Americans begin to comb through unredacted JFK assassination documents, and the legal drama over deportation flights continues.
Previous Episodes
- Florida lawmakers look to ban weather modification, and Trump targets judge who blocked deportations
- Hundreds deported under Alien Enemies Act despite judge's order, and Tallahassee talks term limits
- Lawmakers prepare to vote on a bill to avoid a shutdown, and a local group fights to keep funding for the arts
Court battles heat up over judge's block of deportation flights
The Trump administration said on Wednesday it will continue its deportation campaign — but has no plans for additional flights.
On Saturday, the Department of Homeland Security deported a group of migrants to El Salvador under President Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 and that country’s agreement to detain deportees for the U.S. The administration labeled them members of Tren de Aragua, but some family members claim they have no connection to the Venezuelan gang.
They help protests demanding the migrants be returned to Venezuela.
U.S. District Judge James Boasberg temporarily blocked the flights, but White House says the planes took off before the judge's order came down. Now, Boasberg is demanding more information about those flights.
A deadline for those details was extended to Thursday.
In the meantime, Attorney General Pam Bondi and other top Justice Department officials issued an emergency filing, asserting that the release of further information on those flights would pose a national security risk.
All of this is fueling a larger conversation about the relationship between the Judiciary and Executive branches of government.
President Trump has repeatedly called on Truth Social for the impeachment of Judge Boasberg.
"If a president doesn’t have the right to throw murderers, and other criminals, out of our country because a radical left lunatic judge wants to assume the role of president, then our country is in very big trouble, and destined to fail!," he wrote.
In response, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts defended the judicial branch's position in the federal government, saying that "impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision."
Roberts wasn't the only one.
Retired Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer told CNN he supports Roberts’ rebuke of Trump, emphasizing the importance of making sure court rulings are protected.
“He’s trying to explain to the people of this country how the legal system works and how it doesn’t work. It doesn’t work by impeaching a judge because you don’t like his decision,” Breyer said.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt defending the president Wednesday from the podium.
“The president has made it clear that he believes this judge in this case should be impeached, and he has also made it clear that he has great respect for the Chief Justice John Roberts. And it's incumbent upon the Supreme Court to rein in these activist judges. These partisan activists are undermining the Judicial branch by doing so,” she said. “We have coequal branches of government for a reason, and the president feels very strongly about that.”
Governor Ron DeSantis weighed in on Wednesday.
“Congress has the authority to strip jurisdiction of the federal courts to decide these cases in the first place,” he wrote on X. “The sabotaging of President Trump’s agenda by “resistance” judges was predictable — why no jurisdiction-stripping bills tee’d up at the onset of this Congress?”
DeSantis served in the U.S. House from 2013-2018.
A Republican lawmaker has filed a bill in the House to impeach Judge Boasberg for “high crimes and misdemeanors.”
JFK assassination docs reveal more about CIA but don’t yet point to conspiracies
Newly released documents related to President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 gave curious readers more details Wednesday into Cold War-era covert U.S. operations in other nations but didn’t initially lend credence to long-circulating conspiracy theories about who killed JFK.
Assessments of the roughly 2,200 files posted by the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration on its website came with a huge caveat: No one had enough time as of Wednesday to review more than a small fraction of them. The vast majority of the National Archives’ more than 6 million pages of records, photographs, motion pictures, sound recordings and artifacts related to the assassination have previously been released.
An initial Associated Press review of more than 63,000 pages of records released this week shows that some were not directly related to the assassination but rather dealt with covert CIA operations, particularly in Cuba. And nothing in the first documents examined undercut the conclusion that Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.
“Nothing points to a second gunman,” said Philip Shenon, who wrote a 2013 book about the assassination. “I haven’t seen any big blockbusters that rewrite the essential history of the assassination, but it is very early.”
Kennedy was killed on a visit to Dallas, when his motorcade was finishing its parade route downtown and shots rang out from the Texas School Book Depository building. Police arrested the 24-year-old Oswald, a former Marine who had positioned himself from a sniper’s perch on the sixth floor. Two days later Jack Ruby, a nightclub owner, fatally shot Oswald during a jail transfer broadcast live on television.
A year after the assassination, the Warren Commission, established by Johnson to investigate, concluded that Oswald acted alone and there was no evidence of a conspiracy. But critics of the commission still spun a web of alternative theories.
Historians are hoping for details fleshing out Oswald’s activities before the assassination and what the CIA and FBI knew about him beforehand.
Shenon pointed Wednesday to previously released documents about a trip Oswald made to Mexico City at the end of September 1963. Records show Oswald intended to contact the Soviet Union’s embassy there after living as a U.S. defector in the U.S.S.R. from October 1959 until June 1962.
Shenon said the U.S. government may have kept information about what it knew about Oswald before the assassination secret to hide what he described as officials’ possible “incompetence and laziness.”
“The CIA had Oswald under pretty aggressive surveillance while he was there and this was just several weeks before the assassination,” Shenon said. “There’s reason to believe he talked openly about killing Kennedy in Mexico City and that people overheard him say that.”
Speculation about such details surrounding Kennedy’s assassination has been intense over the decades, generating countless conspiracy theories about multiple shooters and involvement by the Soviet Union, the mafia and the CIA. The new release fueled rampant online speculation and sent people scurrying to read the documents and share online what they might mean.
The latest release of documents followed an order by President Donald Trump, though most of the records were made public previously with redactions. Before Tuesday, researchers had estimated that 3,000 to 3,500 files were still unreleased, either wholly or partially. Last month, the FBI said it had discovered about 2,400 new records related to the assassination.
Jefferson Morley, vice president of the Mary Ferrell Foundation, a repository for files related to the assassination, said in a statement posted on the social platform X that much of the “rampant overclassification of trivial information has been eliminated” from the documents.