Ernie Lazar

Unfortunately, there is no way to limit a discussion to a single topic when the basic terms of discussion are not agreed upon at the outset. For example: YOU introduced the notion that describing the radical right in our country as being a devout supporter of Trump was inaccurate. But you are mistaken. The easiest way to demonstrate your error (to your satisfaction) is simply for you to list what YOU consider to be the TEN or TWENTY most significant or most prominent radical right organizations and individuals in contemporary America. THEN, we could compare your list to their public positions concerning Trump. If we discover that 80% of the persons and organizations on your list, DO support Trump -- then why would it be "inaccurate" or erroneous to say so? IF, HOWEVER, your REAL point is NOT actually about the sympathies or positions of the radical right -- but, instead, your REAL objection is that you don't want ANY discussion of Trump to appear in this thread -- then that is an entirely different matter.

Actually, Paul, if you re-read what I posted, I pointed out that the MAIN reason I posted that article from the JBS website was (1) because it reveals that there is a connection between Trump's dad and the Birch Society and (2) Birchers are currently supporting Trump and (3) Birchers have developed a conspiracy theory regarding what THEY regard as a possible motive for assassinating Trump -- and they connect their theory to JFK. Nobody is claiming that "all" contemporary radical rightists support Trump. That is a straw-man argument. When we discuss ANY issue, it is IMPOSSIBLE to make claims regarding "all" the persons who belong to some category of human beings. However, the great majority of radical rightists in the U.S. support Trump OR, at a minimum, they believe Trump is headed in the right direction BUT they are waiting to see if he will fulfill his promises and not be compromised or manipulated or neutralized by "globalists" and the "establishment" -- which, incidentally, is discussed in one of the links which I included with the JBS article I posted. Just after Trump was elected, the Birch Society magazine published an article entitled: "Is Trumpism Really Bircherism?" (link below) https://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/politics/item/24677-is-trumpism-really-bircherism The JBS takes credit for the JBS "educational" campaign which they think made a Trump victory possible -- i.e. their years of promoting an anti-establishment, anti-internationalist and anti-globalist, anti-foreign entanglements, and "America First" argument which the JBS (and much of the radical right) has been making for 8+ decades.

I have not "deviated" and I don't think you can identify anything about my alleged "dogma" -- particularly since I often post articles which do NOT represent my views but which I think might be of interest to other readers here because they often offer unique insights into the broader discussion regarding right-wing beliefs and links to the radical right in our country's history. With respect to Paul's comment -- he was using a single message to challenge one portion of the article which I discovered on the Birch Society's website that mentioned that Donald Trump's father (Fred Trump) was a personal friend of Robert Welch AND a financial contributor to the Birch Society. Since the ENTIRE thrust of Dr. Caufield's book is that JBS members and JBS supporters were involved in planning, financing, executing, and covering-up the assassination of JFK -- I'm sure Paul just wanted to make some point about Donald Trump NOT being in the same potential jeopardy (for assassination) as was JFK. Apparently, YOU have a VERY rigid and dogmatic view regarding what is, or is not, acceptable to be discussed here. I don't think you will find many readers sympathetic with your personal opinion. Regardless -- I still maintain that your comment that the radical right in the U.S. (or even in other countries) is not supporting Trump is grossly inaccurate and cannot withstand even the most cursory review. In the context of this thread's focus upon the Birch Society being the PRIMARY "radical right" actor in the assassination of JFK, it is simply INDISPUTABLE that many (perhaps even most) Birchers are pro-Trump. The ONLY reservations I have seen posted online by Birchers is that they are concerned about whether or not Trump will compromise with Democrats AND they are concerned that "globalists" (aka establishment elitists) might water down Trump's "natural instincts" to be anti-UN, anti-trade agreement, anti-immigrant, and anti-establishment elites.

You cannot be serious Glenn. The VERY FIRST message which introduced the subject matter of this entire thread began as follows: Coming soon! General Walker and the Murder of President Kennedy: The Extensive New Evidence of a Radical-Right Conspiracy Notice the phrase: "The Extensive New Evidence of a Radical-Right Conspiracy" Consequently, if a contributor does not even know what OR who "radical right" refers to (as described in Dr. Caufield's book) -- THEN this entire thread would be jibberish!

Sorry -- I was just trying to understand something you wrote which did not make any sense to me---particularly since this ENTIRE thread is based upon the premise that a "radical right" conspiracy was responsible for JFK's murder. However, your rudeness indicates that you are not worth talking to.

OK -- maybe I don't understand whom you mean by "radical right". Can you give me some examples of the types of persons or organizations whom YOU consider to be part of the "radical right" in our country?

You are mistaken Glenn. A great portion of the radical right in our country DOES support Trump. I have been debating JBS members on numerous websites and they are THRILLED with Trump because (in the JBS scheme of things), he is doing what the JBS has wanted a President to do for decades. In addition, the JBS has posted articles on its website (and numerous member comments) which point out the ways in which Trump's actions correlate to JBS objectives.

Ya--but sometimes links don't work properly so I usually include both link and text -- as do many other people here on EF

They really are not "new" questions Paul. The Secret Service (and White House personnel) always believed that any assassination of JFK would be most likely to occur through a rifle shot. Even on the morning of the assassination, JFK told his senior assistant (Kenneth O'Donnell--who repeated what JFK said to the Warren Commission) “If anybody really wanted to shoot the President of the U.S., it was not a very difficult job—all one had to do was get a high building some day with a telescopic rifle, and there was nothing anybody could do to defend against such an attempt." With respect to the MM having military training: (1) Paul -- surely you must be aware that the United States introduced a draft during World War II and as a result, the U.S. military trained MILLIONS of men for both World War II and the Korean conflict? You probably could not walk down ANY street in America without bumping into someone who had recently had "military training". (2) No matter what military training you receive, murdering someone -- especially the President of our country -- is not something as easy as making yourself a cup of coffee in the morning. (3) As I have mentioned in a previous message, there are literally THOUSANDS of men and women (extreme right wingers) who used public platforms (speeches, newsletter articles, letters-to-the-editor, annual conventions or conferences, etc) to publicly express their viciousness and hatred and contempt and irrationality toward JFK (which also occurred with President Obama--except with an added racist element) but they never translated their venom and bile into violence or into any direct physical or threatening action. In fact, many psychologists believe that blow-torch rhetoric which is vicious and hateful is often used by political extremists as a substitute for actual physical activity -- especially for mentally disturbed individuals. (4) There really is not much difference between the Minutemen and other extreme right-wing groups which existed during that time -- including (of course) the most violent Klan in our nation's history whose members had already committed very serious crimes including bombings, lynchings, castrations, and murder. Many of those Klan units and other extreme right-wing groups were organized as "gun clubs" -- particularly in the south. In addition, there were paramilitary groups like William Gale's California Rangers -- along with the remnants of the Columbians in the south (which the U.S. Attorney General listed as a subversive fascist organization) as well as our nation's first postwar neo-fascist group (James Madole's National Renaissance Party in New York) which had a "security force" composed of guys dressed in SS-type uniforms, AND there were many other extreme right groups which were pre-disposed toward violence---all of whom had guys trained in our military. Some of them were given dishonorable discharges from the Army or Navy because they had done something unacceptable or expressed extremist political statements or they associated with subversive or pro-nazi elements during their service. Consequently, singling out the Minutemen does not make much sense -- especially when you consider that the MM were compartmentalized so members in the same community, or adjacent areas, often did not even know about each other.

As usual, you miss the relevant points. Let me spell them out for you. 1. The Birch Society in 2018 still rejects the lone gunman theory re: JFK's assassination. They also reject the Warren Commission. 2. As my previous message pointed out -- successful criminals NEVER do ANYTHING which might cause doubt about a prevailing conclusion regarding their crime as long as that prevailing conclusion does NOT implicate the successful criminals or make them suspects. Examples: (a) a crew which successfully robs a bank but is NOT suspected of committing that crime will NEVER do or say or write anything publicly that would bring new scrutiny to their bank robbery. INSTEAD, they always keep their mouths shut because they have already committed a "perfect crime" -- which is defined as succeeding without being caught or even suspected. (b) a criminal conspiracy which successfully murders the President of the United States but is NOT suspected by law enforcement officials of having ANY connection to their crime will NEVER do or say or write anything publicly which calls for a new investigation or which expresses doubt or skepticism concerning the existing (false) narrative about who was responsible for that crime. 3. Lastly, -- there is now a narrative circulating within radical right circles in our country which attempts to create the impression that Donald Trump is somehow comparable to JFK -- because (like JFK), Trump is working against extremely powerful and influential actors WITHIN the government (aka Deep State) -- and those actors INCLUDE senior career officials within the Justice Department, i.e. the very people who might be willing and able to plan and execute an assassination of a President and get away with it -- just like what happened to JFK. POSTSCRIPT: With respect to 2(a) and 2(b) -- I don't mean to exclude the possibility that a participant in, or facilitator of, or somebody connected to the persons who commit a crime might blab something to some person not connected to their crime. My point is simply that criminals don't normally say or do anything which would potentially alert law enforcement officials OR investigators (such as legislative committees) OR investigative journalists to the identity of the actual culprits. Consequently, Paul Trejo's theory about JBS involvement in JFK's murder makes absolutely no logical sense when you consider that Birchers universally dismiss the "lone gunman" theory. IF (as Paul claims) Birchers played a key role (or even THE key role) in the assassination, then it is incomprehensible WHY Birchers would spend 55 years dismissing the Warren Commission's findings while simultaneously declaring that the REAL assassins have NOT been discovered. NO RATIONAL BEINGS who plan and then commit an historic and major successful capital crime of such extreme notoriety, would EVER try to persuade the American public that the prevailing "false" narrative (i.e. LHO was the real culprit) is profoundly mistaken -- so we should re-open the entire matter for further investigation. Who, in their right mind, would do that? If Paul Trejo assassinated the CEO of the Birch Society -- but NOBODY suspected Paul Trejo and, instead, the crime was attributed to John Doe -- THEN why on earth would Paul Trejo launch a public relations campaign whose purpose was to re-open the settled case and try to get law enforcement to re-investigate his successful crime? THAT is the fundamental defect in Paul's theory (which is largely based on Harry Dean's bogus story).

