we reveal names now, it's going to prevent us from getting new informants and undercover people in the future. And I just don't know, you know. So they make that argument, and any President is not going to want to be in a position of having another 911 right? So they're playing the president. They've done this, this. This is the game that they play now, the good, the one hopeful thing that i This is the upside to having a president, a disruptive president. I mean, he fired 150 people that worked at the NSC. So I'm hoping that the people that replace the people he fired, at least on this issue, are going to want to please the president and make sure that his executive order is fulfilled and will comply with but it's really it was really frustrating to watch, to read the memos like there was a memo where Chris buchanko, the CEO of the National Archives, wrote a note to someone at the Department of Defense, and he was saying, Look, we haven't worked before. I want to assure you, we're not trying to be difficult. We're not trying to second get you. I'm just trying to give you the benefit of our experience. It's like they, you know, because they work together. You know, every day. These are these are records people that work in the different agencies, and they work with National Archives. The number one goal for the National Archives appears to be making a having a good relationship with the CIA and other agencies, so they will deliver records to them, and so they don't want to be hostile or have a hostile relationship and granted, they don't have the authority to declassify, but it it just was very frustrating to see. And I'm sure they were frustrated too, because they they did. I mean, I initially was angry at the National Archives, until I saw what really happened, that they did everything they possibly could during the Trump administration to try to get the records released, and they were basically just told, pound sand. In fact, not only pound sand, give us authorization, give us they what they NSC did was they used the archivist as the basis to tell the public it's the archivist is asking us to postpone the record so we have no choice, because the archivist is asking us this,

wow, orchestrated, yeah.

Well, that's yeah, orchestrated is a great word for it. I've noticed that there are debates within the JFK research community in terms of, will there be some proverbial smoking gun? Will there be. Be a collection of threads that skilled researchers will have to just weave together over the course of time based on whatever we can gather about what's being withheld from us. Do you have any thoughts on that? In other words, do you think that there's going to be some document or two that's going to cause this collective gasp within the research community, or do you think this is more of a slow burn?

I don't think there's going to be a smoking gun about here's how we're going to kill the president. You know, if let's assume for the moment that this was not a high level assassination, that this was, say, maybe done at the operational level in JAM wave, and that the mafia paid for it, and they used exiles that were trained to kill Castro to kill Kennedy, that team was was trained by William Harvey, and specifically instructed you put Nothing in writing. So I think what would come out would be, what you kind of hinted at was something that historians and researchers could it be like a mosaic. In fact, the CIA the reason to see another reason the CIA pushes back is the mosaic theory that even if a particular record does not appear on its face to pose a risk for national security. The CIA argument is, well, you take this record, you put another one, and soon our adversaries can put together a mosaic of how well, I think that's the same argument with the Kennedy assassination. If we get enough of these records, trained observers will be able to put together a mosaic from all the conversations that you know, routes they didn't pursue things that were said and dismissed, you know, or just other or other conversations that may, you know, shed light on on the circumstances around The assassination. So but the but for the the for the everyday American who's casually informed there's not going to be a memo saying we're going to we're going to use Lee Oswald as a gunman, or we're going to use him as a patsy. Yeah, and it was money. I'm sure whatever money passed was done with black bags, phone calls from, you know, pay phones that weren't being tapped, you know? I mean, these people, you know, these people knew how to, how to circumvent the system,

right? No, I, and I agree with you. I don't think that we could be wrong. I mean, hey, we're we're human. We don't know the future, but I'm doubtful that there will be a document that says we're going to murder Kennedy, and here's exactly how we're going to do it, step by step, we're going to use Oswald as the Patsy, and then if something goes wrong with that, we'll have Jack Ruby come in as the murderer of him. I don't, I don't think we're going to find that. No,

I know that they destroyed Oswald's Naval Intelligence records. The Joint Chief of Staff destroyed records. The the Secret Service destroyed records after being requested by the ARG to turn them over. I mean, so we know there's been incriminating. Potentially incriminating records have been destroyed anyway. So even if they had, even if someone, you know as a lawyer, I've often times come across situations where you have an official file, right, and it gets destroyed, but somebody made a copy for their own Office file, and that and that file is maintained, and so later comes out. Oh, my God. You know, we never would have brought a lawsuit if we had known this file. But this paper existed. And, you know, a couple years ago, Bill Kelly discovered, I forget who it was, but there was one secret service agent who had a bunch of a box of records underneath his bed, right, and they were to the to the to narrow so there is a slight possibility that some of the records destroyed, there might be copies somewhere, but for the most part, they were destroyed. And certainly anything, any instructions about how to carry this out. I mean, we'd be dealing with the CIA organizational people and the mob. You know they, they knew not to. They knew how to hide their tracks.

