December6 Press Conference at National Press Club DC

National Press Club Event

MEDIA ADVISORY
Press Conference,
National Press Club, Washington DC
Tuesday, December 6 at 9:30 am EST

SMOKING GUN IN THE JFK FILES?

Featured NationalPressClubEvent

https://youtu.be/To5UEvb5jQU

What Has the Government Been Hiding for Nearly 60 Years?

With President Biden’s December 15 deadline for full JFK disclosure approaching, the non-profit Mary Ferrell Foundation (MFF), sponsor of the internet’s largest collection of searchable JFK documents, will present evidence of a potential major break in the JFK assassination story.

Biden set next week’s deadline in an October 2021 memo calling on all federal agencies to release their remaining documents related to the November 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, which will be made public by the National Archives in College Park, Maryland.

"We have been peeling layers off the onion that is the murder of a U.S. president at the height of the Cold War, year by year," says MFF president Rex Bradford. "Our work remains unfinished." In October 2022, the MFF sued President Biden and the National Archives for failure to implement the JFK Records Act of 1992.

"Astonishingly, the CIA continues to conceal its 'sources and methods' around the alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald," says MFF vice president Jefferson Morley. "But we now know where the rest of the Oswald story is hidden: in JFK files the CIA has redacted or denied in full."

"These records relate to a still-classified covert operation, approved by senior Agency officials in June 1963, that used Oswald for intelligence purposes," Morley went on. "Is the undisclosed operational interest in the accused assassin evidence of CIA incompetence? Or CIA complicity? We can’t be sure. Only full disclosure on December 15th will resolve the issue."

Former CIA officer Rolf Mowatt-Larssen will comment on the new and hidden evidence in JFK’s assassination.

Lawrence Schnapf will discuss recent outreach to the president and Congress to release the remaining redacted records in the JFK Collection, tell what has been learned about the Trump postponements, and review the basis for the MFF lawsuit.

Hon. Judge John Tunheim, former chair of the Assassination Records Review Board, will talk about the review board’s work and the status of the JFK Records Act.

Fernand Amandi, pollster, will present the results of a nationwide poll, detailing what the American public thinks about the causes of JFK's assassination and what President Biden should do about the remaining secret JFK files.

CONTACT

LIVESTREAM ON YOUTUBE: DEC. 6, 2022, 9:30 am-11:00am ET
Please sign on 15 minutes early.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=To5UEvb5jQU

For interviews about the new JFK disclosures, call Jefferson Morley, vice president Mary Ferrell Foundation: 202 413 7841 or DM @jeffersonmorley.

For interviews about Mary Ferrell Foundation’s lawsuit seeking JFK files, call attorney Larry Schnapf 212-876-3189 or email Larry@Schnapflaw.com

Click for more information on the JFK records lawsuit.

SPEAKERS

Rex Bradford is president of the non-profit Mary Ferrell Foundation and creator of the foundation's web site ( maryferrell.org), which hosts the internet’s largest collection of searchable JFK assassination records, along with documents collections about the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King.

Lawrence P. Schnapf is a New York City lawyer and an adjunct professor at New York Law School. Schnapf is co-counsel with Bill Simpich in the lawsuit Mary Ferrell Foundation filed to enforce the JFK Records Act.

Hon. John R. Tunheim serves as a federal judge in the United States District Court for the District of Minnesota. From 1994 to 1998, Tunheim served as chair of the Assassination Records Review Board. He and four fellow board members presided over the review and release of four million pages of JFK assassination records, most of which had never been made public before.

Fernand Amandi is president and CEO of Bendixen-Amandi International, a Miami based communications firm. He manages corporate operations, including multicultural public opinion polls, focus groups, media production and strategic communications and research management. He is a guest lecturer in political science at the University of Miami and political analyst for MSNBC.

Jefferson Morley is vice president of the Mary Ferrell Foundation and the editor of the JFK Facts blog (jfkfacts.substack.com). A former editor and reporter at the Washington Post, he is the author of three books on the CIA in the 1960s, Our Man in Mexico, The Ghost, and Scorpions' Dance.

(Remote) Rolf Mowatt-Larssen is the William J. Perry Distinguished Fellow at Nuclear Threat Initiative, supporting NTI's work on global threat reduction. Previously, he spent 23 years as a CIA operations officer in various domestic and international posts, including Chief of the Europe Division in the Directorate of Operations, Chief of the Weapons of Mass Destruction Department, Counterterrorist Center, and Deputy Associate Director of Central Intelligence for Military Support. He has also lectured on the causes of JFK's assassination.

Moderator: Lawrence Schnapf is an Adjunct Professor of Law at New York Law school.

   Some background material

 https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/11/22/jfk-what-the-cia-hides/  {Morley)

  The assumption of Justice Breyer and many others is that any and all unseen CIA material must exonerate the agency. It’s an odd conclusion. If the CIA has nothing to hide, why is it hiding so much? While 95 percent of the still-secret files probably are trivial, the remaining 5 percent—thousands of pages of material–are historically pregnant.  If made public, they could clarify key questions in the long-running controversy about JFK’s death.

  These questions have been raised most concisely by Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, a career CIA officer who served in senior positions. Now a senior fellow at Harvard’s Belfer Center, Mowatt-Larssen has implicated his former employer in the Dallas ambush. In a presentation at Harvard last December, Mowatt-Larssen hypothesized that a plot to kill JFK emanated from the CIA’s station in Miami where disgruntled Cuban exiles and undercover officers loathed JFK for his failure to overthrow Castro’s government in Cuba.