I am posting the following article from the John Birch Society magazine website [The New American] for three reasons: (1) First---it will introduce many readers here on EF to a NEW conspiracy theory -- but one which you probably have never considered or heard of before. (2) Second, there is a revelation in this article which I think is particularly newsworthy (summarized below). (3) As you will see, the Birch Society continues to publish material (even in 2018) which states that JFK was murdered by the type of people whom the JBS despises and whom the JBS has fought for its entire existence. I include the current comments section because it reveals the mental viciousness of Birchers who believe this stuff. https://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/politics/item/27847-deep-state-plan-c-is-to-kill-trump-advisor-roger-stone-warns This article quotes Trump senior adviser, Roger Stone, as making the following comment during his interview. Trump has a pedigree that suggests he is for real, too. “People don't know it, but Trump comes from a long line of anti-communists,” Stone explained. “His father was a quiet funder of the John Birch Society, his father was a personal friend of Billy Graham, a personal friend of [JBS founder] Robert Welch, a supporter of Dr. Fred Schwarz's [Christian] Anti-Communism Crusade, and had been a major, major fundraiser and donor for Barry Goldwater. He kept his national politics quiet, because of course in Queens, all of the zoning and permitting for the Trump residential real-estate business was controlled by machine Democrats.” Monday, 01 January 2018 Deep State “Plan C” Is to Kill Trump, Advisor Roger Stone Warns Written by Alex Newman Longtime Donald Trump advisor and confidante Roger Stone warned that the globalist establishment would do everything in its power to stop the president from draining the swamp, even if it means taking him out John F. Kennedy style. With the “mainstream” media's credibility gone, and the Deep State feeling threatened in an unprecedented way, the “globalist cabal” is desperate and willing to do anything necessary to get rid of Trump, who is shown here with Stone. But it is not over yet. The Deep State's “Plan A,” Stone said, is the imploding “investigation” into alleged “Russian collusion” by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. If and when that fails, which Stone suggested was likely, the establishment would move to “Plan B.” In essence, that plot would involve trying to get a majority of Trump's cabinet to declare him unfit for office. This would allow Trump to be removed under the U.S. Constitution's 25th Amendment — another scheme Stone said would probably flop. Last but not least, though, if all else fails, Stone warned of “Plan C”: Killing the president. In a wide-ranging interview with The New American magazine at his Florida studio, Stone offered insight into Trump — and into his enemies and their tactics. “It's easy to forget that the shocking upset that Donald Trump pulled off has never been forgotten or acknowledged by the globalist cabal that has really infected both of our major parties,” he explained. “I say that as someone who is a sentimental Republican, but a Republican in the mold of Barry Goldwater who wanted government out of the bedroom, out of the boardroom, that believed in peace through strength, not, you know, neocons cruising the globe looking for expensive wars to profiteer in and stick our nose in.” “So I reached the conclusion, with the nomination of Mitt Romney — Council on Foreign Relations and a certified globalist in the Bush tradition — that the old Republican Party was dead,” Stone said. Donald Trump's election, he continued, represented the “hostile takeover of the old Republican Party, which we now hope to remake in his image as a party that stands for economic nationalism, that stands for putting American interests ahead of globalist interests, and re-affirms our sovereign rights as Americans.” “He's a shock to the system,” added Stone, a legendary political operative known for “dirty tricks” who, in addition to his longtime relationship with Trump, has served as a senior campaign aide to Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Senator Bob Dole, and others. “Now, I think the establishment, at this time, when the president has just passed his tax cut, has cut these regulations — so you see a record stock market, you see unemployment at all time lows, you see a booming housing market — it's easy to misread the deep enmity and hatred that the globalists and the Insiders have for this president, and to underestimate their resolve to remove him.” If all else fails, Stone believes the Deep State would, in fact, attempt to murder the president. “Having written books on the Kennedy assassination, having highlighted the attempted assassination of president Ronald Reagan by people deeply associated with the Bush family, I think the establishment has Plan A, Plan B, and Plan C,” he said. “Plan A is very clearly a take-down by the illegitimate Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who was appointed not by Jeff Sessions, not at the direction of the president, but by this fellow Rosenstein, who is a close associate of Mueller and [disgraced former FBI boss James] Comey, and who is a globalist Bush insider, a liberal Republican, who somehow got the number two position in the Trump Justice Department,” Stone warned, saying the establishment was now hoping Trump would fire Mueller to regain the upper hand. Unfortunately for the Deep State, Stone said, it looks less and less likely that Mueller will succeed in bringing down Trump. That is, at least in part, because of the explosive revelations surrounding what Stone called the “naked partisanship and the bias of Mueller and his partisan hit squad.” Indeed, the Mueller team is completely discredited already, Stone explained. Among other issues, Stone pointed to the revelations about Peter Strzok, the top FBI agent on Mueller's Special Counsel task force purporting to investigate alleged links between Trump and the Kremlin. In text messages sent to a colleague, Strzok was extremely critical of Trump, even discussing the creation of an “insurance policy” in case Trump won the election. Stone also cited revelations about the campaign contributions from individuals on the task force to the Clintons and the Obamas. In addition, Stone noted that a lawyer for Ben Rhodes, “one of the people involved in Obama's crimes of illegal surveillance against Donald Trump,” is a member of the task force. “The fraudulent nature of the Mueller probe is becoming more and more apparent,” Stone continued, suggesting that there should be some “additional examination” of a suspiciously timed death that allowed Mueller to acquire all Trump's campaign records. Stone did not elaborate on that point. The other thing that is becoming more and more apparent, he said, is that “neither Mr. Mueller nor the House nor the Senate Intelligence committees nor the Judiciary committees in those bodies have been able to find any evidence of Russian collusion.” “Sorry, but Don Jr.'s meeting with a Russian lawyer that provided nothing is perfectly legal and proper,” Stone said. “There's nothing wrong with it. She produced no evidence, but what we did learn is that she was in the country thanks to the Obama FBI, without a visa, and she was popping up and being photographed at Hillary rallies and in John McCain's office. She's a Quisling! It's a set up! She's a spy. She delivered nothing. It's an attempt to entrap Donny Jr. in a meeting that's perfectly innocuous and perfectly legal.” So, Mueller's “investigation” is the establishment's “Plan A,” Stone reiterated. But it is rapidly falling apart. And so, if and when Plan A fails, the establishment will move to “Plan B,” Stone said. “That's the 25th Amendment Plan,” he added. Basically, under that scenario, a majority of the cabinet and the vice president would need to reach the decision that the president is unable to discharge his duties — “that he was mentally incompetent, that he was crazy,” as Stone put it. If that happened, they could, theoretically, remove him from office, legally speaking. However, if that were to happen, the president could also appeal the decision to the U.S. House of Representatives. But Stone thinks this is a danger. “If Mueller should fail in his illegitimate coup d'etat to take down the president in some phony baloney process indictment — perjury in the matter of the firing of Comey, or obstruction of justice pertaining to the indictment of [Trump's first National Security Adviser Micheal] Flynn, both of which I think are bogus fabrications — then I think you will see an uptick in the 'Trump-is-crazy' talk,” Stone said. He noted that, already, such rhetoric was being heard from MSNBC talking head Joe Scarborough and Trump's nemesis, the “very fake news” network CNN, as Trump describes it. If Plan A fails and Plan B goes into effect, Stone predicted much more of that rhetoric from people such as CNN talking head Don Lemon, Council on Foreign Relations member Senator Robert Corker (R-Tenn.), Senator Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), and perhaps even Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.), another CFR member, if he is still around. “So we'll see an uptick in all of this 'Trump is mentally imbalanced, Trump is insane, Trump must be removed,'” Stone warned. “Now you have to examine the extent to which they can whip up that hysteria as a backdrop, because without that hysteria, such a political move on the president will fail.” Stone warned that even some of Trump's most senior officials would throw him under the bus if given the opportunity. “I can tell you, there are members of Trump's cabinet that would stick a dagger in his heart,” he warned, echoing other warnings that he has offered publicly in recent weeks. “There are globalist insiders who, for one reason or another got into this cabinet, who do not share the president's vision of reform, and are not loyal to him as I am and so many Americans are.” When asked whether Trump was successfully draining the swamp, and what more needed to be done, Stone explained how Deep State insiders hostile to Trump ended up in positions of influence. “Unfortunately, I think that the president misunderstood early in the process that personnel is policy,” he said, pointing to Trump's decision to install establishment GOP operative Reince Priebus as chief of staff as an example of the problem. Stone also mentioned National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, a member of the globalist-minded CFR, on multiple occasions throughout the interview. Plan B is a threat. “I do think they will try a 25th Amendment ploy,” Stone said. “I also think it will fail because of a booming economy, and the fact that Donald Trump is a shrewd operator in his own right. My concern, in a nut shell, is that the president's lawyers — at least in stage one — are walking him into the blades. A legal strategy of turning over hundreds of thousands of White House documents to the special counsel, relying on his innate fairness and lack of bias to determine that there is no crime, waiving all executive privilege, probably without even reviewing these documents, to me, that is folly.” If Plan B fails, the Deep State would move to Plan C, Stone cautioned. “We know Plan C. We saw it in the case of President John F. Kennedy, who had crossed the Central Intelligence Agency and the Deep State over both the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Bay of Pigs, both, I think, central,” he said. “JFK crossed organized crime, who had financed his campaign for president in Chicago and in West Virginia, he crossed Big Texas Oil, because he was fighting for the repeal of the oil depletion allowance, and he was fighting the international bankers to restore at least a silver dollar, if not a gold-backed dollar.” “So John Kennedy, an anti-communist, had threatened all of the establishment Deep Staters of his day,” Stone continued. “Does this sound familiar? And of course, we know what happened — he was taken out in a coup engineered, as I argue in my book, The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ, by Lyndon Johnson, errand boy for the Deep State.” While some who have studied the matter dispute the notion of LBJ's engineering a conspiracy to kill the president, Stone's investigation into the matter has been widely praised by historians and prominent analysts. Stone, who was close to President Nixon, also drew a parallel with that president's less violent downfall. “We also saw it in 1974 with Richard Nixon, who had a reputation as an anti-communist,” said Stone. “Good guy. Who ever knew that Dick Nixon was a peacemaker? Who ever knew that the munitions boys wouldn't make the kind of money they made with a raging war in Vietnam. He had to go, too.” “So we've seen, from my point of view, two previous coups d'etat, one peaceful, but political, one violent,” Stone continued. “And I think the Deep State will stop at nothing to try to remove this president.” The reason the Deep State is so serious about stopping Trump, Stone suggested, was because the president is, in fact, who he says he is. Indeed, Stone emphasized repeatedly throughout the interview that Trump was the real deal: a true anti-establishment patriot determined to “Make America Great Again” and “Drain the Swamp.” While other politicians talk the talk, Trump walks the walk. Trump has a pedigree that suggests he is for real, too. “People don't know it, but Trump comes from a long line of anti-communists,” Stone explained. “His father was a quiet funder of the John Birch Society, his father was a personal friend of Billy Graham, a personal friend of [JBS founder] Robert Welch, a supporter of Dr. Fred Schwarz's [Christian] Anti-Communism Crusade, and had been a major, major fundraiser and donor for Barry Goldwater. He kept his national politics quiet, because of course in Queens, all of the zoning and permitting for the Trump residential real-estate business was controlled by machine Democrats.” Before becoming president, and despite funding both parties over the years, Trump was typically conservative and populist in his views, Stone continued. “Donald Trump and his father were proud members of the Ronald Reagan's 1980 finance committee,” Stone explained. “Donald Trump obviously gave, when he was in real-estate in Manhattan, to both Democrats and Republicans, but his political leanings have always been right of center and kind of populist oriented. So we saw eye to eye.” “Trump is a real American, a patriot, he's a real believer in Americana, and also in American superiority — American exceptionalism, if you will — and a believer in American sovereignty,” Stone said. “He's always been deeply suspicious of the international types that he was happy to sell condominiums to at inflated prices, but he never shared their politics.” One key element of the Trump phenomena that terrifies the elites so much is his “independence,” Stone explained. “This is a man so wealthy that he doesn't need George Soros, he doesn't need the Warburgs or the Rothschilds — that he has his independent wealth that he's made in real-estate, and therefore I always viewed him as unbought and unbossed,” Stone said. “Anybody who has tried to boss Donald Trump around knows that that won't work. He's very much his own man.” And now, Trump threatens the status quo — as well as the Deep State's power. “We've reached a point in American politics where the two-party duopoly that has run the country into the ground — the Bushes and the Clintons working together in one essentially seamless crime family, where they have no real ideology, it's not that they're communists or socialists or liberals, they'll use all that, but it's really about power and money,” Stone said. “And we have seen this two party duopoly, who violently opposed Donald Trump in the election and still violently oppose his presidency today; I view Trump as an antidote to that. I view Trump as an outsider who will challenge that two-party orthodoxy.” That is why the president is in so much danger. According to one of the makers of the new documentary Get Me Roger Stone, after Donald Trump himself, the man most responsible for the fact that Trump is in the White House today is none other than Roger Stone. “As early as 1988, I began to view Donald Trump as a potential president,” Stone told The New American, adding that Trump has always been his own strategist. “As he would tell you, in 1988, he wasn't all that interested, he still had real-estate mountains to climb, and many billions more to make.” But since the 80s, the two have been “simpatico,” Stone said. Now, Stone is working to ensure that the Swamp will be drained, while helping Trump to Make America Great Again. Alex Newman is a correspondent for The New American, covering economics, education, politics, and more. He can be reached at anewman@thenewamerican.com. Follow him on Twitter @ALEXNEWMAN_JOU or on Facebook. Related articles: Deep State Boasts: We’re Sabotaging Trump From the Inside Globalist McMaster Purges Trump Loyalists, Protects Obamaites Deep State: Follow the Rothschild, Soros, and Rockefeller Money Deep State Secret Societies: Skull & Bones, Bohemians, Illuminati Deep State Behind the Deep State: CFR, Trilaterals, Bilderberg Deep State “Intelligence” Threatens Trump, Self-Government “Deep State” Bureaucracy vs. Trump, America, Constitution Roger Stone, Former Nixon Hit Man, Now a Libertarian Is “Trumpism” Really “Bircherism”? Trump vs. the Establishment Mueller Record: Can He Be Trusted with Power? Dershowitz: Mueller "Going Way Beyond His Authority" COMMENTS: Oldtymepatriot • a few seconds ago While Donald Trump isn't as far reaching in his aims to Make America Great Again as I would like, he is the best thing to happen to this nation since Ronald Reagan. I have had a problem with his appointment of some of the very people who oppose him to positions where they can do their dirty work as well as retaining others who represent the NWO. As the good from his actions thus far really sink in with the public, his popularity and that of the direction of his agenda will grow. I think "plan A is all but written off and plan B would also fail. As for plan C, I think if that were tried and successful, it would lead to a conflict similar to only two other such events in this nation's history with the outcome being either a complete defeat of the globalists or a split nation of a free and Constitutional segment and another segment falling under the global oligarchy's control. 2010 was the year the U.S. as a free and sovereign nation was supposed end, but Ronald Reagan's surprise win set the timetable back 8 years and now, the NWO is in a panic with Donald Trump "throwing water on their fire". Instead of becoming a member state in a North America Union with wide open borders, we are on the way to having a (long overdue) wall secured border to help control who enters our great sovereign nation. ConPatriot1234 • 13 hours ago Simple. Take out the Deep State before it takes out Trump. Cheh Low • 9 hours ago Drain the swamp and throw crooked Hillary and corrupt Obama as well as evil Sorro in jail. Also confiscate all their wealth and give them to the poor in this country. In order to do so President Trump must appoint a new AG that is not with the swamp and has the guts to do the right job. President Trump must fire the no ball AG Sessions. Nothing will get the country in the right track and protect President Trump as long as the no ball AG Sessions is still around. Matlonc Cheh Low • 8 hours ago Obama was a puppet. Tell me how a man who has no background in anything other than reading other peoples speeches and looking intelligent in an expensive suit was able to win the presidency by himself- after only one 1/2 term in the senate where he basically campaigned most of the time? Every election he won was by destroying the opponent- kind of what the left has to do in order to win because their ideas do not work and if their tru agenda was exposed would not get garner them 40% of the vote. Matlonc Cheh Low • 8 hours ago by the way before you read the comments below know that I agree with you- sessions is part of the problem. I think him being the first guy to stand at Trump's side was part of the establishments insurance in case Trump won so they could remain in positions of power throughout the upper levels of our intelligence agencies without fear of the DOJ stopping them and investigating all of their corruption. Sounds a bit far fetched, however if you think about it sessions is the perfect plant- kind of a goober who comes off as trustworthy but in the end has to many ties to the swamp. Cheh Low Matlonc • 5 hours ago Jeff Sessions is a Trojan Horse from the swamp. hillbilly • 11 hours ago He best get some body guards he can really trust,wear a vest and pack a 6 gun.... Justice Seeker • 10 hours ago He'll be ok, he will be dead but not dead. As prophesied, he will rise from the dead and all of the world will follow him. Matlonc Justice Seeker • 8 hours ago I share your thoughts- even if they somehow kill trump he has started a movement that will not die. To many people's eyes have been opened that were not aware of what the politicians are really all about- one giant cabal, the two party system is a fraud- our money, and their power. It is too late for Trump to be stopped regardless of what they do to him personally. However, I pray for his safety because if he is allowed to govern for 8 years this country will once again be at the top of the mountain and lead the world. Cheh Low Matlonc • 4 hours ago You are so right.