Yeah, so if, if listeners want to push, if they really want to support these efforts, and they want to support the push for full JFK file disclosure, what can they do, like what I I'm not a big believer in anything that resembles j6 I think taking taking yourself into a point of danger and potentially getting arrested is a very foolish thing to do. So what legal options? What? What? What can we do to show that we're upset but we're not going to get ourselves thrown into a jail cell? So I

think we have an Oliver Stone moment for the 21st century right now. Um. Um, there's a couple things. First of all, there is a bipartisan bill in Congress that was sponsored by a Republican, David Schweikert and a Democrat, Steve Cohen of Tennessee. It's called the justice for JFK act, and it would it. There's another category of records that can't be released under the statute. It's the records that were given by deed of trust to the government. So, for example, the William Manchester interview, interviews of Bobby Kennedy and Jackie Kennedy they William chest, you know, when he did his book The Death of a president. He did interviews, those records are not to be released until 2067 and the JFK Act does not allow the government to override deed of trusts. Number one. Number two, the JFK Act does not allow IRS records to be released, so the Oswald tax returns as if Oswald's going to would have disclosed that he was getting money from the CIA or whoever. But so one thing we can do is to contact your congress person and tell them to sponsor, to agree to co sponsor. There's two things that they can do with legislation. Schweikert and Cohen did a dear colleagues letter asking the representatives to sign on to this letter, asking the president to insist that all the records get released, and also provide for some of these missing records to you know, process, create them a new ARB to review or committee to review records that the agency want to postpone so they can, one, call up their Congress person and calling it is better that gets more attention. Tell them that they like that you're a constituent and you're calling to ask them to be a co signer, to sign on to the Schweikert Cohen, Dear Colleague letter. That's number one. Number two, ask them to be co sponsors of the JFK Records Act. So those are two things, if they hear from their constituents, they may decide that we may have another moment like in 91 where Congress felt inundated from from the from their voters, and that's why the path of JFK Records Act. So that's one way to do it. The next thing is, if you are look at the task force that that representative, Luna is, is heading. There are, I think, 12 people. There's, you know, Democrats and Republicans. If you go to the Oversight Committee and then a website and look for the task force, you'll see the names of the representatives there. If one of your representatives is on that task force, write them and ask them to tell them that you want the records to be released and to complete the outstanding search requests

the records that are not in the collection.

If your representative is not on the task force, but they're on the Oversight Committee, that's okay too, because then you what you want to do is and and sometimes, if you're from Florida, for example, and Representative Luna is not your Congresswoman, but if, as long as you're from the state of Florida, sometimes it helps as well. So if you're rep, if there's a representative from your state, but not necessarily your district. You can contact them as well. And then the last thing would be to call the White House and tell them, you know, it's been over. You know, the plan was supposed to be submitted 15 days after, you know, after the executive order, which I think was January 23 or 21st so it was due the first week in February. We'd like to see this plan, and we want the plan, if the plan calls for any redactions, we want those Redux to be reviewed by a, you know, a independent body. Good, good. So

I don't know if you can, can give us a sneak peek. I know we don't always know the future. I'd love to know more about what you can share with us about the next steps in your legal efforts. And one thing I do want to say, especially since you shared your information with us, thank God it sounds like you're you're doing better with your health. So I do want to absolutely Sam, I'm glad to hear that it sounds like you're in remission. So that's fantastic. Tell us about the next steps that you can with your legal efforts. And you know, what should we be watching for in the coming months? Well,

first of all, I'm considered cured, so thank you for your best wishes. I'm, I'm in good health. I'm, I'm a very active 71 full of. Energy. And you know the old saying, you're only young once, but you have your entire life, tech, immature. Yes. Anyway, so there's a couple things. Obviously, we're waiting. We're waiting on the result of the declassification plan to see, see how that's going to impact the existing Mary Farrell litigation. I'm going to be writing a letter to narrow requesting all of the correspondence for the postponement of of the Biden postponements to see if anything was different under the Biden administration, I suspect not, based on what I've seen. I'm actually I'm also going to file a petition with the Attorney General, specifically on the Carlos Marcello tapes to have them released. And depending on what happens, I you know that might result in litigation. I will say that one thing that we really wanted to do to actually have a real impact, a real, actual impact on the story. Texas has a has a procedure called the court of inquiry. It allows for people that have been wrongfully convicted to seek exoneration. Now, Oswald was never actually convicted because he was killed while in police custody. He was by the, you know, in the public opinion, but he was never convicted. Bill simbach and I, in 2018 wrote a letter to Marina Oswald and said, and the frustrating thing is, a whole bunch of people got together in the mid 90s, a lawyer and a bunch of people that were advising Marina Oswald, and I don't know how they didn't uncover this remedy, because Bill and I found it within a couple hours of research. But we asked, we told Marina that we would be willing pro bono to bring a real, live court of inquiry petition to try to expunge his arrest on the grounds of lack of probable cause.

