DALLAS – The National Archives released a trove of records from the Kennedy assassination files on a Friday afternoon. It was another strange stream of loose strings, dead ends and tangents with little apparent connection to the assassination of the nation's 35th president.
Here and there, the odd curiosity did appear, offering insight into the effort to understand the circumstances of Kennedy's murder but providing nothing to cast the official conclusions into doubt.
The National Archives placed 10,744 records online Friday — documents kept under seal for decades and due for release three weeks ago.
All of the documents come from the FBI's files. The batch includes 144 that had never been released, and 2,408 that remain partly classified, with much of the material blacked out 54 years after President John Kennedy's murder in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.
To the layman, these large document dumps — thousands of pages at a time — may appear to be impressive feats of government transparency. However, many of the documents are copies, or copies of copies, or previously redacted versions of copies. There are no Kennedy assassination bombshells to speak of.
Look at a series of documents in the latest batch:
One file in the National Archives spreadsheet, which organizes the PDF documents, is a translation of a 1972 police report about an American who allegedly tried to pay for a Swiss hotel room with a fraudulent check.
The next document is a memo from the Swiss Central Police to an American attache, saying they were sending this police report to the U.S. Embassy. The third document, in German, is the original police report from Bern.
