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Sensitive personal information including Social Security numbers was revealed in the newly unredacted John F. Kennedy assassination documents released this week, and that is not sitting well with the people affected.
Joseph diGenova, a former campaign lawyer for President Donald Trump, was among those whose personal information was disclosed. He said he is planning to sue the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration for violating privacy laws over concerns about identity theft.
“It should not have happened,” diGenova said in a phone interview Thursday. “I think it’s the result of incompetent people doing the reviewing. I don’t believe it had anything to do with rushing the process. The people who reviewed these documents did not do their job.”
His personal information was on documents relating to his work for a U.S. Senate select committee that investigated abuses of power by government officials in the 1970s, including the surveillance of U.S. citizens.
Officials at the White House said Thursday that a plan was in place to help those whose personal information was disclosed, including credit monitoring offered by the National Archives until new Social Security numbers are issued. Officials also said they are still screening the records to identify all the Social Security numbers that were released.
“President Trump delivered on his promise of maximum transparency by fully releasing the files related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement. “At the request of the White House, the National Archives and the Social Security Administration immediately put together an action plan to proactively help individuals whose personal information was released in the files.”
The White House press office also released a statement from the National Archives.
“In an effort to maximize transparency, these records were released without redactions and some of these records contain the personal identification information of living individuals,” the statement said. “The National Archives and Records Administration and the Social Security Administration are working closely together to protect the individuals who may be affected from their information being exploited.”
The statement also said that while the National Archives will be contacting people whose personal information was disclosed, it urged those people to contact the National Archives.
Neither the White House nor the National Archives explained the decision-making process behind the public release of the personal information.
Trump ordered the release of the remaining classified files relating to the 1963 assassination shortly after being sworn into office in January. About 2,200 files consisting of over 63,000 pages were posted on the National Archive’s website on Tuesday evening. Many of those pages revealed what had previously been redacted.
The vast majority of the National Archives’ more than 6 million pages — records, photographs, motion pictures, sound recordings and artifacts related to the assassination — had previously been released.
The National Archives posted assessments of the newly released documents on its website, but noted that there wasn’t enough time as of Wednesday to review more than a small fraction of them. The documents released this week provided more details of covert, Cold War-era U.S. operations in other nations, but they didn’t initially lend credence to conspiracy theories about who killed Kennedy.
One of the newly unredacted documents, for example, discloses the Social Security numbers of more than two dozen people seeking security clearances in the 1990s to review JFK-related documents for the Assassination Records Review Board.
Gerald Posner, author of “Case Closed,” which concludes that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman, said the documents release was rushed, echoing what other researchers believe.
“I know that people will probably shake their head if they hear that — because how could they be rushing in after 62 years?” he said Thursday. “It’s a lot of documents. It’s a lot of files. The Archives in the past has provided a sort of a search guide. So if I want to find James ‘Jesus’ Angleton, for instance, I could do a search and find all the documents he’s in and then I can see what’s different from the last release. This time they didn’t have that.”
Angleton was the CIA’s counterintelligence chief from 1954 to 1974.
The National Archives began screening the documents on Wednesday to identify all the Social Security numbers in the assassination records, the White House said.
The National Archives will share those numbers with the Social Security Administration, which will identify the people who are living and issue them new numbers, according to the White House.
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 that was broadcast live on television.
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Associated Press writer John Hanna in Topeka, Kansas, contributed to this report.
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