And

now I understand her husband may have died the next level or so, but you know, he had a really strict control over her. But anyway, she declines, through various intermediaries, to allow us to do this. And I said to her, you have to think about, you know your descendants. You know what you don't want to be is like the mud family doctor. Mudd, you know, was convicted of conspiracy to kill President Lincoln because he fixed John Wilkes Booth ankle. He was a doctor, right? Yes, right. And they never, you know, and they're still seeking relief to this day, from what I understand, or they tried, and it was turned down. I said, you don't want your descendants to have the stain that the mud family has. And so she turned us down. And I would love to be able to get in touch with the the Oswald daughters to see whether they would be willing to to entertain this, because this would, this could be a real this could be a real forget mock trials. This could be a real proceeding that actually results in in real relief and changes the actual story. So that's something that, you know, I have to re circle back. I mean, if it's true that that Porter died, then, you know, maybe, maybe the reins are off her now, but she also is in a difficult position, because, you know, she she made statements on their oath, and as a former member, a former citizen of the Soviet Union, I think she's really terrified that if she said something different, now, that somehow she could be, you know, convicted for perjury. Mm, I mean, she was under a lot of pressure. If you, if you look at the first, the first day she testified, you know, she was saying things like, I'm, I'm going to be, I'm going to be telling the truth now. And, you know, she thought there was an article in New York Times year after the assassination, where she thought she was going to be deported. I mean, there were hints at her that if you cooperate, you won't be deported, right? You know, and the whole way that the walker shooting, that the supposed note was discovered belatedly, and after the police supposedly went through Ruth Payne's house. And then Ruth Payne happens to be giving a cookbook or something, or some book, to Marina, and this note was suddenly in there, and Marina had. Denied that Oswald said anything about Walker. And then suddenly, when the most presented to her, and this was given to her the day before, or two days before, the FBI had its internal deadline to issue its report, December 5. I think it was, and I think this is December 1, or something, of 63 so you know, she was the only person that could tie a lot of the key evidence to Oswald. And anyway, she I, you know, I understand her situation she was in. And I think any mother in that case, given the choice of defending your dead husband or protecting your babies was obviously going to protect your babies, right, right? So I don't, and I even give LBJ a mulligan for a 1964 you know, maybe they truly thought that if they ran this thing down, that it was going to lead to a world war. I think if they ran it down, it was going to lead back to Carlos Marcello and Hoover the mafia. And Hoover wrote by the short hairs because he was getting fixed racing tips from Frank Costello, you know. And in fact, when, when the FBI office in doubt in New Orleans started sniffing around Marcellus people, you know, Hoover put a stop to it. Now, obviously the mafia did not have the ability to fix the autopsy and other stuff, right? I think their role was to pay for this. I think the CIA, some operational level people pulled the plan together because they know how to do that. But I think Marcelo was, you know, was the money behind it. Because I think once we stopped funding the exiles, the Kennedy, you know, administration stopped funding the exiles in the in the I think the spring of 63 I think Marcell stepped in and started funding them, because, you know, they were trying to get rid of Castro. So I don't know how I got onto that topic. So

there's so many rabbit holes Larry, whenever we talk about anything related to JFK, one rabbit hole goes into another goes into another, and they're all freaking fascinating. That's the thing.

