Politics: Trump hopes to get ‘just about everything’ on JFK to the public after backtracking on a full release

Donald Trump's idea that 50-year-old JFK files could imperil current national security "doesn't pass the test of common sense," according to a historian.

"JFK Files are being carefully released. In the end there will be great transparency. It is my hope to get just about everything to public!" Trump tweeted on Friday morning.

On Thursday, Trump declined to release the full trove of documents that a law passed 25 years ago dictated must be made public, citing "potentially irreversible harm" to national security if he had released all the records now.

The decision to limit the release of documents apparently came down to a last-minute decision with intelligence agencies scrambling to postpone the release that Trump had promised earlier on Twitter.

Jefferson Morley, a CIA historian and the editor of JFKFacts.org, told BBC News that the delay of the JFK files show that it's a "very live and sensitive issue."

But according to Morley, the idea that 50-year-old documents could imperil current national security "doesn't pass the test of common sense."

Morley suggested that the agencies may be trying to avoid something "embarrassing," like potential incompetence in preventing or investigating Lee Harvey Oswald's assassination of Kennedy.

While few expect any of the myriad conspiracy theories about Kennedy's death to be investigated, Morely said the new trove of documents could lead to a "significant new understanding of what caused the death of John F. Kennedy."

Donald Trump's idea that 50-year-old JFK files could imperil current national security "doesn't pass the test of common sense," according to a historian. Read Full Story