The officials arrived at the CIA’s secret archive facility in the Washington area one morning in early April. Their mission: to obtain previously classified CIA files on the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy, John F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr.
The team pulled up unannounced in their vehicles and kept the spy agency on alert, three people familiar with the matter told Reuters. They were acting on behalf of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who wanted to take the documents out of the hands of the Central Intelligence Agency and begin the process of declassifying them at the National Archives, the people said.
One of the people familiar with the matter said the CIA was unaware that it was about to receive instructions that day “from a senior government agency.” The person also described the moment as possibly the most confrontational point in the still-young relationship between Gabbard’s office and the CIA.
The official leading the search, a Defense Agency official named Paul Allen McDonald II who was temporarily assigned to Gabbard’s office, said they were “on a mission” from Gabbard, two of the people said.
A Trump administration official who made a brief appearance that day after arriving in her minivan, Amaryllis Fox Kennedy, was herself a CIA veteran and the daughter-in-law of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. She did not have the necessary badge to enter the warehouse, but was waved at, the two people said.
One said Fox Kennedy spent about an hour there focusing on efforts to digitize a huge archive of documents.
The initial episode in April, which was not previously reported, lasted until 2 a.m. the next morning, when the huge trove of documents was finally transferred to the National Archives, according to two of the people.
The case sheds new light on the tension between the two forces in Washington, the CIA and Gabbard’s ODNI, as Trump appointees sought to act on the president’s orders to quickly release full information about the 1963 Kennedy assassination, as well as the 1968 assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Martin.
White House spokesman Steven Cheung said Trump has full confidence in both Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe. “The legacy media’s efforts to sow internal division are a distraction that will not work,” Cheung said.
A spokesman for the Director of National Intelligence said ODNI had “worked closely with the CIA since the beginning of the administration to carry out this historic file release”.
Trump issued an executive order in January ordering Gabbard and other intelligence agencies to declassify records related to the assassinations of JFK, RFK and Martin Luther King Jr.
Reuters could not independently determine whether Gabbard directed this particular mission in the archives, or to what extent Trump may have been informed in advance of individual missions related to the declassification effort.
The Director of National Intelligence serves as the President’s chief intelligence advisor and has oversight of 17 other agencies, including the CIA. The work usually involves managing interdepartmental tensions.
Gabbard’s ODNI and the CIA said in a joint statement that the two agencies “have and will continue to work hand-in-hand to release and declassify documents of public interest and to fulfill President Trump’s mission to restore confidence in the intelligence community.”
“THE PRINCIPAL IS SOMEHOW DONE.
45-day deadline in Trump’s executive order to review documents and submit plan to declassify files related to Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. ended in March, and Gabbard’s team was growing frustrated with the slow pace of progress, one of the individuals said.
After arriving at the CIA archive warehouse, officials produced a document that argued Gabbard’s office had the legal authority to take the documents even without CIA approval and warned that anyone obstructing the process could be prosecuted, according to one of the people familiar with the matter.
The person said ODNI made the move “because they (CIA officials) had been uncooperative up to that point. So the director kind of put her foot down.”
Another person described the CIA as highly cooperative and said Director Ratcliffe briefed Robert F. Kennedy Jr. about what the agency planned to release about his father’s killing. Reuters was unable to ascertain the exact name or location of the CIA archives.
Two of the people familiar with the events described the tension at the entrance to the archive, including shouting. However, Gabbard’s office and two other people Reuters spoke to said the interaction between Gabbard’s team and the CIA was professional.
One of those who described the exchange of information as professional said there appeared to be a “shared recognition that although the timeline was short, it was also 60 years since the Kennedy assassinations” and that it was time to complete the declassification.
Gabbard broadly described the effort to declassify the files during a cabinet meeting on April 10, telling Trump she had sent “hunters” to search CIA and FBI archives for the materials. “We’re actively going out and trying to find out the truth,” Gabbard said at the meeting as reporters watched.
At that meeting, Trump praised the effort to find the documents, as did Kennedy Jr., who has long expressed suspicions that the CIA was involved in the murders of his father and uncle. The CIA denied such allegations.
CONSPIRACY THEORIES HAVE A LONG ANIMATED MAGA BASE
For more than 60 years, the US Department of Justice and other federal authorities have maintained that the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy was the work of a single shooter, Lee Harvey Oswald.
But polls show many Americans remain unconvinced, and conspiracy theories — from the Epstein files and QAnon to the decades-old questions about the JFK assassination — have long been a focus of key parts of Trump’s MAGA base.
Former senator and then-presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated five years after his brother JFK. Sirhan Sirhan confessed and was convicted of his killing at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Faced with demands from Gabbard’s team at the archive site in April, security officials called in CIA officials already involved in declassifying agency files, according to one person familiar with the incident. The individual added that the CIA was not opposed to releasing the files following proper procedures.
The agency agreed to hand over the files to the National Archives, which was in charge of digitizing and making the materials available to the public, in a manner consistent with government regulations. This meant maintaining a “chain of custody”, ensuring proper security and using government vehicles to transport documents.
It took until 2 a.m. the next day to make those arrangements, determine which files Gabbard’s delegation wanted and then transport them to the National Archives facility in College Park, Md., the source said.
“It all had to be coordinated,” the source said.
ODNI did not make Allen McDonald or Fox Kennedy available for an interview. In March, the National Archives began releasing about 80,000 files on the Kennedy assassination, including CIA materials, on Trump’s orders. The declassified files provided more details about the CIA’s knowledge of Oswald than it had previously admitted publicly, experts say. There is no new information to challenge the official conclusion that Oswald was the lone gunman on November 22, 1963. So far the same has been true for the 70,000 RFK files released in April and May. (Reporting by Phil Stewart and Jonathan Landay. Additional reporting by Erin Banco. Editing by Don Durfee and Claudia Parsons)
