President Trump has announced his intention to approve the release of a cache of JFK assassination files expected to be made public next week.
The 3,100 heretofore-unseen documents as well as the non-redacted versions of over 30,000 files that had previously only been partially declassified were due to be released this coming Thursday, October 26th.
Whether or not the document dump would even occur has been the subject of considerable speculation for months, as the regulations governing the file release specifically stated that only the president could stop it from happening.
Seemingly putting an end to that mystery, Trump declared in a Tweet on Saturday morning, "subject to the receipt of further information, I will be allowing, as President, the long blocked and classified JFK FILES to be opened."
The news will no doubt be cheered by historians and conspiracy theorists who have sought to study these documents for decades and now anxiously await their chance to do so in the very near future.
However, as is often the case with the infamous assassination, it would be wise to temper expectations until the story fully unfolds and more information becomes available.
That is because reports surfaced on Friday, prior to Trump's weekend tweet, that the CIA and other agencies were pressuring the president to block the full release of the files due to concerns about documents from the 1990's that are contained in the cache.
As such, it's entirely possible that those specific files, relatively scant though they may be, will not be a part of the document dump, fueling further suspicions that the intelligence agency has something to hide about the assassination.
Additionally, the caveat "subject to the receipt of further information," allows Trump to change his decision sometime before the October 26th deadline, giving the intelligence agencies in question one last chance to persuade the president to stop the release.
Provided that things continue on the course that they seem to be headed now, concerns regarding the logistical nightmare which could erupt when the National Archives makes the entire library of documents available at once remain quite valid.
Be that as it may, students of the assassination are likely to be thrilled just to get the chance to access the documents, although they can also be forgiven for holding their proverbial breath for the next few days while they wait to see if, after all these years, the files will finally see the light of day.