Well, that's the thing like, you know, so lot of people from my generation, they hit LBJ. And they think LBJ, you know, is behind it. And I say, Well, I answered the Roger Stone, who I know. And I said, So LBJ was the shrewdest politician of his time, right? He goes, Yeah. I said, Okay. And you have to admit that plotting to kill a president is a dangerous endeavor, because if you don't aren't. If you aren't successful, you're going to be hung for treason, right? Yes, of course. So if you're a shrewd politician, when you do the more shrewd thing, and if you really want to give it a JFK, just have your neighbor Hoover released a dirty hat on him in 1963 that would have ruined them long you have to go through this process of killing applauding to kill him. Right now, the cover ups a different story. But, you know, I mean, the upfront, the idea that he would have participated in the murder of the President, just to me, is, you know, I'm not saying LBJ was a nice man, but that's, that's for his own sake. I don't, because you don't know it's going to work. I mean, the summer before, well, how many two dozen guys or or a dozen guys try to kill de Gaulle? And it didn't work? Yes. So, you know, there's no assurance that this, when you look backwards in history, things always look like, of course, that happened, but you know, we didn't know we were going to win World War Two, you know, and, and, but you know, we didn't know the union was going to win the Civil War. I mean, as late as, you know, 63 when Gettysburg, it would look like it was an iffy thing, and the election, if Lincoln didn't get reelected, the Civil War would have ended with the two countries. So history doesn't to history seems like it's or it's ordained to happen when it really isn't. And there was no assurance that this plan was going to be successful. And in fact, we know there were two plans that month that, you know, in Chicago and Tampa didn't work, right? So there was, you know, to take a risk like that of your sitting president and Congress did go and did have hearings about Baker in the spring of 64 so it wasn't like, you know, that was kept on the wraps. So anyway, I can be skeptical. And then, you know the the other theory that secret service agent Hickey fired the fatal shot, yes, and, and, you know the book the book publisher, settled a defamation lawsuit brought by the Hickey estate after the Hickey estate had blown the statue of limitations. If you're a book publisher and you think that you have found the you've solved the crime of the century, you. Are you really going to settle and don't say, oh, it's lawyer fees, because it's very hard to win A a defamation lawsuit. You have to prove malice. It's a lot of work on the part of the plaintiff. It's not as hard on the defense. And the idea that they somehow settle to save legal fees, you know, it just doesn't make sense that they that they wouldn't stand behind the book if they thought it was true. So there's a lot of lot of people, a lot of researchers. You know, their fame is relate, is connected to. They come up with a theory and they want books. So I, you know, the research committee has not been, we've been, sometimes our own worst enemies, and we don't, kind of move forward. I mean, I still don't understand why, why there was no action after Trump postponed the records. I'm just, I wish I had been more well known at that point in time, because I could have been cobbled together something, but, you know, I was just I people didn't know me yet. Cap is what gave me exposure. And you know, there was no way that people were going to, you know, agree to join my coalition. So unfortunately, it took a little late, but I was just surprised that that no one pushed back against the Biden abeyance of Trump postponements. Mm, hmm, so happens, you know, I mean, I think, I think there's still going to be because of the time it's taken, I am sure, and the fact that we have transparency plans that are two years old, three years old, where the agencies asked for postponements till at least the 2040s I find it very doubtful that they're going to just say, Sure, release all the records. There's going to be requests for postponement. I have no doubt about that. And the question is going to be, how are those requests handled? Are is President Trump going to do what President Biden did and basically have another version of transparency plans, or is he going to have those requests vetted by an independent body to make sure that they truly, truly represent a threat to national security? I don't think anybody is advocating to release a record that could actually pose a risk to national security. The thing is that we don't think that, you know, most, I mean, maybe a handful of records, less than a dozen, right, to me, could justify maybe postponement. I'm just making that number up. The point was, it's a very small number, right? And the idea that the FBI found 2400 files, records, you know, in January, that had never been disclosed before and shared with the ARB. Now there's a good sign to that, in the sense that Okay, someone actually looked but the bad thing is that that shows you that there was not a good faith effort done in the 90s or in the 70s to try to find records. Yes, so it's going to be interesting to see. You know, again, I'm I'm anticipating there's going to be postponements. And the real test for President Trump and for Congress the congressional Task Force is, how do they handle those requests? If they basically just say, Sure, we'll just process them like the transparency plans, then they have failed. In my opinion, they'll get an F. In my opinion, those records, if they're going to be postponements, need to be vetted by independent bodies so that the American people can have confidence that whatever records remain redacted truly have an impact on national security. Otherwise, we'll think it's the same old saying someone's just prime trying to protect being embarrassed.

