Donald Trump says he ‘always’ believed that Lee Harvey Oswald killed former President John F. Kennedy in Houston – but has speculated that the gunman may have had some help.
The president made the remarks in a wide-ranging interview with Outkick founder Clay Travis onboard Air Force One on Saturday, after Travis asked the commander-in-chief whether he thinks Oswald killed JFK.
‘I do,’ Trump replied. ‘And I’ve always felt that, but of course, was he helped?’
The Justice Department has long maintained that Oswald, 24, acted alone when he opened fire on the presidential motorcade on November 22, 1963 from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository.
But Oswald denied the claims, famously declaring to the police that he was ‘just a patsy,’ before he, too, was gunned down on November 24, 1963 – and to this day, many Americans believe Kennedy’s death was the result of a conspiracy.
Some have even claimed Oswald may have received assistance from either the US government, the Mafia, the CIA, the Cuban government or the Soviet Union’s KGB.
After decades of speculation, Trump ordered the federal government to release more than 2,000 pages of documents related to the Kennedy assassination.
The trove of top-secret files released on Tuesday included typewritten reports and handwritten notes spanning decades – including details from a top CIA agent who claimed the deep state was responsible, Oswald was a ‘poor shot’ and that the Secret Service had been warned Kennedy would be killed in August.
President Donald Trump expressed doubts that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in the assassination of former President John F Kennedy in an interview with Outkick founder Clay Travis on Saturday
His remarks came just days after the federal government released more than 2,000 pages of documents related to Kennedy’s assassination
The rollout of the files stunned Trump’s national security team, who spent 24 hours racing to assess security hazards ahead of publication.
Experts have warned as they sift through the information that they do not expect the release to overturn the long understanding of what happened or earth-shattering reveals.
Trump, himself, also noted in his interview with Outkick that ‘the papers have turned out to be somewhat unspectacular.
‘I don’t think there’s any that earth-shattering,’ he said, adding that the public can make their own ‘determination’ about the infamous assassin.
But those who have dug through thousands of pages have already uncovered some intriguing details.
They found that one of the many documents was a memo released on a passage from the left-wing political magazine Ramparts from June 1967 about intelligence agent, CIA informant and former US Army Captain John Garrett Underhill Jr.
‘The day after the assassination, Gary Underhill left Washington in a hurry. Late in the evening he showed up at the home of a friend in New Jersey He was very agitated,’ the passage starts.
‘A small clique within the CIA was responsible for the assassination, he confided, and he was afraid for his life and probably would have to leave the country. Less than six months later Underhill was found shot to death in his Washington apartment. The coroner ruled it a suicide,’ the passage continued.
The Department of Justice has long maintained that Oswald, 24, acted alone when he opened fire on the presidential motorcade on November 22, 1963
Oswald fired at the then-president’s motorcade (pictured) from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository
It noted that he was on ‘intimate terms with a number of high-ranking CIA officials.
The passage was shared numerous times by conservatives on social media on Tuesday night. But others dismissed it, pointed out the magazine passage had been publicly available and discussed for decades.
Another document that made the rounds in the MAGA world Tuesday night focused on Oswald.
One line in the document stated that KGB watched Oswald closely while he was in the USSR. But files indicated that Oswald was a poor shot when he tried target filing in the USSR.’
Another detail released was a letter sent by a man named Sergyj Czornonoh in 1978 to the British Embassy.
He claimed that he was detained in London on July 18, 1963 and questioned by authorities.
Czornonoh said that he told them about Lee Harvey Oswald, saying he planned to kill the president.
He added that he warned American Vice Consul Tom Blackshear of the plans of Oswald, who tried to defect to Russia.
Oswald denied the claims, famously declaring to the police that he was ‘just a patsy,’ before he, too, was gunned down
Yet some crucial information was missing from the files, experts say.
The transcript of the first conversation between president Lyndon Johnson and CIA Director John McCone after the 1963 assassination has still not been released to the public, author James Johnston told USA Today.
He said the document could help answer questions about any possible involvement from Cuba in Kennedy’s assassination, since the president had famously tried to use the CIA to kill communist dictator Fidel Castro.
McCone has previously been accused of keeping ‘incendiary’ information from the Warren Commission that probed the assassination, as reported by Politico.
The sensitive information revolved around the existence of plots to assassinate Castro, which put the CIA ‘in cahoots with the mafia.’
Without this information, the Warren Commission – which ultimately declared that Oswald acted alone in the assassination – never looked at whether the gunman could have had accomplices in Cuba or elsewhere who wanted the president dead.
Jefferson Morley, vice president of the Mary Ferrell Foundation, a repository for files related to the assassination, also said that the documents released on Tuesday did not include two-thirds of the promised files, any of the recently discovered FBI files or 500 Internal Revenue Service records.
Still, he said in a statement on X that the release is ‘an encouraging start,’ noting that much of the ‘rampant over-classification of trivial information has been eliminated’ from the documents.
The vast majority of the National Archives’ collection of over 6 million pages of records, photographs, motion pictures, sound recordings and artifacts related to the assassination have previously been released.