I am posting the following article from the John Birch Society magazine website [The New American] for three reasons. (1) First---it will introduce many readers here on EF to a NEW conspiracy theory -- but one which you probably have never considered or heard of before. (2) Second, there is a revelation in this article which I think is particularly newsworthy (summarized below). (3) As you will see, the Birch Society continues to publish material (even in 2018) which states that JFK was murdered by the type of people whom the JBS despises and whom the JBS has fought for its entire existence. I include the current comments section because it reveals the mental viciousness of Birchers who believe this stuff. https://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/politics/item/27847-deep-state-plan-c-is-to-kill-trump-advisor-roger-stone-warns This article quotes Trump senior adviser, Roger Stone, as making the following comment during his interview. Trump has a pedigree that suggests he is for real, too. “People don't know it, but Trump comes from a long line of anti-communists,” Stone explained. “His father was a quiet funder of the John Birch Society, his father was a personal friend of Billy Graham, a personal friend of [JBS founder] Robert Welch, a supporter of Dr. Fred Schwarz's [Christian] Anti-Communism Crusade, and had been a major, major fundraiser and donor for Barry Goldwater. He kept his national politics quiet, because of course in Queens, all of the zoning and permitting for the Trump residential real-estate business was controlled by machine Democrats.” Monday, 01 January 2018 Deep State “Plan C” Is to Kill Trump, Advisor Roger Stone Warns Written by Alex Newman Longtime Donald Trump advisor and confidante Roger Stone warned that the globalist establishment would do everything in its power to stop the president from draining the swamp, even if it means taking him out John F. Kennedy style. With the “mainstream” media's credibility gone, and the Deep State feeling threatened in an unprecedented way, the “globalist cabal” is desperate and willing to do anything necessary to get rid of Trump, who is shown here with Stone. But it is not over yet. The Deep State's “Plan A,” Stone said, is the imploding “investigation” into alleged “Russian collusion” by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. If and when that fails, which Stone suggested was likely, the establishment would move to “Plan B.” In essence, that plot would involve trying to get a majority of Trump's cabinet to declare him unfit for office. This would allow Trump to be removed under the U.S. Constitution's 25th Amendment — another scheme Stone said would probably flop. Last but not least, though, if all else fails, Stone warned of “Plan C”: Killing the president. In a wide-ranging interview with The New American magazine at his Florida studio, Stone offered insight into Trump — and into his enemies and their tactics. “It's easy to forget that the shocking upset that Donald Trump pulled off has never been forgotten or acknowledged by the globalist cabal that has really infected both of our major parties,” he explained. “I say that as someone who is a sentimental Republican, but a Republican in the mold of Barry Goldwater who wanted government out of the bedroom, out of the boardroom, that believed in peace through strength, not, you know, neocons cruising the globe looking for expensive wars to profiteer in and stick our nose in.” “So I reached the conclusion, with the nomination of Mitt Romney — Council on Foreign Relations and a certified globalist in the Bush tradition — that the old Republican Party was dead,” Stone said. Donald Trump's election, he continued, represented the “hostile takeover of the old Republican Party, which we now hope to remake in his image as a party that stands for economic nationalism, that stands for putting American interests ahead of globalist interests, and re-affirms our sovereign rights as Americans.” “He's a shock to the system,” added Stone, a legendary political operative known for “dirty tricks” who, in addition to his longtime relationship with Trump, has served as a senior campaign aide to Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Senator Bob Dole, and others. “Now, I think the establishment, at this time, when the president has just passed his tax cut, has cut these regulations — so you see a record stock market, you see unemployment at all time lows, you see a booming housing market — it's easy to misread the deep enmity and hatred that the globalists and the Insiders have for this president, and to underestimate their resolve to remove him.” If all else fails, Stone believes the Deep State would, in fact, attempt to murder the president. “Having written books on the Kennedy assassination, having highlighted the attempted assassination of president Ronald Reagan by people deeply associated with the Bush family, I think the establishment has Plan A, Plan B, and Plan C,” he said. “Plan A is very clearly a take-down by the illegitimate Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who was appointed not by Jeff Sessions, not at the direction of the president, but by this fellow Rosenstein, who is a close associate of Mueller and [disgraced former FBI boss James] Comey, and who is a globalist Bush insider, a liberal Republican, who somehow got the number two position in the Trump Justice Department,” Stone warned, saying the establishment was now hoping Trump would fire Mueller to regain the upper hand. Unfortunately for the Deep State, Stone said, it looks less and less likely that Mueller will succeed in bringing down Trump. That is, at least in part, because of the explosive revelations surrounding what Stone called the “naked partisanship and the bias of Mueller and his partisan hit squad.” Indeed, the Mueller team is completely discredited already, Stone explained. Among other issues, Stone pointed to the revelations about Peter Strzok, the top FBI agent on Mueller's Special Counsel task force purporting to investigate alleged links between Trump and the Kremlin. In text messages sent to a colleague, Strzok was extremely critical of Trump, even discussing the creation of an “insurance policy” in case Trump won the election. Stone also cited revelations about the campaign contributions from individuals on the task force to the Clintons and the Obamas. In addition, Stone noted that a lawyer for Ben Rhodes, “one of the people involved in Obama's crimes of illegal surveillance against Donald Trump,” is a member of the task force. “The fraudulent nature of the Mueller probe is becoming more and more apparent,” Stone continued, suggesting that there should be some “additional examination” of a suspiciously timed death that allowed Mueller to acquire all Trump's campaign records. Stone did not elaborate on that point. The other thing that is becoming more and more apparent, he said, is that “neither Mr. Mueller nor the House nor the Senate Intelligence committees nor the Judiciary committees in those bodies have been able to find any evidence of Russian collusion.” “Sorry, but Don Jr.'s meeting with a Russian lawyer that provided nothing is perfectly legal and proper,” Stone said. “There's nothing wrong with it. She produced no evidence, but what we did learn is that she was in the country thanks to the Obama FBI, without a visa, and she was popping up and being photographed at Hillary rallies and in John McCain's office. She's a Quisling! It's a set up! She's a spy. She delivered nothing. It's an attempt to entrap Donny Jr. in a meeting that's perfectly innocuous and perfectly legal.” So, Mueller's “investigation” is the establishment's “Plan A,” Stone reiterated. But it is rapidly falling apart. And so, if and when Plan A fails, the establishment will move to “Plan B,” Stone said. “That's the 25th Amendment Plan,” he added. Basically, under that scenario, a majority of the cabinet and the vice president would need to reach the decision that the president is unable to discharge his duties — “that he was mentally incompetent, that he was crazy,” as Stone put it. If that happened, they could, theoretically, remove him from office, legally speaking. However, if that were to happen, the president could also appeal the decision to the U.S. House of Representatives. But Stone thinks this is a danger. “If Mueller should fail in his illegitimate coup d'etat to take down the president in some phony baloney process indictment — perjury in the matter of the firing of Comey, or obstruction of justice pertaining to the indictment of [Trump's first National Security Adviser Micheal] Flynn, both of which I think are bogus fabrications — then I think you will see an uptick in the 'Trump-is-crazy' talk,” Stone said. He noted that, already, such rhetoric was being heard from MSNBC talking head Joe Scarborough and Trump's nemesis, the “very fake news” network CNN, as Trump describes it. If Plan A fails and Plan B goes into effect, Stone predicted much more of that rhetoric from people such as CNN talking head Don Lemon, Council on Foreign Relations member Senator Robert Corker (R-Tenn.), Senator Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), and perhaps even Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.), another CFR member, if he is still around. “So we'll see an uptick in all of this 'Trump is mentally imbalanced, Trump is insane, Trump must be removed,'” Stone warned. “Now you have to examine the extent to which they can whip up that hysteria as a backdrop, because without that hysteria, such a political move on the president will fail.” Stone warned that even some of Trump's most senior officials would throw him under the bus if given the opportunity. “I can tell you, there are members of Trump's cabinet that would stick a dagger in his heart,” he warned, echoing other warnings that he has offered publicly in recent weeks. “There are globalist insiders who, for one reason or another got into this cabinet, who do not share the president's vision of reform, and are not loyal to him as I am and so many Americans are.” When asked whether Trump was successfully draining the swamp, and what more needed to be done, Stone explained how Deep State insiders hostile to Trump ended up in positions of influence. “Unfortunately, I think that the president misunderstood early in the process that personnel is policy,” he said, pointing to Trump's decision to install establishment GOP operative Reince Priebus as chief of staff as an example of the problem. Stone also mentioned National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, a member of the globalist-minded CFR, on multiple occasions throughout the interview. Plan B is a threat. “I do think they will try a 25th Amendment ploy,” Stone said. “I also think it will fail because of a booming economy, and the fact that Donald Trump is a shrewd operator in his own right. My concern, in a nut shell, is that the president's lawyers — at least in stage one — are walking him into the blades. A legal strategy of turning over hundreds of thousands of White House documents to the special counsel, relying on his innate fairness and lack of bias to determine that there is no crime, waiving all executive privilege, probably without even reviewing these documents, to me, that is folly.” If Plan B fails, the Deep State would move to Plan C, Stone cautioned. “We know Plan C. We saw it in the case of President John F. Kennedy, who had crossed the Central Intelligence Agency and the Deep State over both the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Bay of Pigs, both, I think, central,” he said. “JFK crossed organized crime, who had financed his campaign for president in Chicago and in West Virginia, he crossed Big Texas Oil, because he was fighting for the repeal of the oil depletion allowance, and he was fighting the international bankers to restore at least a silver dollar, if not a gold-backed dollar.” “So John Kennedy, an anti-communist, had threatened all of the establishment Deep Staters of his day,” Stone continued. “Does this sound familiar? And of course, we know what happened — he was taken out in a coup engineered, as I argue in my book, The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ, by Lyndon Johnson, errand boy for the Deep State.” While some who have studied the matter dispute the notion of LBJ's engineering a conspiracy to kill the president, Stone's investigation into the matter has been widely praised by historians and prominent analysts. Stone, who was close to President Nixon, also drew a parallel with that president's less violent downfall. “We also saw it in 1974 with Richard Nixon, who had a reputation as an anti-communist,” said Stone. “Good guy. Who ever knew that Dick Nixon was a peacemaker? Who ever knew that the munitions boys wouldn't make the kind of money they made with a raging war in Vietnam. He had to go, too.” “So we've seen, from my point of view, two previous coups d'etat, one peaceful, but political, one violent,” Stone continued. “And I think the Deep State will stop at nothing to try to remove this president.” The reason the Deep State is so serious about stopping Trump, Stone suggested, was because the president is, in fact, who he says he is. Indeed, Stone emphasized repeatedly throughout the interview that Trump was the real deal: a true anti-establishment patriot determined to “Make America Great Again” and “Drain the Swamp.” While other politicians talk the talk, Trump walks the walk. Trump has a pedigree that suggests he is for real, too. “People don't know it, but Trump comes from a long line of anti-communists,” Stone explained. “His father was a quiet funder of the John Birch Society, his father was a personal friend of Billy Graham, a personal friend of [JBS founder] Robert Welch, a supporter of Dr. Fred Schwarz's [Christian] Anti-Communism Crusade, and had been a major, major fundraiser and donor for Barry Goldwater. He kept his national politics quiet, because of course in Queens, all of the zoning and permitting for the Trump residential real-estate business was controlled by machine Democrats.” Before becoming president, and despite funding both parties over the years, Trump was typically conservative and populist in his views, Stone continued. “Donald Trump and his father were proud members of the Ronald Reagan's 1980 finance committee,” Stone explained. “Donald Trump obviously gave, when he was in real-estate in Manhattan, to both Democrats and Republicans, but his political leanings have always been right of center and kind of populist oriented. So we saw eye to eye.” “Trump is a real American, a patriot, he's a real believer in Americana, and also in American superiority — American exceptionalism, if you will — and a believer in American sovereignty,” Stone said. “He's always been deeply suspicious of the international types that he was happy to sell condominiums to at inflated prices, but he never shared their politics.” One key element of the Trump phenomena that terrifies the elites so much is his “independence,” Stone explained. “This is a man so wealthy that he doesn't need George Soros, he doesn't need the Warburgs or the Rothschilds — that he has his independent wealth that he's made in real-estate, and therefore I always viewed him as unbought and unbossed,” Stone said. “Anybody who has tried to boss Donald Trump around knows that that won't work. He's very much his own man.” And now, Trump threatens the status quo — as well as the Deep State's power. “We've reached a point in American politics where the two-party duopoly that has run the country into the ground — the Bushes and the Clintons working together in one essentially seamless crime family, where they have no real ideology, it's not that they're communists or socialists or liberals, they'll use all that, but it's really about power and money,” Stone said. “And we have seen this two party duopoly, who violently opposed Donald Trump in the election and still violently oppose his presidency today; I view Trump as an antidote to that. I view Trump as an outsider who will challenge that two-party orthodoxy.” That is why the president is in so much danger. According to one of the makers of the new documentary Get Me Roger Stone, after Donald Trump himself, the man most responsible for the fact that Trump is in the White House today is none other than Roger Stone. “As early as 1988, I began to view Donald Trump as a potential president,” Stone told The New American, adding that Trump has always been his own strategist. “As he would tell you, in 1988, he wasn't all that interested, he still had real-estate mountains to climb, and many billions more to make.” But since the 80s, the two have been “simpatico,” Stone said. Now, Stone is working to ensure that the Swamp will be drained, while helping Trump to Make America Great Again. Alex Newman is a correspondent for The New American, covering economics, education, politics, and more. He can be reached at anewman@thenewamerican.com. Follow him on Twitter @ALEXNEWMAN_JOU or on Facebook. Related articles: Deep State Boasts: We’re Sabotaging Trump From the Inside Globalist McMaster Purges Trump Loyalists, Protects Obamaites Deep State: Follow the Rothschild, Soros, and Rockefeller Money Deep State Secret Societies: Skull & Bones, Bohemians, Illuminati Deep State Behind the Deep State: CFR, Trilaterals, Bilderberg Deep State “Intelligence” Threatens Trump, Self-Government “Deep State” Bureaucracy vs. Trump, America, Constitution Roger Stone, Former Nixon Hit Man, Now a Libertarian Is “Trumpism” Really “Bircherism”? Trump vs. the Establishment Mueller Record: Can He Be Trusted with Power? Dershowitz: Mueller "Going Way Beyond His Authority" COMMENTS: Oldtymepatriot • a few seconds ago While Donald Trump isn't as far reaching in his aims to Make America Great Again as I would like, he is the best thing to happen to this nation since Ronald Reagan. I have had a problem with his appointment of some of the very people who oppose him to positions where they can do their dirty work as well as retaining others who represent the NWO. As the good from his actions thus far really sink in with the public, his popularity and that of the direction of his agenda will grow. I think "plan A is all but written off and plan B would also fail. As for plan C, I think if that were tried and successful, it would lead to a conflict similar to only two other such events in this nation's history with the outcome being either a complete defeat of the globalists or a split nation of a free and Constitutional segment and another segment falling under the global oligarchy's control. 2010 was the year the U.S. as a free and sovereign nation was supposed end, but Ronald Reagan's surprise win set the timetable back 8 years and now, the NWO is in a panic with Donald Trump "throwing water on their fire". Instead of becoming a member state in a North America Union with wide open borders, we are on the way to having a (long overdue) wall secured border to help control who enters our great sovereign nation. ConPatriot1234 • 13 hours ago Simple. Take out the Deep State before it takes out Trump. Cheh Low • 9 hours ago Drain the swamp and throw crooked Hillary and corrupt Obama as well as evil Sorro in jail. Also confiscate all their wealth and give them to the poor in this country. In order to do so President Trump must appoint a new AG that is not with the swamp and has the guts to do the right job. President Trump must fire the no ball AG Sessions. Nothing will get the country in the right track and protect President Trump as long as the no ball AG Sessions is still around. Matlonc Cheh Low • 8 hours ago Obama was a puppet. Tell me how a man who has no background in anything other than reading other peoples speeches and looking intelligent in an expensive suit was able to win the presidency by himself- after only one 1/2 term in the senate where he basically campaigned most of the time? Every election he won was by destroying the opponent- kind of what the left has to do in order to win because their ideas do not work and if their tru agenda was exposed would not get garner them 40% of the vote. o Matlonc Cheh Low • 8 hours ago by the way before you read the comments below know that I agree with you- sessions is part of the problem. I think him being the first guy to stand at Trump's side was part of the establishments insurance in case Trump won so they could remain in positions of power throughout the upper levels of our intelligence agencies without fear of the DOJ stopping them and investigating all of their corruption. Sounds a bit far fetched, however if you think about it sessions is the perfect plant- kind of a goober who comes off as trustworthy but in the end has to many ties to the swamp. Cheh Low Matlonc • 5 hours ago Jeff Sessions is a Trojan Horse from the swamp. hillbilly • 11 hours ago He best get some body guards he can really trust,wear a vest and pack a 6 gun.... Justice Seeker • 10 hours ago He'll be ok, he will be dead but not dead. As prophesied, he will rise from the dead and all of the world will follow him. Matlonc Justice Seeker • 8 hours ago I share your thoughts- even if they somehow kill trump he has started a movement that will not die. To many people's eyes have been opened that were not aware of what the politicians are really all about- one giant cabal, the two party system is a fraud- our money, and their power. It is too late for Trump to be stopped regardless of what they do to him personally. However, I pray for his safety because if he is allowed to govern for 8 years this country will once again be at the top of the mountain and lead the world. Cheh Low Matlonc • 4 hours ago You are so right.