Mm, hmm, yes. Well, as the saying goes, may you live in interesting times, and I think at least we can say that's true. I do think we live in interesting times. If somebody is wanting to keep up with you, your doings, the latest news that you have to offer, what's the best website or the best social media platform for them to go to to stay apprised of what you're up to? That's a

good question, because I'm not

I do have my CSI, JFK, YouTube. I have my I have a my website, my snaf.com as opposed to my law firm, which is snap law.com I, you know, I post up on Education Forum, I do some stuff on Twitter, but I'm not as active as because I have my regular law practice, right? So, but that's places they could go, or they could contact me if they have any questions about anything that I said today. We do have, you know, we have. We're living in interesting times, not only because of the JFK stuff, but we are essentially. Revisiting things that were decided in the 1930s about what the government looks like. You know, FDR expanded the power of the of the presidency during a new deal. And a lot this is way off topic, but just so you're for your listeners who are interested in history, we are revisiting issues that were decided in favor of big government in the 1930s and the Supreme Court. There are concepts like the executive, the unified executive theory, which be which says that the President is on top of the executive branch, and he can make decisions about all the executive branches, even if Congress says that they're creating an independent body, the idea that the President can fire people that work whose positions were created by Congress, The idea that the the administrative state is actually an unlawful delegation by Congress to the executive branch. These are all issues that were decided in the mid 1930s initially, the Supreme Court pushed back against FDRs new deal because it was an expansion of the federal government. Yes. And then, when, suddenly, when FDR threatened to stack the Supreme Court, they reversed. So we are truly living in interesting times, because we are revisiting concepts of what this government looks like that have been in place for almost 90 years. So it truly is historic moment in time. Forget this, the Kennedy stuff. Now I want to say one final thing to your listeners, and that is the Kennedy assassination. May say, Why am I still interested in Kennedy assassination? And it's not because, simply, I want to know what happened before I die, the people that were able to pull this off and get away with it learned a lesson, and the Kennedy assassination is not simply a historical event. It isn't like when I was 10 years old and World War One was 50 years or 60 years ago. The the Kennedy assassination. It continues today to influence our politics, because people are not punished for wrongdoing. So, for example, after after Kennedy's murder was hidden, we had the Gulf of Tonkin incident. That was the pretext for Vietnam. We had the Sandinistas, another pretext where the President violated limitations by Congress. We had the weapons of mass destruction right Where? Where? We had a ginned up intelligence in 90 in the 90s, when the Secret Service destroyed the records, nobody got punished, even though this was a direct command from orb. So what happens on January 6, they destroy emails, and nobody gets punished, until people are held accountable for their actions, until people understand that when they write memos or they make decisions, that they're going to be the sun the disinfections that the so there's a saying about the greatest disinfectant is sunshine, sunlight, until people know that their decision making is going to be exposed to the light of day, they're going to continue to do things that are not in the public's interest, in their own interests. And we have they. You know, in my experience as an environmental lawyer, I have a lot of administrative law practice, and I can see how, how bureaucrats can there are ways that they can avoid creating records that are subject to the freedom Information Act. And what's happening now is there are all kinds of ways that bureaucrats are avoiding creating records. It it goes down to levels of even some of those informal chats that they create within an agency. These are all designed to avoid anyone seeing what they're doing. And so long as that is in effect, and that's the way government decisions are made, the government's going to continue to be not responsive to the American people. So the Kennedy assassination is the ultimate hidden secrets of our government. But this would be the first step by getting the Kennedy assassination completely flushed out in the public. Then that could be maybe the turning point that the rest of our government begins to be have more sunlight shown shown on it, because if it doesn't, you know, we're we're the country that we know is going to disappear because bureaucrats are not accountable. And so that's why I encourage young people. This is not simply about the Kennedy assassination. It's about the way our government functions and operates. And so we have to start. Sunlight, and so those the baby boomers like me, we're getting up in years, and we may not. This is a long battle, and we may not be around to see the the ultimate release of all the records we're going to need the next generation and the generation after that to pick up the mantle. And I hope that your listeners do that, and what the first thing you can do is start calling your congress person and the White House to start pushing on this issue, but also maybe support somebody's open government organizations that that fight or good fight to get records released. Mm,

hmm, amen. I couldn't have said it any better myself. I would definitely encourage everybody in my generation. It's, it's the it's the next one up, after yours, Gen X, I would encourage all the Xers, as well as millennials, Gen Z, ers. If you're listening to this, what Larry is telling you is spot on. This has reverberations and ramifications that we're living with even today. And Larry, I just, I want to thank you so much. I know you're busy. I know you have your fingers and a lot of pies, and I want to thank you for taking the time to come on the show to tonight and talk to us about what you've got cooking.

Oh, great. It's my my pleasure, and I hope that you know this will lead to more activism on the younger generations. Absolutely.

Yes, yes, get the records released!

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