The 2025 JFK Files Release: 2,709 Records Posted by the National Archives

OFFICIAL FILES · Released 18 March 2025. The records concern the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy.

The National Archives’ JFK page says President Trump stated on 23 January 2025 that “it is in the national interest to finally release all records related to these assassinations without delay.” NARA’s 2025 release page lists 2,709 record PDFs, all with a NARA release date of 03/18/2025.

NARA warns that some records “were released without redactions and some of these records contain the personal identification information of living individuals.” For that reason we inventoried the records but did not mass-download or republish them. Link to NARA’s copies instead, and do not reproduce personal details.

CASE FILE · JFK-2025
Publisher: U.S. National Archives (NARA)
Records: 2,709 (PDF)
Release date: 18 Mar 2025

Why there were still secret files in 2025

The 2025 release is the latest step in a process that began more than 30 years earlier. In 1992 Congress passed the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act, partly in response to public anger stirred up by the Oliver Stone film JFK (1991). The law required every assassination record to be disclosed in full by 26 October 2017, 25 years after it was enacted, unless the President certified that continued postponement was needed to prevent an identifiable harm to defense, intelligence, law enforcement or foreign relations, and that the harm outweighed the public interest.

The Act also created an independent agency, the Assassination Records Review Board, which ruled on agencies’ requests to keep material back. It worked from 1 October 1994 to 30 September 1998. According to its former chairman, it declassified around 5 million documents before it closed.

NARA describes the full collection as more than six million pages of records, photographs, motion pictures, sound recordings and artifacts. It says “the vast majority” was already declassified and open to the public before 2025, either in person at College Park, Maryland, or online.

The releases before 2025

The final stretch came in stages:

• 24 July 2017: NARA began releasing the remaining withheld records. The first batch included 441 records never before seen, plus 3,369 previously released in part.
• 26 October 2017: President Trump ordered release of the remaining records but gave agencies until 26 April 2018 to appeal.
• 26 April 2018: another 19,045 documents were released, some still with redactions.
• 2021: President Biden postponed further releases, citing the COVID-19 pandemic.
• 15 December 2022: NARA released 13,173 more documents.
• June 2023: NARA finished its review. Press reports put the number of documents still fully or partly withheld at about 4,684.

What happened in March 2025

On 23 January 2025, President Trump signed Executive Order 14176, covering records on the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Senator Robert F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. NARA points out that it “does not have authority to declassify records”. It posts records once the President or the agencies decide to release them.

The first batch went online on the evening of 18 March 2025 and further files followed over the next two days. Wikipedia’s tally, based on NARA’s postings, is about 77,100 pages in 2,343 PDFs across 18 to 20 March. NARA’s release table, which we parsed on 4 Nov 2026, now lists 2,709 PDFs, all dated 03/18/2025. The likeliest reason for the gap is that NARA groups all the March postings under one release date. We report both figures and haven’t tried to reconcile them file by file.

What the files show, and what they don’t

Coverage of the 2025 files focused on how closely the CIA watched Lee Harvey Oswald before the shooting, and on the scale of the agency’s presence in U.S. embassies. One example is a memo by White House aide Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. Records released in July 2025 added detail about George Joannides, a Miami-based CIA officer connected to an anti-Castro student group that Oswald had a public confrontation with in 1963. The CIA had not told the Warren Commission about that role. It also didn’t tell the House Select Committee on Assassinations, even though Joannides was the agency’s liaison to that committee. The Review Board’s former chairman called it “an example of treachery”.

That’s a real and documented story about concealment. It’s not proof of a second gunman or of a plot. No official body has changed its finding because of the 2025 releases, and researchers such as former Washington Post reporter Jefferson Morley say some records still have not been accounted for.

Handling note

NARA warns that some 2025 records contain personal information about living people. Our archive links to NARA’s copies and does not republish names, Social Security numbers or addresses from the files.

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