To hit streaming services in 2026
On his third day in office, Donald Trump finally ordered the declassification of the assassination files on the Brothers K. No, not the Brothers Karamazov, I’m talking about another ill-fated duo: former president JFK and former attorney general RFK.
White House Press Secretary Caroline Leavitt said Trump wanted to declassify the files during his first term, but couldn’t locate them before he had to leave office. Rumor has it that after a long search, aided by document-sniffing rottweilers, Elon discovered the files in a cabinet in USAID’s Headquarters marked, “ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO SEE HERE.” Leavitt said the files were nearly lost forever when, on a visit to the White House last week, Biden tried to smuggle them away in the back of his Corvette, believing they were old stock certificates for Burisma. Biden disputed Leavitt’s claim, telling investigators he thought they were bedtime stories his nanny had misplaced. I don’t have any insights as to what Joe’s soporific literature of choice is, but it wouldn’t surprise me to hear it’s assassination records, considering the current morbid popularity of the true crime genre.
We regular Americans must wait until March 9 to get our true crime fix, which is the date President Trump has set for the files’ release. Some 320,000 documents on JFK’s killing have already been released, while an estimated 4,000 more remain hidden. Even more exciting, the FBI reportedly found an additional 2,400 documents which will be included in the release. I won’t speculate where in the USAID’s HQ these bonus files were uncovered, but the Executive Snack and Sesame Street Room is the current favorite on Polymarket.
Some question whether the files’ release will bring us any closer to finding out who really killed JFK. After all, 50 years is plenty of time to Sharpie out inconvenient sentences, and I’m not sure even a DOGE task-force knows how to remove CIA-made white-out. The odds of stumbling upon the words “We did it, so sorry” buried on page 3 million are quite low. More likely, the public will receive thousands and thousands of pages of, well, not much. The problem with secret document troves is not that they are secret. Unlike Google Docs, they have no edit history. “The FBI made a change at 3:27 a.m.” is not something we’ll be seeing a whole lot of. If a curious U.S. Archives janitor took a few pages home for some midnight perusing in the ’80s and never returned them, we’d be none the wiser.
Perhaps even more frustrating for some is that the official narrative of JFK’s demise might well be the true one. Perhaps, it was Oswald and only Oswald who hatched the plot all those years ago. Perhaps, there was no collusion with the mob, Russia, the CIA, Bigfoot or any other of the alleged colluders. Perhaps, Oswald was just a sharp-sighted nut who wasn’t a fan of teamwork. If this is what the files tell us, there will of course still be deniers. Time and secrecy have eroded the rock of certainty down to pebble-size, and even if the documents point unerringly at Oswald, people will still clutch their alternate theories tightly. This is America after all, where we have the right to think and say what we want, however crazy. Ask Joe, that’s what makes a good bedtime story.
Ralph Emerson Slinkworth is a freshman political science major. In his spare time, he enjoys reading in book warehouses (on any floor except the sixth). His part time job includes managing government contracts for a document shredding company. He cannot be reached.
Photo Credit: Shikler’s John Fitzgerald Kennedy, modified (from Wikimedia Commons)
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