One of the problems with your hypothesis is that there were many "capitals for right-wing fanatics" in our country besides Dallas AND according to Jeff Caufield the overwhelming majority of key actors in the JFK murder plot lived outside Texas. In addition, most of the fanatics who were deemed a potential threat to JFK (according to the Secret Service records) lived outside Texas. The second major problem with your hypothesis -- which I have mentioned before -- is that when criminals of any type successfully complete a crime without detection then they NEVER begin a public relations campaign to re-open the case. In other words, if law enforcement makes a conclusion about the likely perps involved in a crime (and about their enablers or facilitators), but the law enforcement conclusion is entirely mistaken, THEN there is no conceivable rational reason why any actual participant in the crime would EVER want to bring new attention to their already successful crime. Why not? (1) Because the real criminal(s) could not control any new investigation. Consequently, newly energized law enforcement (and media) scrutiny could easily produce a result where investigators discover the actual criminals or discover clues which would lead them to those criminals. (2) Because in every criminal enterprise there are weak links, including people who cannot handle the stress or anxiety which inevitably results when dozens or hundreds of investigators and researchers start pursuing new leads. But Paul Trejo wants us to believe that Edwin Walker and his minions AND other JBS members supposedly involved in the plotting, in the financing, and in the execution or cover-up of the most sensational crime of the century up to that time WELCOMED such a re-examination which is why they UNIVERSALLY rejected the Warren Commission findings about a "lone gunman" being responsible. Sorry, Paul, but your hypothesis contradicts EVERYTHING we know about (1) human nature and human behavior and (2) plain, simple logic and (3) all accumulated knowledge from history regarding ALL previous conspiratorial murder plots.

During my many debates with JBS members and other believers in a "Council on Foreign Relations-New World Order" conspiracy, I have developed a series of questions which I use to focus attention upon the intrinsic absurdity of many of their propositions. I present some of those questions below because they can be used to expose the defects within many conspiracy arguments (just substitute the alleged current conspiratorial actor for CFR-NWO). (1) What is the definition of NORMAL political behavior? In other words, what criteria determines when behavior is conspiratorial as opposed to normal political activity? (2) Has there ever been a period in U.S. history when conspiratorial forces were not predominant? (3) Which objectives are the CFR-NWO conspiracy pursuing that it cannot achieve by non-conspiratorial means? For example, according to the most recent edition of the John Birch Society “Freedom Index” (which scores all members of Congress with respect to “their adherence to constitutional principles of limited government, fiscal responsibility, national sovereignty, and a traditional foreign policy of avoiding foreign entanglements”) --- the average score for the House of Representatives is 43% and the average score for the Senate is 36%. In other words, the alleged CFR-NWO crowd (aka "Establishment elite") apparently has been successful at achieving its objectives through the legislative process---so why do they require some kind of “conspiracy” to achieve what they want? (4) Are political conspirators ordinary mortals? Do they function in the same manner as ordinary people? For example, do they have the same range of emotions such as anger, jealousy, envy, pride, admiration, respect? (5) Are the persons involved in political conspiracies omniscient or omnipotent? If not, are they fallible? Are they susceptible to the same weaknesses and defects experienced by ordinary people such as: stupidity, desire for revenge, failure to accomplish assigned tasks, inability to resolve personality conflicts, inability to work well with co-conspirators, incompetence, failure to anticipate adverse results of their actions or decisions? (6) From our knowledge of previous conspiracies… typically, how long from the inception of the conspiracy did it take before the existence of the conspiracy became known? how are conspiracies normally organized? For example: are there regularly scheduled meetings? Are any notes taken? Are there written memos, reports, or any other documentary evidence? Is there any sort of organizational chart? How do conspirators communicate with each other? For example: when a new policy or objective is decided upon, how does senior management of the conspiracy inform their subordinates? Newsletter? Phone calls? Emails? In-person discussions? Or what? Do the conspirators usually have regular full-time jobs doing things un-related to the conspiracy? If so, how much time are they normally able to devote to the conspiracy? Does the conspiracy normally take priority over their family life? If so, this must create tension or acrimony within their families who feel neglected---just as is the case with many prominent persons whose careers absorb most of their time. What evidence do we have of such conspirator family quarrels or friction? (7) Every conspiracy we can name (for example: Mafia, Watergate, CPUSA, tobacco companies, Enron, KKK) has produced insiders who defected and told their stories to law enforcement, legislative committees, and/or news media. Specify some defectors from the “CFR-New World Order” conspiracy. (8) In every organization involving human beings there is competition for leadership and influence. That competition often leads to internal disputes and hurt feelings. Usually, policy or personal differences result in acrimonious exchanges, and, consequently, someone leaks embarrassing information as “payback” to get even. Is there such evidence in CFR-NWO conspiracy history? (9) How is the conspiracy financed? What financial records, if any, are kept and by whom? Are the records audited in any way? Does the conspiracy assess dues or require periodic financial contributions? (10) Every conspiracy we know about has produced defectors or disillusioned participants or witnesses who copied confidential internal documents and then released them to law enforcement or Congressional investigators or the news media. The documents often reveal membership or financial data, mailing lists, or other confidential information. Are there any such defectors, witnesses, or disillusioned participants who have provided such documentary evidence about the CFR-NWO conspiracy? (11) With respect to specific defectors or disillusioned participants… Have they made any statement which summarized their conspiratorial career? In other words, something that starts with “I joined the conspiracy” on (date) and then proceeds to explain (a) their reasons for joining, and (b) what his/her specific role was in the conspiracy, i.e. what tasks he/she was assigned, and (c) why and when he/she left the conspiracy? Was the conspirator unsuccessful at any assigned task? If so, specify examples. Does the participant state whether or not he/she was a junior or senior officer within the conspiracy? OR was he/she just a follower of orders but not a decision-maker? How often did the conspirator attend conspiracy meetings? Who was present at those meetings? After the meetings, did the conspirator prepare written notes about what transpired? What plots were discussed at these meetings and which of those plots did the conspirator participate in? What specific tasks was the conspirator assigned by their superiors after joining? Who were their superiors? How much direct contact did conspirators have with their superiors? Was that contact by phone or in writing, in person, or what? Are there any records of such contacts? Are there any documents (or confirming testimony by other members of the conspiracy) that establishes that the defecting conspirator was actually a member of that conspiracy and which also discusses the conspirator’s status within the hierarchy of the conspiracy? (12) By definition, conspiracy refers to illegal behavior so…. On what date(s) did the conspirator first contact law enforcement authorities to report his/her participation in the conspiracy and the illegal activities he/she was associated with? Do law enforcement records confirm such contact(s)? Did the conspirator prepare a sworn affidavit or testify under oath in court or before any legislative committees about his/her participation in a conspiracy? If the conspirator never reported his/her participation in the conspiracy to law enforcement or other entities – then how do we know that he/she genuinely left the conspiracy? How do we determine whether or not a conspirator genuinely departed from the conspiracy as opposed to merely pretending to be a defector in order to become a disinformation agent to confuse authorities and the public about the actual existence, operations or objectives of the conspiracy OR for the conspirator to protect his/her own reputation to prevent any legal jeopardy for his/her own actions? By revealing the names of their co-conspirators, the defecting conspirator would expect hostility and reprisals. Can you cite some examples of such hostility and reprisals directed against the defecting conspirator --- such as comments made in court testimony, newspaper or magazine articles, interviews, or on websites --- where the defecting conspirator is denounced?

I agree with several points made by Jason especially his third paragraph. Historically, political conspiracy theories (which I distinguish from other types) arise from situations where the official explanation of some event or controversy does not seem accurate or honest or completely plausible. For example: as I have pointed out several times to Paul --- from the first day of the "lone gunman" explanation for JFK's murder, the majority of Americans rejected that conclusion and every time Gallup has polled our countrymen on the JFK assassination, a majority has still declared that there was a conspiracy involving more than one person. It is also historically relevant to point out that most political conspiracy theories originate from the losing side in political disputes and public policy debates -- especially if the losing side has been losing for very lengthy periods of time. Often you can read conspiracy adherent arguments which refer to the "law of averages" making some outcome impossible. The hypothesis of "losers" is as follows: It is inconceivable that the same person(s) and group(s) could repeatedly prevail in elections and policy debates and thus wield power and influence over long periods of time (plus accumulate purportedly undeserved wealth, status, awards, and honors) without the reason being some underlying and ongoing corruption of political processes. From the "losers" perspective, the simple “law of averages” should produce periodic sustained and decisive victories for their personal political preferences (i.e. candidates and policies) and, consequently, they (the perennial losers) should have a roughly equal impact upon shaping the public debate and winning political contests. The fundamental flaw of this argument is simply that there is no applicable formula from history or logic that would help us establish typical or average rates of "success" or "favorable results" with respect to political contests, policy debates, elections, measurements of power, influence, wealth, awards, and honors. In other words, there is no pre-existing norm or baseline that can be used for comparison purposes in order to determine when one prevailing viewpoint has exceeded "the norm" -- because there is NO norm! Just like, for example, there is no known formula or baseline for sports team competition. If the Boston Red Sox do not win a world series for 86 years (!) does that mean "a conspiracy" must have been responsible, i.e. some secret agreement by corrupt persons to prevent Boston from winning the world series or from even reaching the final playoffs? Why? Because "the law of averages" should have produced a world series win long before 86 years had elapsed? Because "chance" could not possibly account for such a long period of failure? Because random, unintended, or unpredictable events or circumstances could not possibly apply to such a long period of failure in competitive contests? Although Paul Trejo immediately dismisses and de-values ANY research which he interprets as critical of conspiracy theories and their adherents, there is, nevertheless, a very substantial body of academic research into conspiracy theories and why people are attracted to and believe them. Conspiracy theory acts as a psychological tonic and establishes one's own "superior" understanding of events and "the way things really are". Most political conspiracy theories presume a conscious, coherent plan in operation for decades which proceeds almost flawlessly without ever being exposed by its participants or witnesses. In fact, it is this very quality (ultra-coherence) which renders conspiracy theories so implausible. Conspiracy theories provide a degree of order and clarity which rarely exists in human affairs. So, under what circumstances would someone voluntarily relinquish such a potent elixir and revert to an ordinary mortal's weak, ambiguous, or unsatisfying understanding of history and contemporary events? Conspiracy theories speak to our internal need for neat, orderly, and unambiguous identification of enemies that one should vanquish and render impotent within society.

Nobody is trying to "shame" anybody into silence. Just another example of how you cannot correctly read and interpret evidence.

