CRUMPTON: Trump Should Follow Through And Form An Assassinations Commission

Now that Donald Trump has been re-elected, he should use the power of the presidency to follow through on what he said he would do: form a commission on assassinations. The commission should investigate the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and the attempt on Trump himself in Butler, Pennsylvania.

Each of these historical events have unanswered questions that could be resolved once and for all with an independent investigative commission. For the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers, the American people have waited far too long for resolution of the conflicting evidence. For the Trump attempt, the question of whether Thomas Crooks had any assistance must be definitively established.

This commission should be empowered to issue subpoenas for documents and depositions. It should bring in experts on both sides of any competing issue. In the end, the commission should provide a written report on all three assassination attempts, similar to the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978 – which, incidentally, found that President Kennedy was “probably assassinated as the result of a conspiracy.”

When it comes to President Kennedy, the commission should be empowered to follow through on the work of the Assassination Records Review Board and force the government agencies still holding these files to either declassify, or to provide a legal basis for why the document should be classified and a date for revisiting its status.

While President Trump and President Biden both released thousands of documents during their administrations, neither of them followed through on the JFK Records Act. The Act, passed in 1992 in the wake of Oliver Stone’s film about the assassination, mandates specific rules and timelines for releasing the still classified documents from JFK’s murder over 60 years ago.

In October of 2017, instead of releasing the documents in compliance with the Act, President Trump punted the document releases into the future past their due date, relying on legally questionable memoranda written by the Justice Department. Later, President Biden took the DOJ’s delaying and noncompliance tactics a step further, and essentially deferred the decision of whether to release documents to the agencies that hold them – including the Central Intelligence Agency. In other words, the JFK Records Act has been ignored by the executive branch and made impotent. The creation of a new commission could reverse that trend.

It’s no wonder that “conspiracy theories” have developed when there is evidence to support such theories, and the evidence does not receive a hearing. For the American people to have faith in their institutions, especially intelligence agencies, these matters need to be definitively resolved.

After all, the government’s position on the JFK Assassination is that Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone nut. If that is true, then there should be no reason to withhold any government documents related to President Kennedy’s death, especially 61 years later. To reasonable observers in the United States and abroad, the continued classification of these documents so many years after the fact implies that the intelligence agencies have something to hide.

Similarly, we are told that the RFK assassination and the Butler attempt on Trump were by lone gunmen, without the assistance of others. Thus, any information that any government agencies have related to those attempts should also be brought to light by this commission.

President Trump must make it a priority to create this new commission during the first year of his administration. The end result could be that some conspiracy theories are proven to be false and we restore faith in government. Or, it could be that government or other third party wrongdoing is uncovered, leading to the offending entities receiving the appropriate punishment. We will never know until we review all of the now-available facts (and obtain the rest of the classified records that have not been destroyed).

Given how much evidence there is that the official story is wrong in all of these cases, but especially the JFK assassination, forming a commission is worth the time and effort to find out what really happened in Dealey Plaza, at the Ambassador Hotel and in Butler, Pennsylvania.

Matt Crumpton is the host of Solving JFK, podcast that compares arguments about the JFK Assassination. He appears in JFK: What the Doctors Saw on Paramount Plus. Matt is a co-author of The JFK Assassination Chokeholds, along with James DiEugenio, Paul Bleau, Andrew Iler, and Mark Adamczyk. 

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller.