When Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. dropped out of the US presidential race and endorsed the Republican nominee, former president Donald Trump, on August 23, his first reward was a promise: If elected, Axios reports, Trump say he will “establish an independent presidential commission on assassination attempts” and “task the commission with releasing all of the remaining documents pertaining to the assassination of former President John F. Kennedy.”

I’m skeptical, and I’m not alone.

The Future of Freedom Foundation’s Jacob G. Hornberger — author of several informative books on the assassination — notes that Trump made the same promise in 2016, then reneged on that promise.

Hornberger also asserts — with good reason, in my opinion — that even if “smoking gun” documentation contradicting the “Lee Harvey Oswald as lone assassin” narrative ever existed, “there is no chance whatsoever that the CIA would have turned over such a record to the Assassination Records Review Board or the National Archives instead of simply destroying it. ”

A third argument against the likelihood that we’ll get more information:

Weasel-word “tasking” a government agency, commission, or board with this or that deliverable is the go-to method by which a politician accomplishes nothing while claiming he kept a promise.

Trump himself is a great example: One of his promises in 2016 was to cut regulation by requiring federal agencies to eliminate two regulations for each new one they created.

But when Trump issued his vaunted executive order to that effect, it wasn’t really to that effect. It merely required the agencies to “identify” two regulations “for” repeal, not actually repeal them.

Results?

As of three days before Trump’s inauguration, according to QuantGov’s Regulation Tracker, the Federal Register included 1,079,651 regulations. The number of federal regulations then increased, not dropping below the original number again for nearly two years, then began increasing again, totaling 1,089,742 on the day Trump left office.

So:

Trump’s already proven he can’t be trusted to keep promises relating to records concerning the assassination of JFK.

Even if Trump claimed he was “keeping” that promise, his way of “keeping” it would most likely involve fobbing off responsibility on a commission with enough wiggle room in its mandate to avoid real disclosure.

And even if the commission released every last relevant document in the government’s possession, it’s a safe bet that any documents contradicting the “lone gunman” narrative in any substantive or provable way were shredded, then burned, then buried at sea decades ago.

The official story, as promulgated by the Warren Commission in 1964, hasn’t aged well. As of last year, per Gallup, 65% of Americans believe the assassination was carried out by conspirators, not by Oswald alone.

They’re probably right — but unfortunately, we’ll probably never know exactly what happened in Dallas that day.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter:@thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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