Conspiracy theories: Here's what drives people to them, no matter how wacky https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2017/12/23/conspiracy-theory-psychology/815121001/ William Cummings, USA TODAYPublished 1:36 a.m. ET Dec. 23, 2017 | Updated 1:41 a.m. ET Dec. 23, 2017 Wake up, sheeple. Right now, there are networks of passionate and committed people across the world working to subvert some of our deepest-held beliefs and upend the established world order. They're called conspiracy theorists. They walk among us. They could be your friends, neighbors or loved ones. Who knows? You may even be one yourself. There seems to be a conspiracy being "uncovered" all the time these days, and no matter how outlandish they may be they seem to have no trouble drawing in ardent believers. Despite the prevalence and pervasiveness of conspiracy theories, the reasons people are drawn to them is a relatively new area of study for psychologists. Jan-Willem van Prooijen, an associate professor at the Department of Social and Organizational Psychology at VU University Amsterdam, said research into the phenomenon has really only taken off in the last seven years. According to University of Chicago political science professors Eric Oliver and Thomas Wood, in any given year roughly half of Americans believe in at least one conspiracy theory. Their 2014 study found that 19% of Americans believed the U.S. government planned the 9/11 attacks to start a war in the Middle East, 24% believed former president Barack Obama was not born in the United States, and 25% believed Wall Street bankers conspired to cause the financial crisis that began in 2008. Those are high numbers considering there is zero evidence to support any of those theories. And a whopping 61% said they do not believe the official conclusion of the Warren Commission that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in assassinating President John F. Kennedy, according to a 2013 Gallup poll. The number has not dropped below 50% since Gallup began polling on the subject just after the 1963 tragedy. President Trump himself has expressed a belief in at least two of the above conspiracies at one time or another. He was the most vocal proponent of the baseless claim that Obama was not born in America, and during the 2016 Republican primary campaign, Trump implied Sen. Ted Cruz's father was connected to Oswald and the Kennedy killing. Trump has also said climate change is a Chinese-manufactured hoax meant to hurt U.S. industry. His characterization of Russian election meddling as a "made-up story" designed to discredit his election victory was deemed 2017's lie of the year by fact-checker Politifact last week. Everyone's a suspect Conspiracy theorists can be conservative, liberal or any other political stripe — male or female, rich or poor, well educated or not. To some extent, the human brain is wired to find conspiracy theories appealing. People are highly evolved when it comes to the ability to draw conclusions and predict consequences based on sensory data and observation. But sometimes those same processes can lead to oversimplifications and misperception through what psychologists refer to as "cognitive bias," van Prooijen said. Among the cognitive biases Van Prooijen and other psychologists believe contribute to the appeal of conspiracy theories are: Confirmation bias: People's willingness to accept explanations that fit what they already believe. Proportionality bias: The inclination to believe that big events must have big causes. Illusory pattern perception: The tendency to see causal relations where there may not be any. Yet there are factors that make some people more or less inclined to accept conspiracy theories. People with greater knowledge of the news media are less likely to believe conspiracy theories, according to a new study, “News Media Literacy and Conspiracy Theory Endorsement,” in the current issue of Communication and the Public. “It’s significant that knowledge about the news media — not beliefs about it, but knowledge of basic facts about structure, content and effects — is associated with less likelihood one will fall prey to a conspiracy theory, even a theory that is in line with one’s political ideology,” co-author Stephanie Craft, a University of Illinois journalism professor, told the Columbia Journalism Review. Oliver believes the greatest predictor of people's likelihood to accept conspiracy theories is the degree to which they rely on their intuition over analytical thinking. "They go with their gut feelings. They’re very susceptible to symbols and metaphors," he said. Conspiracy theories as coping mechanism? One reason for the pervasiveness of conspiracy theories is that they serve an important psychological function for people trying to cope with large, stressful events like a terrorist attack. People "need to blame the anxiety that they feel on different groups and the result is frequently conspiracy theories," van Prooijen said, defining the term as a belief that "a group of actors is colluding in secret in order to reach goals that are considered evil or malevolent." "People don’t like it when things are really random. Randomness is more threatening than having an enemy. You can prepare for an enemy, you can’t prepare for coincidences." Conspiracy theories also appeal to people's need to feel special and unique because it gives them a sense of possessing secret knowledge, according to a study in the July 2017 edition of Social Psychology. Real conspiracies Of course, sometimes conspiracies turn out to be real. President Nixon tried to cover up the Watergate break-in; the Reagan administration sold arms to Iran to illegally fund the Contra rebels in Nicaragua, and the CIA really did test LSD on unwitting U.S. citizens. Of course, one thing those conspiracies have in common is that they all came to light. And that is almost certain to be the case with any large plot like those imagined by conspiracy theorists. Yes, conspiracies exist, but the real ones usually don't fit the Hollywood mold of films like The Parallax View, The Manchurian Candidate or Oliver Stone's JFK. They imagine "a secret government employing hundreds of people that operate with supreme efficiency, everybody having the capability of James Bond and never making an error," said Gerald Posner, author of Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK. Posner began the book a believer that the mafia was behind the assassination, but his research led him to conclude that the Warren Commission was right and Oswald acted alone. "After 54 years, you say, 'Where’s the deathbed confession?'" Posner said of the Kennedy assassination. "Where’s the guilty person with a guilty conscience who comes out? Where’s the diary that’s been left by somebody that has now been unearthed? "Are there some out there that we never found out about? I’m sure," Posner said. "But at the level of assassinating the president of the United States, with the level of complexity and the number of people that would have had to have been involved, for that to have worked? No." The long-awaited release this year of nearly 2,900 previously classified records related to the Kennedy assassination also failed to produce any evidence of a conspiracy to kill the president. But a few documents remain classified, which is more than enough mystery to keep the conspiracy theories around the assassination alive. The National Archives have released more than 35,500 records on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The once-classified records have fascinated researchers and fueled conspiracy theorists for decades. USA TODAY JFK files: Here are the most interesting records on Kennedy assassination, annotated More: JFK files: Withheld documents only encourage more conspiracy theories, expert says An act of faith The absence of evidence never got in the way of a good conspiracy theory. No matter how unlikely a given imagined conspiracy, and no matter how many facts are produced to disprove it, the true believers never budge. For example, even when Obama released his birth certificate many "birthers" were still certain he was not a natural-born American citizen. The fact that multitudes of horrified people witnessed the planes fly into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, hasn't stopped conspiracy theorists from insisting the towers collapsed because of a controlled demolition. And what do you say to the people who still aren't convinced we went to the moon or that the Earth is flat? "I’ve learned that is there no such thing as evidence that persuades a conspiracy theorist," Posner said. "It’s sort of a psycho-religious belief, in part. They just know it’s true even if they can’t quite prove it." Van Prooijen also called conspiracy theories a "form of belief." "It doesn’t matter how much evidence to the contrary you raise, these hardcore conspiracy theories will discredit the source of the evidence," van Prooijen said. "It’s very easy to dismiss evidence as being part of the conspiracy, being part of the coverup. So it’s very hard to disprove a conspiracy theory." Is social media making it worse? Social media is often the scapegoat for many of contemporary civilization's ills, but surprisingly there is not yet evidence it is increasing the number of conspiracy theory adherents. "I’m not yet persuaded that the number of people who actually believe in them has increased due to social media," said van Prooijen, adding that people believed in conspiracies in huge numbers long before the arrival of Facebook and Twitter. But van Prooijen and Oliver think those sites, as well as anonymous platforms like 4Chan, have increased the number of conspiracy theories out there and allowed them to spread more quickly. "It was harder to get conspiracy theories to your doorstep 50 years ago than it is now," said Oliver. A person who might have been handing out fliers on a street corner to get their ideas out in the past might have 200,000 followers on social media today, Oliver said. So, what's the harm? Irrational conspiracy theories can lead people to not vaccinate their children, to deny the scientific evidence of climate change or to dismiss mass shootings like the one at Sandy Hook Elementary as "false flag" operations meant to spur gun control. A wildly irrational conspiracy theory that presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was connected to a child-sex ring that was being run out of a Washington pizza shop even led to a man opening fire in the restaurant with a semi-automatic rifle. Fortunately, he shot at the ceiling and not the patrons. The assault on a D.C. area pizzeria was a result of a man being influenced by an online conspiracy that the restaurant was helping Hillary Clinton run a child sex ring. USA TODAY, Collin Brennan More: 'Pizzagate' gunman attempted to recruit 2 others Van Prooijen believes such conspiratorial thinking can undermine democracy because it sews distrust and leads to groups perceiving each other as enemies. Oliver does not believe conspiracy theories have a major impact on politics as much as they are symptomatic of problems with the political system. "It’s less about the conspiracy theories themselves and it’s more about kind of the flight from reason in political discourse," he said. "American democracy is a product of the Enlightenment, it’s a very explicitly rationalist enterprise." And if people reject rationality to embrace what they believe over what they can prove, that Democratic enterprise could begin to unravel.

Conspiracy theories: Here's what drives people to them, no matter how wacky https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2017/12/23/conspiracy-theory-psychology/815121001/ William Cummings, USA TODAYPublished 1:36 a.m. ET Dec. 23, 2017 | Updated 1:41 a.m. ET Dec. 23, 2017 Wake up, sheeple. Right now, there are networks of passionate and committed people across the world working to subvert some of our deepest-held beliefs and upend the established world order. They're called conspiracy theorists. They walk among us. They could be your friends, neighbors or loved ones. Who knows? You may even be one yourself. There seems to be a conspiracy being "uncovered" all the time these days, and no matter how outlandish they may be they seem to have no trouble drawing in ardent believers. Despite the prevalence and pervasiveness of conspiracy theories, the reasons people are drawn to them is a relatively new area of study for psychologists. Jan-Willem van Prooijen, an associate professor at the Department of Social and Organizational Psychology at VU University Amsterdam, said research into the phenomenon has really only taken off in the last seven years. According to University of Chicago political science professors Eric Oliver and Thomas Wood, in any given year roughly half of Americans believe in at least one conspiracy theory. Their 2014 study found that 19% of Americans believed the U.S. government planned the 9/11 attacks to start a war in the Middle East, 24% believed former president Barack Obama was not born in the United States, and 25% believed Wall Street bankers conspired to cause the financial crisis that began in 2008. Those are high numbers considering there is zero evidence to support any of those theories. And a whopping 61% said they do not believe the official conclusion of the Warren Commission that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in assassinating President John F. Kennedy, according to a 2013 Gallup poll. The number has not dropped below 50% since Gallup began polling on the subject just after the 1963 tragedy. President Trump himself has expressed a belief in at least two of the above conspiracies at one time or another. He was the most vocal proponent of the baseless claim that Obama was not born in America, and during the 2016 Republican primary campaign, Trump implied Sen. Ted Cruz's father was connected to Oswald and the Kennedy killing. Trump has also said climate change is a Chinese-manufactured hoax meant to hurt U.S. industry. His characterization of Russian election meddling as a "made-up story" designed to discredit his election victory was deemed 2017's lie of the year by fact-checker Politifact last week. Everyone's a suspect Conspiracy theorists can be conservative, liberal or any other political stripe — male or female, rich or poor, well educated or not. To some extent, the human brain is wired to find conspiracy theories appealing. People are highly evolved when it comes to the ability to draw conclusions and predict consequences based on sensory data and observation. But sometimes those same processes can lead to oversimplifications and misperception through what psychologists refer to as "cognitive bias," van Prooijen said. Among the cognitive biases Van Prooijen and other psychologists believe contribute to the appeal of conspiracy theories are: Confirmation bias: People's willingness to accept explanations that fit what they already believe. Proportionality bias: The inclination to believe that big events must have big causes. Illusory pattern perception: The tendency to see causal relations where there may not be any. Yet there are factors that make some people more or less inclined to accept conspiracy theories. People with greater knowledge of the news media are less likely to believe conspiracy theories, according to a new study, “News Media Literacy and Conspiracy Theory Endorsement,” in the current issue of Communication and the Public. “It’s significant that knowledge about the news media — not beliefs about it, but knowledge of basic facts about structure, content and effects — is associated with less likelihood one will fall prey to a conspiracy theory, even a theory that is in line with one’s political ideology,” co-author Stephanie Craft, a University of Illinois journalism professor, told the Columbia Journalism Review. Oliver believes the greatest predictor of people's likelihood to accept conspiracy theories is the degree to which they rely on their intuition over analytical thinking. "They go with their gut feelings. They’re very susceptible to symbols and metaphors," he said. Conspiracy theories as coping mechanism? One reason for the pervasiveness of conspiracy theories is that they serve an important psychological function for people trying to cope with large, stressful events like a terrorist attack. People "need to blame the anxiety that they feel on different groups and the result is frequently conspiracy theories," van Prooijen said, defining the term as a belief that "a group of actors is colluding in secret in order to reach goals that are considered evil or malevolent." "People don’t like it when things are really random. Randomness is more threatening than having an enemy. You can prepare for an enemy, you can’t prepare for coincidences." Conspiracy theories also appeal to people's need to feel special and unique because it gives them a sense of possessing secret knowledge, according to a study in the July 2017 edition of Social Psychology. Real conspiracies Of course, sometimes conspiracies turn out to be real. President Nixon tried to cover up the Watergate break-in; the Reagan administration sold arms to Iran to illegally fund the Contra rebels in Nicaragua, and the CIA really did test LSD on unwitting U.S. citizens. Of course, one thing those conspiracies have in common is that they all came to light. And that is almost certain to be the case with any large plot like those imagined by conspiracy theorists. Yes, conspiracies exist, but the real ones usually don't fit the Hollywood mold of films like The Parallax View, The Manchurian Candidate or Oliver Stone's JFK. They imagine "a secret government employing hundreds of people that operate with supreme efficiency, everybody having the capability of James Bond and never making an error," said Gerald Posner, author of Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK. Posner began the book a believer that the mafia was behind the assassination, but his research led him to conclude that the Warren Commission was right and Oswald acted alone. "After 54 years, you say, 'Where’s the deathbed confession?'" Posner said of the Kennedy assassination. "Where’s the guilty person with a guilty conscience who comes out? Where’s the diary that’s been left by somebody that has now been unearthed? "Are there some out there that we never found out about? I’m sure," Posner said. "But at the level of assassinating the president of the United States, with the level of complexity and the number of people that would have had to have been involved, for that to have worked? No." The long-awaited release this year of nearly 2,900 previously classified records related to the Kennedy assassination also failed to produce any evidence of a conspiracy to kill the president. But a few documents remain classified, which is more than enough mystery to keep the conspiracy theories around the assassination alive. The National Archives have released more than 35,500 records on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The once-classified records have fascinated researchers and fueled conspiracy theorists for decades. USA TODAY JFK files: Here are the most interesting records on Kennedy assassination, annotated More: JFK files: Withheld documents only encourage more conspiracy theories, expert says An act of faith The absence of evidence never got in the way of a good conspiracy theory. No matter how unlikely a given imagined conspiracy, and no matter how many facts are produced to disprove it, the true believers never budge. For example, even when Obama released his birth certificate many "birthers" were still certain he was not a natural-born American citizen. The fact that multitudes of horrified people witnessed the planes fly into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, hasn't stopped conspiracy theorists from insisting the towers collapsed because of a controlled demolition. And what do you say to the people who still aren't convinced we went to the moon or that the Earth is flat? "I’ve learned that is there no such thing as evidence that persuades a conspiracy theorist," Posner said. "It’s sort of a psycho-religious belief, in part. They just know it’s true even if they can’t quite prove it." Van Prooijen also called conspiracy theories a "form of belief." "It doesn’t matter how much evidence to the contrary you raise, these hardcore conspiracy theories will discredit the source of the evidence," van Prooijen said. "It’s very easy to dismiss evidence as being part of the conspiracy, being part of the coverup. So it’s very hard to disprove a conspiracy theory." Is social media making it worse? Social media is often the scapegoat for many of contemporary civilization's ills, but surprisingly there is not yet evidence it is increasing the number of conspiracy theory adherents. "I’m not yet persuaded that the number of people who actually believe in them has increased due to social media," said van Prooijen, adding that people believed in conspiracies in huge numbers long before the arrival of Facebook and Twitter. But van Prooijen and Oliver think those sites, as well as anonymous platforms like 4Chan, have increased the number of conspiracy theories out there and allowed them to spread more quickly. "It was harder to get conspiracy theories to your doorstep 50 years ago than it is now," said Oliver. A person who might have been handing out fliers on a street corner to get their ideas out in the past might have 200,000 followers on social media today, Oliver said. So, what's the harm? Irrational conspiracy theories can lead people to not vaccinate their children, to deny the scientific evidence of climate change or to dismiss mass shootings like the one at Sandy Hook Elementary as "false flag" operations meant to spur gun control. A wildly irrational conspiracy theory that presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was connected to a child-sex ring that was being run out of a Washington pizza shop even led to a man opening fire in the restaurant with a semi-automatic rifle. Fortunately, he shot at the ceiling and not the patrons. The assault on a D.C. area pizzeria was a result of a man being influenced by an online conspiracy that the restaurant was helping Hillary Clinton run a child sex ring. USA TODAY, Collin Brennan More: 'Pizzagate' gunman attempted to recruit 2 others Van Prooijen believes such conspiratorial thinking can undermine democracy because it sews distrust and leads to groups perceiving each other as enemies. Oliver does not believe conspiracy theories have a major impact on politics as much as they are symptomatic of problems with the political system. "It’s less about the conspiracy theories themselves and it’s more about kind of the flight from reason in political discourse," he said. "American democracy is a product of the Enlightenment, it’s a very explicitly rationalist enterprise." And if people reject rationality to embrace what they believe over what they can prove, that Democratic enterprise could begin to unravel.

