Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
Source
Participants
Main
j
jefferson morley
20:12
Appearances
p
pedro echevarria
cspan02:44
Clips
dana bash
cnn00:06
Callers
doug in kansas
callers00:06
john in florida [2]
callers00:14
?
Voice
Speaker
Time
Text
JFK Assassination Controversies00:15:22
unidentified
On President Trump's efforts to dismantle diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, as well as the administration's scrutiny over federally funded universities, museums, and public media.
We'll also talk with Connecticut Democratic Congressman John Larson, a member of the Ways and Means Committee, about President Trump's tariff policies and the future of Social Security.
C-SPAN's Washington Journal.
Join the conversation live at 7 Eastern Thursday morning on C-SPAN, C-SPAN Now, our free mobile app, or online at C-SPAN.org.
C-SPAN, Democracy Unfiltered.
We're funded by these television companies and more, including Charter Communications.
Charter is proud to be recognized as one of the best internet providers.
And we're just getting started.
Building 100,000 miles of new infrastructure to reach those who need it most.
Charter Communications supports C-SPAN as a public service, along with these other television providers, giving you a front-row seat to democracy.
If you were watching that hearing yesterday, taking a look at the newly released documents concerning the JFK assassination, you may have noticed Jefferson Morley as part of the panel.
He is the author of the JFK Fact Substack newsletter.
I came to the JFK story actually through reporting on the CIA, not through the literature of JFK's assassination.
When I first came to Washington in the 80s, when I first appeared on C-SPAN, I was covering the civil wars in Central America, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua.
And to understand those conflicts and the U.S. role in it, you had to understand the role of the CIA, which is difficult, especially for a guy like me, a young reporter.
I didn't have sources, didn't have a security clearance, never worked at the CIA.
So I had to educate myself by just talking to a lot of people, reading a lot, reading a lot of original documentation, understanding how the CIA worked, and what was the history of the CIA in the Western Hemisphere.
That inevitably leads back to the conflict between the United States and Cuba.
And if you go into the deep history of that, that takes you into the conflicts of the early 1960s, the Bay of Pigs, Cuban Missile Crisis, and the assassination of President Kennedy.
So as I got interested in the CIA and interested in the Kennedy assassination later, that was always the lens in which I viewed it.
And so I wrote three books about the CIA, about top men in the CIA.
The first one was Our Man in Mexico, and that's the story of Winston Scott.
He was the head of the CIA station in Mexico City from 1956 to 1969.
Very powerful man in the Mexican scheme of things.
And he was there in 1963 when Lee Harvey Oswald visits the embassies.
And so Wynn Scott figures centrally in the JFK assassination story.
And so what I wanted to do in that book was rather than give my theory of the assassination, because like Jeff, who cares about your theory?
You know, nobody in the world should care about your theory.
But what Wynn Scott thought about the assassination, a CIA insider who had a front row seat and whose role in the whole thing was pretty shadowy for the next 20, 30 years.
That was an interesting story.
And then my next book was The Ghost, which was a book about James Angleton.
He too was involved in the JFK story.
He controlled the Oswald file.
Again, I was doing a biography of Angleton from his beginning of his career to the end of his career at CIA and looked at what did the Kennedy assassination look like him.
And same with my third book, Scorpions Dance.
Richard Helms and Richard Nixon was the story in that book, the director of the CIA and the president.
That was really about Watergate, but the JFK story is kind of in the background between these two Machiavellian men.
So my three books kind of give you a view of Kennedy's assassination in the eyes of the CIA.
And that's how I came to it.
That's how I came to the story.
And that's how I understand it as a national security event of deep interest to senior CIA officials.
You wrote about the recent release of information that if you look at it and search for fact patterns, you find things related to the CIA, things you've talked about.
Well, you know, it's a familiar experience for me when the government puts out tens of thousands of pages of documents and I get a call like 30 minutes later saying, Jeff, is there a smoking gun?
