What Sleuths Are Seeking in Newly Released JFK Files

The government released a new trove of documents related to the assassination of John F. Kennedy on Tuesday night. The gist of coverage Wednesday morning: It's going to take a while to get through them, and bombshells are unlikely.

• Unlikely: Major revelations changing the official narrative that Lee Harvey Oswald killed JFK while acting alone are not believed to be lurking in the files, though it's "not impossible," Harvard professor and JFK biographer Fredrik Logevall tells the Washington Post.
• Oswald's whereabouts: Both the Post and the New York Times say the files may, however, fill in some blanks on Oswald's movements in the months ahead of the assassination, particularly in regard to his visits to the Soviet and Cuban embassies in Mexico City. They may also reveal what US agencies knew and shared about those visits at the time.

• The files: You can read the new files for yourself at the National Archives website here. The AP counts 2,200 newly released files with more than 63,000 pages. The government already had released more than 6 million pages of its JFK records, and President Trump ordered this latest dump of unredacted files.
• Bad shot: Coverage in USA Today takes note of an assessment of Oswald by a KGB agent when Oswald was in the USSR. The agent found that Oswald was likely not under the sway of the KGB, that he had "a stormy relationship with his Soviet wife, who rode him incessantly," and that he "was a poor shot when he tried target firing in the USSR."
• Futile? So are all the government files out now? Maybe not. And even if they are, Larry J. Sabato of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics offers this pessimistic nugget to the Post: "We'll never see many of the best documents." he says. "You can be sure they were destroyed long before they were required to be turned over."

(More JFK assassination stories.)