With more to come, new JFK documents offer fresh leads 54 years later BY KEVIN G. HALL khall@mcclatchydc.com http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/article191819019.html DECEMBER 28, 2017 05:00 AM WASHINGTON Half-a-dozen 2017 releases of long-secret documents about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy have given plenty of new leads to those who don’t believe alleged gunman Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. President Donald Trump promised via Twitter this fall that all the JFK assassination documents will be public by the end of April 2018 “to put any and all conspiracies to rest.” Instead, the 34,963 documents released so far in 2017 have fed the fire tended by researchers and others who believe there is much more to the story how a U.S. president was assassinated in Dallas 54 years ago. “To this point, as expected, we haven’t had a document that lists the conspirators in the murder of President Kennedy,” said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics and author of The Kennedy Half Century. “What we have gotten is a lot of rich material, not just about the Kennedy assassination but the times.” It was a 1991 movie, Oliver Stone’s “JFK,” that led Congress to require the secret documents to be released more than two decades later after they were reviewed for national security purposes and to protect past informants. The film, which challenged the official version of the assassination, brought conspiracy theorists into the mainstream and led other Americans to question the official version of events. McClatchy’s Washington bureau, the Miami Herald and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram have pored over thousands of newly released JFK documents. Here are some of the new or bolstered leads revealed thus far by the new material. Dallas mayor was CIA asset One particular document from the August release has created much buzz. It that shows that Earle Cabell, mayor of Dallas at the time of the Nov. 22, 1963, shooting, became a CIA asset in late 1956. The CIA had withheld the information on grounds that it was not considered relevant. No related documents have been released, but even alone it is important. Cabell’s brother Charles was deputy director of the CIA until he was fired by Kennedy in January 1962. This screenshot of a newly released CIA document from 1956 shows that Dallas Mayor Earle Cabell had been an asset. He was mayor at the time of the JFK assassination. “That shows why Dallas was the place,” said Zack Shelton, a retired veteran FBI agent who fervently disbelieves that Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone gunman. “I think the investigation or focus is going to be turned more into Oswald not being the lone wolf.” Shelton, now 67 and retired in Beaumont, Texas, was an FBI agent in Chicago combating organized crime in the 1980s. In the process of helping bust a contraband ring involving an alleged mafia hitman named James Files, Shelton was told that Files had curious things to say about the Kennedy killing roughly 20 years earlier. That tip to Shelton launched a chain of events that led to Files confessing from prison in Illinois that he was one of several gunmen in Dallas on the fateful day, and that he fired from the famous grassy knoll. Many historians dismiss Files’ claims, but Shelton maintains that Files was indeed an assassin and was part of the Cosa Nostra mob organization headed in Chicago by Salvatore “Sam the Cigar” Giancana. Files was released from prison in 2016 after a long stint for attempted murder. The CIA and FBI documents released so far say nothing about Files or another assassin he allegedly worked with named Charles Nicoletti, but that’s no surprise to Wim Dankbaar. He’s a Dutch national with a website and videos devoted to debunking what he considers a myth — that Oswald killed Kennedy or that he acted alone — and promoting the view that Files assassinated Kennedy. “Do you really think they haven’t deep-sixed the incriminating files?” Dankbaar asked in a testy telephone interview. The November tranche of new documents does include some about Giancana’s courier, a former Chicago cop who went by the alias Richard Cain and met in Mexico City with CIA staff; he was also an informant for the FBI. A 1992 biography written by Giancana’s family said the mob boss had told his younger brother that Cain and Nicoloetti, not Oswald, were in the Texas Book Depository from where shots at Kennedy were fired. In addition, several new documents discuss the CIA and its work with mobsters to prevent Fidel Castro’s rise to power in Cuba and later oust him. There’s this bar in New Orleans Another revelatory JFK document released in full on Dec. 15 was the transcript of a 1978 interview by the House Select Committee on Assassinations with Orest Pena. According to Pena, a bar owner in New Orleans, Lee Harvey Oswald was a U.S. government agent or informant. How did he know? Because Pena himself was an informant, he said. He had given details to the Warren Commission in July 1964 but, as the new document shows, later revealed much more detail about Warren de Brueys, an FBI agent in New Orleans to whom Pena said he reported. Oswald, he claimed, frequented a breakfast place regularly not only with de Brueys but with agents from U.S. Customs and Immigration in New Orleans. Pena believed Oswald had an office in the same government complex. Pena also testified to the House panel that de Brueys had threatened him if he shared with investigators details of their meetings and training of anti-Castro instigators, and that his FBI handler had transferred to Dallas before the assassination. Pena’s testimony, however, was largely discounted by two government commissions. “Their reasons for denying this were weak,” said Rex Bradford, president of the Mary Ferrell Foundation, which boasts the largest searchable electronic collection of JFK assassination documents; Bradford is another disbeliever in the official version of events. The newly released transcript is likely to spark new interest in the New Orleans link to the assassination and searches of government records in multiple agencies, he said. De Brueys died in 2013 at the age of 92. Son Jim de Brueys told the New Orleans Advocate at the time that his father was sent to Dallas after the assassination, not before, and that he was long frustrated by being named in conspiracy theories. View image on Twitter David Atlee Phillips, Texan in Mexico One of the names experts are watching for in the documents yet to be released is David Atlee Phillips. The Texan was a native of Fort Worth, a decorated World War II veteran and actor who rose to CIA leadership roles across the Americas, including Cuba, Mexico and Chile. Among the new documents released earlier this month was one showing that the CIA itself was trying to gauge what Phillips knew about Oswald and when he learned certain things about the alleged gunman’s mysterious September 1963 trip to Mexico. Documents show that the CIA had tracked Oswald and picked up phone intercepts of his calls with and visits to the Soviet and Cuban embassies in the Mexican capital just months before the assassination in Dallas. “He was there for six days and we know about six hours. What was he doing there? I don’t think he was on vacation,” said Sabato, who thinks there is still much to learn about the Mexico trip. The new documents provide details about people with whom Oswald met in Mexico and agency efforts to reconstruct his time there when he visited the Soviet and Cuban embassies, purportedly seeking to travel to either country. Spying on the Cuban embassy was one of Phillips’ chief tasks, he wrote in his own autobiography, “The Night Watch.” A main reason Phillips is of such interest is the claim by a now elderly anti-Castro leader in Miami that Oswald was a CIA informant handled by a man named Maurice (or Morris, as it sometimes appears) Bishop. And Bishop was actually an alias used by Phillips, insists Antonio Veciana. Veciana, a Cuban émigré, helped lead the anti-Castro group Alpha 66 and claims he himself worked with Bishop/Phillips, and saw him with Oswald. In a statement to McClatchy, Veciana, now 89 and in failing health, said that “I have no doubt that the man I knew as Maurice Bishop was David Atlee Phillips. He was the same man I saw with Oswald.” The JFK Assassination: A cast of characters As new documents about the killing of President John F. Kennedy are released, The New York Times's Peter Baker walks us through who’s who in this American tragedy. The newly released documents show that the CIA looked into Veciana’s claim. One document reveals a list of all employees past and present with the last name Bishop, ordered up by agency leaders. “I don’t think I will live to see it, but as more documents come to light the country will eventually learn the truth about the Kennedy assassination and in what way Bishop/Phillips was involved,” Veciana told McClatchy. Shawn Phillips, now 74 and an acclaimed folk musician, is the nephew of the former CIA leader. He has been often quoted telling the story of how his own father, James, became estranged from brother David late in life; an attempted reconciliation went south after David, dying from lung cancer, confessed to James that he had been in Dallas the day of JFK’s assassination. The nephew did not return requests for comment, but in a 1988 poem eulogized his uncle as a man of mystery and complexity. In “The Night Watch,” written years earlier, David Atlee Phillips said that he was working in the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City when he got a call from his wife saying she’d heard a report that Kennedy had been shot, contrary to what he supposedly confessed on his deathbed. Of Oswald he wrote, “I know of no evidence to suggest that Oswald acted as an agent for the Cubans or the Russians, that he was a CIA agent or that any aspect of his Mexico City trip was any more ominous than reported by the Warren Commission.” Still, documents released in 2017 suggest the CIA and FBI spent decades trying to better understand Oswald’s time in Mexico. More intrigue Other twists in the newly released documents include the finding that an ultra conservative former secret agent named George Gaudet had mysteriously had been issued a Mexican travel permit whose number was the next one after [[or before? DID NOT SPECIFY ]] Oswald’s permit number. This screenshot of a recently released U.S. government document shows onetime CIA asset George Gaudet apparently had received a Mexican travel permit that was sequentially one number off of a permit issued to Lee Harvey Oswald. And in yet another revealing document that will set researchers hunting in a new direction, there’s the account of a call to the British paper , the Cambridge Evening News, just 25 minutes before the assassination, advising that the U.S. embassy would soon have big news. The released document was a memo from the CIA to the FBI, dated four days after the killing, and notes the information was shared with Britain’s MI5. “It’s getting late in the game. We are 54 years on,” said Bradford, with the Mary Ferrell Foundation. Kevin G. Hall: 202-383-6038, @KevinGHall