And I'm like, well, I'm reading my third of 2,300 documents, so I'm not quite ready to pronounce judgment.
But people want that.
They want to know what's new, what's new.
We've got to step back a little bit.
If you want to understand what's coming and what we just learned last month, which is very important, let me say that.
People who say there's nothing in these files, it's simply not true.
They don't know where to look, is what I would say to people like that.
And we can talk about some of the specific things that emerge.
But it's more important to step back and look at what have we learned in the last five years, right?
Because JFK information has been coming into the record slowly.
And so it's not just what happened last week.
It's all the accumulation of evidence over the last five or ten years.
What does that tell us?
What it tells us is the official story that one guy shot the president for no reason and another came along and shot that guy because he felt like it.
Okay?
We now know that's not what happened.
I mean, the evidence does not support that.
It doesn't support the notion that one man fired at the limousine three shots from behind.
The doctors didn't think that.
The people in the limousine didn't think that.
The police officers on the scene didn't think that.
The photographic evidence doesn't show that.
So the official story is not true.
So what did happen, that's a much more complicated thing.
And that's what I was trying to get at in the hearing is, yes, we are learning slowly more about, particularly about CIA operations around Oswald before and after the assassination.
So the story that Oswald, the man who supposedly killed the president, was a lone nut, okay, that's completely false.
Lee Harvey Oswald was very well known to a small group of operations officers at the top of the CIA a couple of weeks before Kennedy was killed.
And they knew everything about him.
And what I talked about in my testimony was in what we learned last month was we now have three senior CIA officials who have lied under oath about what they knew about the accused assassin.
And what I'm saying is, as somebody who's written a lot about the CIA, that sure looks like these guys are running an operation involving this character named Oswald, who they have been very interested in for four years.
And so before we only knew about two senior CIA officials who lied in that way.
Now we have three.
So I'm saying that's a pattern of misconduct.
That's a pattern of malfeasance.
It's not a theory.
Three officials lying under oath.
That's a serious deal in a presidential assassination.
So that's what I'm trying to get at.
Washington today, a lot of theater, a lot of politicization, people dragging Trump into it.
It's really unfortunate because this is a very serious topic.
It's not a partisan political issue.
And that's not to say that the stuff that's going on in government today isn't important.
It's very important.
But this should be insulated from that.
This is history.
I find wide agreement, wide political agreement.
The readers of my JFK facts on Substack, very diverse audience.
MAGA Red, Christian Nationalists, Libertarians, Conservatives, Leftists.
I never even, until yesterday, I never even assigned responsibility for the crime individually or institutionally.
I still don't assign responsibility institutionally.
I think what we've learned, especially with this false testimony of James Engleton, in combination with the false testimony of these other people, which has only been learned in recent years, you know, that's a pattern of misconduct.
That points to legal culpability.
When people lie that much about the same thing.
So what I'm saying is because these CIA officers knew so much about the accused assassin and failed to, let's say Oswald did it and failed to stop him, that's criminal negligence.
Or the other possibility, given all the secrecy around, is that they're running an operation involving him, in which case they're implicated in the president murder by a covert action.
So to me, was the CIA criminally negligent or were they actually complicit in JFK's murder?
That's the question that is posed by the record we have today.
But the story that one guy alone shot the president for no reason, it just, the evidence doesn't support that.
First of all, when I was a student in Philadelphia, I listened to a radio show featuring Sylvia Mager, who was one of the investigators of the JFK assassination.
She quit because she was told not to deviate from the lone assassin theory.
And so she said that's no way to do an investigation.
The other thing is the Dallas Morning News, which I have a copy of, the gun that was found in the book depository was identified by experts, by the way, as a German Mauser.
And that didn't fit the gun that Oswald had, so they changed the story to an Italian Karkenko.