  Mowatt-Larssen has yet to publish his presentation and documentation, so I can’t say if he’s right or wrong. But he asks the right question: “How can intelligence operational and analytical modus operandi help unlock a conspiracy that has remained unsolved for 55 years?” And he focuses on the right place to dig deeper: the CIA’s Miami office, known as WAVE station.

  Yet legitimate questions persist: Did a plot to kill JFK originate in the agency’s Miami station as Mowatt-Larssen suggests? The fact that the CIA won’t share the evidence that could answer the CIA man’s question is telling.

  So these days, when people ask me who killed JFK, I say the Kennedy was probably victimized by enemies in his own government, possibly including CIA officers involved in anti-Castro and counterintelligence operations. I have no smoking gun, no theory. Just look at the suspicious fact pattern, still shrouded in official secrecy, and it’s easy to believe that JFK was, as Mowatt-Larssen puts it, “marked for assassination.”

     https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/12/31/jfk-revisited-oliver-stone-and-the-new-jfk-fact-pattern/  (Morley)

  After 30 years of reporting on the CIA’s role in the JFK story, I am not persuaded by the Agency’s O.J. Simpson defense. I see no proof beyond a reasonable doubt that any one CIA employee was guilty of plotting to kill Kennedy. But that does not mean CIA officers were innocent of malfeasance in the wrongful death of the president. To the contrary, I think, like LBJ and Castro, that the preponderance of evidence shows Kennedy was killed by enemies in his own government. These enemies cannot yet be identified because of the bizarre and suspicious secrecy that still surrounds the JFK files 58 years after the fact.

  The State of the Case

  Rest assured, I didn’t come by my views via the KGB or QAnon or even Oliver Stone. My thinking has been most influenced recently by Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, a retired CIA officer who teaches, ironically enough, at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. His espionage credentials are impressive. He playing a leading role in the counterintelligence investigation that snared Soviet spy Aldrich Ames. He ran operations deep in the sphere of Russian influence. As his memoir, State of Mind: Faith and CIA demonstrates, he is a creative thinker with a penetrating mind.

  In a compelling presentation to JFK researchers in Dallas in November 2019, Mowatt-Larssen made a cogent case that the gunfire in Dealey Plaza was the product of a tightly compartmentalized operation, mounted by Kennedy’s enemies in the ranks of the CIA that was probably known to only four or five people. Mowatt-Larssen’ interpretation strikes me as more convincing than the large conspiracy that Stone evokes in JFK the movie and implies in JFK Revisited.

While I cannot identify the leaders in such a conspiracy, if there was one, I can identify one participant, the late George Joannides. He was the Miami-based undercover officer whose agents generated propaganda about Oswald and Castro before and after JFK was killed. Fifteen years later, he was called out of retirement to stonewall the House Select Committee on Assassination, a performance that won him a CIA medal.

  His story was partially uncovered by my 16 year-long Freedom of Information lawsuit for Joannides’s files, as covered by the Associated Press and USA Today. But key documents remain out of public view, thanks to a split appellate court decision by Judge Brett Kavanaugh. In his last ruling before ascending to the Supreme Court in July 2018, Kavanaugh ruled that the CIA deserved “deference upon deference” when it came to JFK records. In their refusal to confront the new historical record of Kennedy’s assassination, our newspapers of records and Stone’s critics, display a Kavanaughian deference at the expense of their own credibility.

  To be sure, there is no evidence that Joannides (who died in 1991) was witting to a plot to kill Kennedy. There is abundant evidence that he was an accessory after the fact. Joannides did not conspire to kill the president. He blocked the investigation of those who probably did.

  I say “probably” because we don’t have all the evidence. The CIA continues to withhold 44 documents about Joannides’s secret operations, including an unexplained high-level security clearance in the summer of 1963 and a missing performance evaluation from September 1978 when he was stonewalling congressional investigators.

  The withholding of these ancient documents is not smoking gun proof of conspiracy but it is solid evidence that the CIA still has something significant to hide about JFK’s assassination. If and when Joannides’s personnel file and thousands of other still-secret CIA records become public, the question of a large vs small conspiracy–or no conspiracy at all–will be clarified. We won’t see those files until December 15, 2022 at the earliest.

  Until then, I can say Oliver Stone represented my views fairly and accurately, and none of his critics have disputed the analysis I shared with him and his audience. So, while there is much to be learned about the role of certain senior CIA officers in monitoring and manipulating Lee Harvey Oswald in 1963, JFK Revisited stands out as a journalistic service that the Washington Post and the New York Times have so far shirked.

     More:

     https://jfkfacts.org/cia-tradecraft-jfks-assassination-a-veteran-officer-analyzes-the-death-of-of-a-president/

     https://jfkfacts.org/cia-tradecraft-jfks-assassination-the-very-top-people/

     https://jfkfacts.org/cia-tradecraft-jfks-assassination-the-making-of-a-patsy/

     https://jfkfacts.org/cia-tradecraft-jfks-assassination-im-not-privy-to-who-struck-john/

     Jeff Meek on Mowatt-Larssen at CAPA, and more:

     https://www.swtimes.com/story/news/crime/2020/05/25/are-there-cia-connections-to-lee-oswald-part-1/113744782/

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