With more to come, new JFK documents offer fresh leads 54 years later BY KEVIN G. HALL khall@mcclatchydc.com http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/article191819019.html DECEMBER 28, 2017 05:00 AM WASHINGTON Half-a-dozen 2017 releases of long-secret documents about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy have given plenty of new leads to those who don’t believe alleged gunman Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. President Donald Trump promised via Twitter this fall that all the JFK assassination documents will be public by the end of April 2018 “to put any and all conspiracies to rest.” Instead, the 34,963 documents released so far in 2017 have fed the fire tended by researchers and others who believe there is much more to the story how a U.S. president was assassinated in Dallas 54 years ago. “To this point, as expected, we haven’t had a document that lists the conspirators in the murder of President Kennedy,” said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics and author of The Kennedy Half Century. “What we have gotten is a lot of rich material, not just about the Kennedy assassination but the times.” It was a 1991 movie, Oliver Stone’s “JFK,” that led Congress to require the secret documents to be released more than two decades later after they were reviewed for national security purposes and to protect past informants. The film, which challenged the official version of the assassination, brought conspiracy theorists into the mainstream and led other Americans to question the official version of events. McClatchy’s Washington bureau, the Miami Herald and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram have pored over thousands of newly released JFK documents. Here are some of the new or bolstered leads revealed thus far by the new material. Dallas mayor was CIA asset One particular document from the August release has created much buzz. It that shows that Earle Cabell, mayor of Dallas at the time of the Nov. 22, 1963, shooting, became a CIA asset in late 1956. The CIA had withheld the information on grounds that it was not considered relevant. No related documents have been released, but even alone it is important. Cabell’s brother Charles was deputy director of the CIA until he was fired by Kennedy in January 1962. This screenshot of a newly released CIA document from 1956 shows that Dallas Mayor Earle Cabell had been an asset. He was mayor at the time of the JFK assassination. “That shows why Dallas was the place,” said Zack Shelton, a retired veteran FBI agent who fervently disbelieves that Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone gunman. “I think the investigation or focus is going to be turned more into Oswald not being the lone wolf.” Shelton, now 67 and retired in Beaumont, Texas, was an FBI agent in Chicago combating organized crime in the 1980s. In the process of helping bust a contraband ring involving an alleged mafia hitman named James Files, Shelton was told that Files had curious things to say about the Kennedy killing roughly 20 years earlier. That tip to Shelton launched a chain of events that led to Files confessing from prison in Illinois that he was one of several gunmen in Dallas on the fateful day, and that he fired from the famous grassy knoll. Many historians dismiss Files’ claims, but Shelton maintains that Files was indeed an assassin and was part of the Cosa Nostra mob organization headed in Chicago by Salvatore “Sam the Cigar” Giancana. Files was released from prison in 2016 after a long stint for attempted murder. The CIA and FBI documents released so far say nothing about Files or another assassin he allegedly worked with named Charles Nicoletti, but that’s no surprise to Wim Dankbaar. He’s a Dutch national with a website and videos devoted to debunking what he considers a myth — that Oswald killed Kennedy or that he acted alone — and promoting the view that Files assassinated Kennedy. “Do you really think they haven’t deep-sixed the incriminating files?” Dankbaar asked in a testy telephone interview. The November tranche of new documents does include some about Giancana’s courier, a former Chicago cop who went by the alias Richard Cain and met in Mexico City with CIA staff; he was also an informant for the FBI. A 1992 biography written by Giancana’s family said the mob boss had told his younger brother that Cain and Nicoloetti, not Oswald, were in the Texas Book Depository from where shots at Kennedy were fired. In addition, several new documents discuss the CIA and its work with mobsters to prevent Fidel Castro’s rise to power in Cuba and later oust him. There’s this bar in New Orleans Another revelatory JFK document released in full on Dec. 15 was the transcript of a 1978 interview by the House Select Committee on Assassinations with Orest Pena. According to Pena, a bar owner in New Orleans, Lee Harvey Oswald was a U.S. government agent or informant. How did he know? Because Pena himself was an informant, he said. He had given details to the Warren Commission in July 1964 but, as the new document shows, later revealed much more detail about Warren de Brueys, an FBI agent in New Orleans to whom Pena said he reported. Oswald, he claimed, frequented a breakfast place regularly not only with de Brueys but with agents from U.S. Customs and Immigration in New Orleans. Pena believed Oswald had an office in the same government complex. Pena also testified to the House panel that de Brueys had threatened him if he shared with investigators details of their meetings and training of anti-Castro instigators, and that his FBI handler had transferred to Dallas before the assassination. Pena’s testimony, however, was largely discounted by two government commissions. “Their reasons for denying this were weak,” said Rex Bradford, president of the Mary Ferrell Foundation, which boasts the largest searchable electronic collection of JFK assassination documents; Bradford is another disbeliever in the official version of events. The newly released transcript is likely to spark new interest in the New Orleans link to the assassination and searches of government records in multiple agencies, he said. De Brueys died in 2013 at the age of 92. Son Jim de Brueys told the New Orleans Advocate at the time that his father was sent to Dallas after the assassination, not before, and that he was long frustrated by being named in conspiracy theories. View image on Twitter David Atlee Phillips, Texan in Mexico One of the names experts are watching for in the documents yet to be released is David Atlee Phillips. The Texan was a native of Fort Worth, a decorated World War II veteran and actor who rose to CIA leadership roles across the Americas, including Cuba, Mexico and Chile. Among the new documents released earlier this month was one showing that the CIA itself was trying to gauge what Phillips knew about Oswald and when he learned certain things about the alleged gunman’s mysterious September 1963 trip to Mexico. Documents show that the CIA had tracked Oswald and picked up phone intercepts of his calls with and visits to the Soviet and Cuban embassies in the Mexican capital just months before the assassination in Dallas. “He was there for six days and we know about six hours. What was he doing there? I don’t think he was on vacation,” said Sabato, who thinks there is still much to learn about the Mexico trip. The new documents provide details about people with whom Oswald met in Mexico and agency efforts to reconstruct his time there when he visited the Soviet and Cuban embassies, purportedly seeking to travel to either country. Spying on the Cuban embassy was one of Phillips’ chief tasks, he wrote in his own autobiography, “The Night Watch.” A main reason Phillips is of such interest is the claim by a now elderly anti-Castro leader in Miami that Oswald was a CIA informant handled by a man named Maurice (or Morris, as it sometimes appears) Bishop. And Bishop was actually an alias used by Phillips, insists Antonio Veciana. Veciana, a Cuban émigré, helped lead the anti-Castro group Alpha 66 and claims he himself worked with Bishop/Phillips, and saw him with Oswald. In a statement to McClatchy, Veciana, now 89 and in failing health, said that “I have no doubt that the man I knew as Maurice Bishop was David Atlee Phillips. He was the same man I saw with Oswald.” The JFK Assassination: A cast of characters As new documents about the killing of President John F. Kennedy are released, The New York Times's Peter Baker walks us through who’s who in this American tragedy. The newly released documents show that the CIA looked into Veciana’s claim. One document reveals a list of all employees past and present with the last name Bishop, ordered up by agency leaders. “I don’t think I will live to see it, but as more documents come to light the country will eventually learn the truth about the Kennedy assassination and in what way Bishop/Phillips was involved,” Veciana told McClatchy. Shawn Phillips, now 74 and an acclaimed folk musician, is the nephew of the former CIA leader. He has been often quoted telling the story of how his own father, James, became estranged from brother David late in life; an attempted reconciliation went south after David, dying from lung cancer, confessed to James that he had been in Dallas the day of JFK’s assassination. The nephew did not return requests for comment, but in a 1988 poem eulogized his uncle as a man of mystery and complexity. In “The Night Watch,” written years earlier, David Atlee Phillips said that he was working in the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City when he got a call from his wife saying she’d heard a report that Kennedy had been shot, contrary to what he supposedly confessed on his deathbed. Of Oswald he wrote, “I know of no evidence to suggest that Oswald acted as an agent for the Cubans or the Russians, that he was a CIA agent or that any aspect of his Mexico City trip was any more ominous than reported by the Warren Commission.” Still, documents released in 2017 suggest the CIA and FBI spent decades trying to better understand Oswald’s time in Mexico. More intrigue Other twists in the newly released documents include the finding that an ultra conservative former secret agent named George Gaudet had mysteriously had been issued a Mexican travel permit whose number was the next one after [[or before? DID NOT SPECIFY ]] Oswald’s permit number. This screenshot of a recently released U.S. government document shows onetime CIA asset George Gaudet apparently had received a Mexican travel permit that was sequentially one number off of a permit issued to Lee Harvey Oswald. And in yet another revealing document that will set researchers hunting in a new direction, there’s the account of a call to the British paper , the Cambridge Evening News, just 25 minutes before the assassination, advising that the U.S. embassy would soon have big news. The released document was a memo from the CIA to the FBI, dated four days after the killing, and notes the information was shared with Britain’s MI5. “It’s getting late in the game. We are 54 years on,” said Bradford, with the Mary Ferrell Foundation. Kevin G. Hall: 202-383-6038, @KevinGHall

Wait a minute!! You promised to put me on ignore and not respond to my messages!