Yeah, Sylvia Marr was one of the best assassination researchers, and her book is called Accessories After the Fact, was really the first book that was skeptical of the Warren Commission that I found really convincing.
A lot of the conspiracy literature I never found very convincing, but Sylvia Maher's book was very good.
So to your first point, I didn't know that she had been warned off the case, but that doesn't surprise me.
It was a kind of a radical position to take, even though her approach was very fact-based and all that.
And the story you tell about the Mauser and the Manlinkar Carcano, that's a true story.
Well, I mean, we have a homicide for which no one was ever brought to justice.
So in that sense, it's a cold case, right?
We never had a judicial verdict about Lee Harvey Oswald.
He was never convicted in a court of law.
And in fact, it's an important point to point out.
He should enjoy the presumption of innocence, right?
I mean, and he said he was innocent.
So, yes, the government has arrayed this big case at him, but the government has also lied repeatedly.
And that's what I talked about in the hearing yesterday.
I mean, if three senior CIA officials are lying about your case, doesn't that change, doesn't that call into question the judgment that has been passed on you?
I mean, I said in the hearing, let's say three police officers lie about their knowledge of a defendant in a homicide case.
Wouldn't we say that homicide, that defendant should get a new trial?
You know, isn't that government misconduct?
Doesn't that require a new trial and a presumption of innocence?
That's what I say about Oswald.
It's like there's so much government misconduct that any presumption that Oswald is guilty needs to be removed.
I saw an Englishman do a documentary where they showed a man in a manhole, which, you know, seems to be like a really spot that I would be in if I was doing the shooting and not the grafty knoll.
I mean, I think that's the question is, you know, Engleton has this big file on Oswald sitting on his desk on November 15th when the president's getting to leave.
You know, and the first line of the FBI report that he receives on November 14th says Oswald was arrested.
So they know that he's like, you know, there's something problematic about him, and they do nothing.
So was that negligence?
Were they letting Oswald go there and participate in the assassination?
Or were they manipulating him to some end?
You know, I hear the negligence argument, but when I see three senior officials lying under oath, that's not negligence.
That's not a sign of negligence.
That's a sign of something else.
That's why I lean more towards complicity and culpability.
The Washington Post had an editorial after the release, and they start off by saying none of the more than 77,000 pages released last week undermine the consensus view that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone when he assassinated Kennedy.
And some of the covert actions that were revealed were not, let's say, enlightening, talking about the work of the CIA and so forth.
You know, and then when you go look at it, do the editors of the Washington Post say three senior CIA officials lying under oath about a presidential assassin?
Are they saying that's nothing?
That's not important?
I mean, they're entitled to that judgment at the cost of their own credibility.
I mean, most people would say, that's significant.
That's a significant part of the JFK story.
They wouldn't say, that's nothing.
So, you know, what gives?
What gives?
Why pretend that you have read 77,000 pages of material when you obviously haven't, and you've made no effort to understand them?
You know, that's what we're up against, is it's not a fact-based mindset, right?
I come to this story with a fact-based mindset.
I was always very wary about pronouncing judgment on a big question.
Who's responsible for the president's death?
I reported on the story for 30 years.
I never passed judgment, individually or institutionally.
I've started changing that based on what I've seen in these records.
I can say with confidence, there's a pattern of misconduct there.
There's a pattern of malfeasance there that needs to be explained.
After the president's order came, the FBI went and searched their records and they found a bunch more JFK-related things.
And those are now, they sent those to the National Archives, and those are going to be released.
And so at JFK Facts, we've started going through those, and I'm going to tease this a little bit.
We have some new findings from the new FBI files.
We need to do some more research.
We're not like the editors of the Washington Post who can read 77,000 pages in a couple of hours and pronounce confidently on what's in the documents that they haven't read.
Unlike the editors of the Washington Post, we like to read the documents before we pass judgment on them.
So we're working on the FBI files now, and I think we have a really good, interesting story about them.
FBI and CIA operations against the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, which Lee Harvey Oswald was a member of.
At that time, CIA and FBI targeted leftists and liberal groups that opposed U.S. policy, and they targeted them for disruption and destruction.
And I think we've got a little piece of that story about what was going on when the CIA and FBI targeted the Fair Play for Cuba committee as this unknown character, Lee Harvey Oswald, was a member of that group.
He is the author of the JFK Facts Substack newsletter.
Bob, hello.
unidentified
Hello.
How much investigation have you actually done into looking into Jack Ruby's background?
There's two things I really want to talk about.
One is I've seen literature and also photographs that associate him with Prescott Bush and Richard Nixon as an investigator for the House Un-American Activities Committee back in 1948.
In fact, I'm not aware of any evidence to that effect, but okay.
unidentified
I'll send some of that to you.
But another thing that has to do with motive is a speech that Kennedy made about a month before the assassination.
Almost a month before the assassination.
He made a speech at, I'm trying to remember the name of it, but it was a center that was dedicated to in Pennsylvania that was dedicating itself to creating a lot of private land out west.
We've looked at, JFK researchers have looked at film footage of all the trips that President Kennedy took in the fall of 1963 before he went to Dallas.
He went to about, had about 10 trips around the country.
The security on every one of those trips was much tighter than it was in Dallas, much tighter.
So that story that you're true, that somehow security was standing down.
I mean, we can tell from the film footage of the motorcades that the security procedures in effect were definitely minimal in Dallas compared to all the other places Kennedy went that year.
And, you know, in terms of like CIA, FBI, military involvement, I say, you know, since the official story is not true, you know, that one guy killed the president for no reason, you know, what is more likely explanation?
The more likely explanation is what Jackie and Robert Kennedy came to believe, that President Kennedy was killed by enemies in his own government.
And that could encompass CIA or, you know, military intelligence.
Good morning, Mr. Morley and Padre and the C-SPAN station.
I'm so grateful that you guys are putting this on this morning.
Most importantly, grateful to Mr. Trump for having the initiative to get these crowds out in the open to tell the truth.
Now, what I found out during the meeting was there were three attempts on our president, one in Chicago, one in Tampa, and he finally got killed in Texas, okay?
And I say with all my heart and soul not to be a smart Alex, the mob did kill Kennedy.
That's all I'm going to say.
Educational Hearings Instead?00:02:40
unidentified
I'm not going to go into specifics.
When we finally find out that that happened, it'll be the time when nobody could care less about this situation.
I mean, what we saw in the hearing yesterday, the divisive, the polarization, the inability to kind of reach a join a common conversation, that's going to make reopening the investigation very difficult.
And I think a better approach is to really complete what Trump called for and what the law calls for.
You know, Congress passed a law in 92, 1992, calling for full disclosure of all JFK records in 25 years.
Okay, now we're 33 years later, and we still don't have all the records.
So what we need to do is get all the records.
And people say, oh, well, we have them all.
There's nothing there.
No, the people are paying attention.
We know what the CIA is still withholding.
And there's a lot of evidence out there.
And there's a lot of people who know what's, you know, who have relevant information.
I think it would be better to have educational hearings rather than an open investigation.
And, you know, let people decide for themselves.
You know, nobody's going to be lectured to on the Kennedy assassination.
C-SPAN's Washington Journal, our live forum, inviting you to discuss the latest issues in government, politics, and public policy from Washington, D.C. to across the country.
Coming up Thursday morning, we'll talk about President Trump's tariffs and how it could impact consumers with Axio senior economics reporter Courtney Brown and then Heritage Foundation senior fellow Mike Gonzalez on President Trump's efforts to dismantle diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, as well as the administration's scrutiny over federally funded universities, museums, and public media.
We'll also talk with Connecticut Democratic Congressman John Larson, a member of the Ways and Means Committee, about President Trump's tariff policies and the future of Social Security.