Did J. Edgar Hoover Kill JFK? http://flagpole.com/news/news-features/2017/12/27/did-j-edgar-hoover-kill-jfk-1 By Donald E. Wilkes, Jr. Save National Enquirer Conspiracy Theories The tabloid newspaper National Enquirer cannot make up its mind about who was responsible for the Nov. 22, 1963, assassination of President John F. Kennedy. On Apr. 20, 2016, it published an article which referred to Lee Harvey Oswald as “the man who murdered America’s 35th president,” and excitedly screamed it was Oswald who “blew President John F. Kennedy’s brains out!” That article, “Ted Cruz’s Father Linked to JFK Assassination,” infamously and falsely accused Texas U.S. Senator Ted Cruz’s father of being a “pal” of Oswald. Seven months later, on Dec. 19, 2016, the Enquirer published another article on the JFK assassination, “Dying Castro Admits Killing JFK!” This article claimed that JFK had been slain by a team of hired assassins sent to Dallas by Cuban communist dictator Fidel Castro. The fatal shots, the article asserted, had been fired from the grassy knoll by a named Cuban-born mercenary who eluded detection and made his way back to Cuba. As for Lee Harvey Oswald, he had been “framed” and “was in fact a patsy!” The December 2016 article obviously is wildly at odds with the April 2016 article but makes no mention of it. And now the Enquirer has put out a third JFK assassination article, which itself is wildly inconsistent with the first two articles but pretends they never existed. The headline on the front page of the Nov. 27, 2017, Enquirer is “J. EDGAR HOOVER ORDERED JFK MURDER!,” referencing an article that begins on page 30 of the issue, “Hoover Masterminded JFK Killing!” J. Edgar Hoover was the Director of the FBI for 48 years, from 1924 until his death in 1972. National Enquirer’s Accusations Against J. Edgar Hoover The Nov. 27 Enquirer article makes these claims: “Hoover ran the deep-cover conspiracy that killed President John F. Kennedy in Dallas,” and the Enquirer “has obtained a shocking top-secret document that proves it!” The document is a telex—a printed message transmitted via a teletype machine—consisting of a memo authored by Hoover. The telex, “now in the possession of the National Enquirer,” has “never before [been] seen.” “According to an expert who’s spent decades investigating JFK’s murder, Hoover’s memo proves the FBI czar led the plot to kill Kennedy.” “The telex was sent [from FBI headquarters to FBI field offices across the nation] on Nov. 17, 1963, at 1:45 a.m.” (This was the Sunday before the Friday assassination.) The telex (which the article quotes in its entirety) warned of a “threat to assassinate President Kennedy in Dallas, Texas Nov. 22-23, 1963…Bureau has determined that a militant revolutionary group may attempt to assassinate President Kennedy on his proposed trip to Dallas, Texas.” [Author’s note: In this and the following paragraph numerous spelling and grammatical errors in the telex have been corrected.] The telex directed all receiving offices to “immediately contact” informants and determine “if [there was] any basis for the threat,” and instructed that the “Bureau should be kept advised of all developments by teletype.” According to the Enquirer’s assassination expert, the telex “proves [that] J. Edgar Hoover “not only was part of a cabal to kill Kennedy but led it,” because, the expert claims, “the telex was sent [by Hoover] to cover himself after the fact!” The existence of the telex was first disclosed to persons outside the FBI in 1968, “by William Walter, a former FBI agent in New Orleans.” The “night after JFK was shot, [Walter] looked for the telex in the New Orleans field offices and found that it was missing!” Then, after Walter discovered that the folder in which the telex had been filed also had vanished, and proceeded to mention the telex to a superior, “he was immediately fired by the FBI.” Both the telex and the folder disappeared because Lee Harvey Oswald “was a confidential informant for the FBI, [and] Hoover…didn’t want any reports kept that might embarrass the FBI…” Although the original telex is unavailable, we know its contents because Walter “reproduced [it] from memory.” What National Enquirer Got Right and What it Got Wrong Some of what the Enquirer alleges is true. The Nov. 17, 1963 telex did exist and it did warn that JFK might be assassinated in Dallas on Nov. 22 or 23. William Walter (whose full name was William S. Walter) did discover, shortly after the assassination, that the telex and its folder had gone missing. We do know the contents of the telex only because Walter, using notes he had taken, reproduced them from his memory. The telex did first come to the attention of JFK assassination researchers in 1968. And Lee Harvey Oswald was an FBI informant. But the Enquirer article gets many facts wrong. William S. Walter did work for the FBI but was never an actual FBI agent. From 1961 to 1966 he was the night security patrol clerk in the FBI’s New Orleans field office. He was the only employee on duty at the office from midnight to 8 a.m. His responsibilities included handling incoming and outgoing telephone calls; receiving and answering teletype messages; and communicating the activities of his shift to his supervisors. Walter discovered the telex and folder were missing not the night after the assassination, but about a week or so later. The FBI did not fire Walter in 1963; he retired amicably and with a clean record to pursue other business opportunities in 1966. The article is wrong in asserting that the Walter telex vanished because the FBI did not want the public to know that Oswald was one of its informants. The telex did not even mention Oswald, much less indicate he informed for the FBI. The article is also wrong in claiming that the telex has never been seen before. In his 1988 book On the Trail of the Assassins, former New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison quoted in full the telex as reconstructed by Walter. The Enquirer article omits important facts. It fails to note that it was William S. Walter who while on duty that Sunday night became the first New Orleans FBI employee to see the telex, or that Walter immediately notified the local special agent in charge. The article does not mention the fact that Walter also discovered other FBI documents which indicated that Oswald was an FBI informant. The article also fails to mention that on Mar. 23, 1978, William S. Walter voluntarily gave a lengthy deposition under oath before staff members of the U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations, which conducted a two-year reinvestigation of the JFK assassination (and concluded that the assassination resulted from a conspiracy). William S. Walter’s deposition testimony was forthright and believable. He had a credible answer to almost every question put to him. He had nothing to gain by testifying. In fact, as Walter told assassination researcher Mark Lane, “he feared for his life since many key witnesses in the JFK investigation had died of ‘unnatural causes.’” Walter’s testimony shows that he was not an embittered or hostile ex-FBI employee; he was proud of and still admired the Bureau. Nor was he some sort of “conspiracy kook.” He testified: “I still feel Oswald was alone as far as I am concerned… [and] that there was no conspiracy either domestic or international…” However, in its 1979 Final Report the House Assassinations Committee rejected Walter’s testimony, concluding that his “allegations were unfounded.” Today, nearly 40 years later, we can say with confidence that the Assassinations Committee erred in disbelieving Walter. There is now so much information (much of it previously unavailable) about the inadequate protection given JFK during his Dallas visit, about the actual assassination itself (which is now recognizable as a military-style ambush), and about the substandard investigations carried out by the FBI, the CIA, and the Warren Commission, that William S. Walter’s testimony now has the clear ring of truth. This is why, in the JFK assassination research community, Walter’s account has gained widespread acceptance. The Assassinations Committee gave two basic explanations for rejecting Walter’s testimony: (1) it was not corroborated by anything in official FBI files, and (2) the various FBI agents and employees who would have seen or been aware of the telex all denied knowing anything about it. In light of what we now know about the performance of law enforcement and intelligence agencies before and after the 1963 assassination, these explanations are pathetically unpersuasive. As to the first reason, we now know for certain that in regard to its JFK assassination investigation the FBI repeatedly destroyed or denied the existence of files and documents it thought might compromise or embarrass the FBI. One notorious example was the destruction of the allegedly threatening note Lee Harvey Oswald wrote and delivered to the Dallas FBI field office approximately two or three weeks before the assassination. Shortly after the assassination the note, it is now firmly established, was secretly destroyed by a Dallas FBI agent acting on instructions from his superiors. The absence of anything in the FBI files confirming William S. Walter’s statements about the telex, therefore, is meaningless. It is ridiculous to think that J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI would not have purged its files of documents (including the telex) that might confirm Walter’s account, which was highly embarrassing to the FBI since it had failed to alert the Secret Service of a dangerous threat against JFK, or to take investigatory actions that might have saved JFK’s life. No one has explained how gigantically embarrassing a revelation of the contents of the telex would have been for the FBI than Jim Garrison, who wrote: “The telex had been most explicit, naming both a place and dates for the attempt to assassinate the President. It was addressed to all special agents in charge, which meant everyone in the country, including Dallas. Yet the FBI did nothing. There is no record that it notified anyone…” We now know, for similar reasons, that the fact that the FBI agents and employees asked about the telex by the Committee denied its existence is also meaningless. J. Edgar Hoover ran the FBI with an iron fist and regarded any action or inaction by FBI personnel that would embarrass the Bureau as practically felonious. In that toxic atmosphere FBI people were willing to and would commit perjury to cover up FBI blunders and prevent criticism of the Bureau. To avoid Hoover’s wrath, and out of loyalty to the FBI (a fierce devotion to the FBI was part of the Bureau’s institutional culture), FBI people would deny the truth whenever they thought it necessary to protect the Bureau’s reputation. When Mark Lane once asked Walter whether the other FBI people who had seen or heard of the telex would confirm his story, his reply was, according to the Enquirer, “Not a chance.” It is thus almost comical when we read that (in its own words) the Assassinations Committee “found it difficult to believe that such a message could have been sent without someone 15 years later—a special agent in charge, or an employee who might have seen the teletype—coming forward in support of Walter’s claim,” and that the Committee “declined to believe that many employees of the FBI would have remained silent for such a long time.” What a disturbing display of naiveté by a Committee inquiring into the murder of a President! Space limitations make it impossible to set forth here the numerous additional reasons we now have for concluding that William S. Walter told the truth. that the telex did exist, and that Walter accurately reconstructed its contents. But one of those reasons does deserve brief mention. Vincent Michael Palamara is one of the most respected JFK assassination researchers. In his excellent, eye-opening book Survivor’s Guilt: The Secret Service and the Failure to Protect President Kennedy (2013), he expresses no doubt that William S. Walter “received a memo via telex warning of a plot to kill JFK [by] ‘a militant revolutionary group [which] may attempt to assassinate President Kennedy on his proposed trip to Dallas…’” Palamara has come across an obscure official Secret Service document, dated only two days before the Walter telex, and published by the Warren Commission in 1964, which seems to substantiate Walter’s testimony about the telex. The document states on its face that it is based on “nformation received telephonically from FBI Headquarters, Washington, D.C.” It also says that the FBI acquired its information from an individual “interviewed by the FBI on November 14, 1963…” On page 65 of his book Palamara writes: “Some have tried to discredit the authenticity of this telex, but a document ignored by the Warren Commission, and since discovered by the author, appears to corroborate it. Originating from the San Antonio, Texas field office [of the Secret Service] and dated 11/15/63, here is the pertinent part of the text: ‘… a militant group of the National States Rights Party plans to assassinate the President and other high-level officials.” (For anyone interested in crosschecking, a photocopy of the Secret Service document Palamera refers to is on page 566 of volume 17 of the Hearings Before the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy.) William S. Walter could not have known of this Secret Service document. Was J. Edgar Hoover Behind the JFK Assassination? No, he was not. There is no doubt that J. Edgar Hoover despised President Kennedy and his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, whom he regarded as lightweight impertinent upstarts. In fact, he hated Robert Kennedy. Nor is there doubt that Hoover feared that if JFK was re-elected in 1964 he would lose his job. There is no doubt that prior to Nov. 22, 1963, the FBI, because it did not conduct appropriate needed investigations, and because it did not collect and share relevant intelligence information, failed in its solemn obligation to ensure President Kennedy was properly protected. The House Assassinations Committee so found in its Final Report. And no one was more aware of the FBI’s pre-assassination lapses better than J. Edgar Hoover (although of course in public he insisted that the FBI had adequately performed its duties prior to Nov. 22, 1963). To give just one example, Hoover was outraged to learn that ex-Marine Oswald, who had once defected to and lived in the USSR, had sought Soviet citizenship and offered to turn over military secrets to the Russians, who had engaged in public demonstrations in favor of Fidel Castro’s communist Cuba, and who had visited Soviet and Cuban diplomatic compounds in Mexico City only weeks before the assassination, had not been placed on the Security Index, the FBI’s list of individuals deemed threats to the national security. Therefore, less than three weeks after the assassination, 17 FBI officials—five field investigative agents, one field supervisor, three special agents in charge, four headquarters supervisors, two headquarters section chiefs, one inspector and one assistant director—were secretly censured or placed on probation by Hoover for “shortcomings in connection with the investigation of Oswald prior to the assassination.” Hoover was so appalled by the pleas of lower FBI officials that Oswald did not meet the criteria for inclusion on the Security Index that in a handwritten notation on a memo he stated: “Certainly no one in possession of all his faculties can claim Oswald didn’t fall within this criteria.” The American public did not learn of these disciplinary actions for over a decade. There is no doubt that 48 hours after the assassination J. Edgar Hoover had already rushed to judgment and made up his mind that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin and there was no conspiracy. Nor can it be doubted that the entire FBI organization endorsed and adhered to Hoover’s Oswald-did-it-alone position. As a result, after Nov. 22, 1963, the FBI, as the House Assassinations Committee confirmed, failed to adequately investigate the possibility of conspiracy and in other respects was seriously deficient in its investigation of the murder of President Kennedy. Nonetheless, there never has been any evidence that J. Edgar Hoover was the leader of or participated in a conspiracy to assassinate JFK. Nor are there any good reasons for believing such evidence ever existed. And given what we know about Hoover, it is unimaginable that this legendary, high-ranking law enforcement official—who admittedly was a terribly flawed man willing to trample on the constitutional rights of Americans when he deemed it appropriate—would ever intentionally allow the President of the United States to be murdered on his watch. Nor is there any reliable evidence that, as some have claimed, J. Edgar Hoover knew in advance that the Mafia was planning to kill JFK but did nothing to stop it. The Assassinations Committee was surely right when it concluded that the FBI—which certainly would include J. Edgar Hoover personally—was not involved in the JFK assassination. The National Enquirer’s assassination expert offers not a shred of evidence in support of his allegations that J. Edgar Hoover masterminded a plot to murder President Kennedy and that Hoover sent the Walter telex for the purpose of covering himself once the murder had taken place. The truth is that the telex reflects well on Hoover. It shows that he did take some steps to try to prevent JFK from being assassinated. If, as the expert claims, Hoover sent the telex to protect himself from criticism, why did he not make sure it was kept on file and made available to the public? It cannot have been to prevent the public from knowing Oswald was secretly an FBI informant, because nothing in the telex indicated that. In overview, the Walter telex most definitely is not proof that J. Edgar Hoover was behind the JFK assassination, and the claim that Hoover sent it to protect his reputation if and when JFK was murdered is speculative fantasy unsupported by facts. But profound mystery still surrounds the Walter telex: Why didn’t the FBI notify the Secret Service of the threat to President Kennedy, and why did the FBI do nothing to investigate the threat? Donald E. Wilkes, Jr. is a Professor of Law Emeritus at the University of Georgia School of Law, where he taught for 40 years. He has published more than 100 articles in Flagpole. This is his 51st article on the JFK assassination

Did J. Edgar Hoover Kill JFK? Did J. Edgar Hoover Kill JFK? http://flagpole.com/news/news-features/2017/12/27/did-j-edgar-hoover-kill-jfk-1 By Donald E. Wilkes, Jr. Save National Enquirer Conspiracy Theories The tabloid newspaper National Enquirer cannot make up its mind about who was responsible for the Nov. 22, 1963, assassination of President John F. Kennedy. On Apr. 20, 2016, it published an article which referred to Lee Harvey Oswald as “the man who murdered America’s 35th president,” and excitedly screamed it was Oswald who “blew President John F. Kennedy’s brains out!” That article, “Ted Cruz’s Father Linked to JFK Assassination,” infamously and falsely accused Texas U.S. Senator Ted Cruz’s father of being a “pal” of Oswald. Seven months later, on Dec. 19, 2016, the Enquirer published another article on the JFK assassination, “Dying Castro Admits Killing JFK!” This article claimed that JFK had been slain by a team of hired assassins sent to Dallas by Cuban communist dictator Fidel Castro. The fatal shots, the article asserted, had been fired from the grassy knoll by a named Cuban-born mercenary who eluded detection and made his way back to Cuba. As for Lee Harvey Oswald, he had been “framed” and “was in fact a patsy!” The December 2016 article obviously is wildly at odds with the April 2016 article but makes no mention of it. And now the Enquirer has put out a third JFK assassination article, which itself is wildly inconsistent with the first two articles but pretends they never existed. The headline on the front page of the Nov. 27, 2017, Enquirer is “J. EDGAR HOOVER ORDERED JFK MURDER!,” referencing an article that begins on page 30 of the issue, “Hoover Masterminded JFK Killing!” J. Edgar Hoover was the Director of the FBI for 48 years, from 1924 until his death in 1972. National Enquirer’s Accusations Against J. Edgar Hoover The Nov. 27 Enquirer article makes these claims: “Hoover ran the deep-cover conspiracy that killed President John F. Kennedy in Dallas,” and the Enquirer “has obtained a shocking top-secret document that proves it!” The document is a telex—a printed message transmitted via a teletype machine—consisting of a memo authored by Hoover. The telex, “now in the possession of the National Enquirer,” has “never before [been] seen.” “According to an expert who’s spent decades investigating JFK’s murder, Hoover’s memo proves the FBI czar led the plot to kill Kennedy.” “The telex was sent [from FBI headquarters to FBI field offices across the nation] on Nov. 17, 1963, at 1:45 a.m.” (This was the Sunday before the Friday assassination.) The telex (which the article quotes in its entirety) warned of a “threat to assassinate President Kennedy in Dallas, Texas Nov. 22-23, 1963…Bureau has determined that a militant revolutionary group may attempt to assassinate President Kennedy on his proposed trip to Dallas, Texas.” [Author’s note: In this and the following paragraph numerous spelling and grammatical errors in the telex have been corrected.] The telex directed all receiving offices to “immediately contact” informants and determine “if [there was] any basis for the threat,” and instructed that the “Bureau should be kept advised of all developments by teletype.” According to the Enquirer’s assassination expert, the telex “proves [that] J. Edgar Hoover “not only was part of a cabal to kill Kennedy but led it,” because, the expert claims, “the telex was sent [by Hoover] to cover himself after the fact!” The existence of the telex was first disclosed to persons outside the FBI in 1968, “by William Walter, a former FBI agent in New Orleans.” The “night after JFK was shot, [Walter] looked for the telex in the New Orleans field offices and found that it was missing!” Then, after Walter discovered that the folder in which the telex had been filed also had vanished, and proceeded to mention the telex to a superior, “he was immediately fired by the FBI.” Both the telex and the folder disappeared because Lee Harvey Oswald “was a confidential informant for the FBI, [and] Hoover…didn’t want any reports kept that might embarrass the FBI…” Although the original telex is unavailable, we know its contents because Walter “reproduced [it] from memory.” What National Enquirer Got Right and What it Got Wrong Some of what the Enquirer alleges is true. The Nov. 17, 1963 telex did exist and it did warn that JFK might be assassinated in Dallas on Nov. 22 or 23. William Walter (whose full name was William S. Walter) did discover, shortly after the assassination, that the telex and its folder had gone missing. We do know the contents of the telex only because Walter, using notes he had taken, reproduced them from his memory. The telex did first come to the attention of JFK assassination researchers in 1968. And Lee Harvey Oswald was an FBI informant. But the Enquirer article gets many facts wrong. William S. Walter did work for the FBI but was never an actual FBI agent. From 1961 to 1966 he was the night security patrol clerk in the FBI’s New Orleans field office. He was the only employee on duty at the office from midnight to 8 a.m. His responsibilities included handling incoming and outgoing telephone calls; receiving and answering teletype messages; and communicating the activities of his shift to his supervisors. Walter discovered the telex and folder were missing not the night after the assassination, but about a week or so later. The FBI did not fire Walter in 1963; he retired amicably and with a clean record to pursue other business opportunities in 1966. The article is wrong in asserting that the Walter telex vanished because the FBI did not want the public to know that Oswald was one of its informants. The telex did not even mention Oswald, much less indicate he informed for the FBI. The article is also wrong in claiming that the telex has never been seen before. In his 1988 book On the Trail of the Assassins, former New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison quoted in full the telex as reconstructed by Walter. The Enquirer article omits important facts. It fails to note that it was William S. Walter who while on duty that Sunday night became the first New Orleans FBI employee to see the telex, or that Walter immediately notified the local special agent in charge. The article does not mention the fact that Walter also discovered other FBI documents which indicated that Oswald was an FBI informant. The article also fails to mention that on Mar. 23, 1978, William S. Walter voluntarily gave a lengthy deposition under oath before staff members of the U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations, which conducted a two-year reinvestigation of the JFK assassination (and concluded that the assassination resulted from a conspiracy). William S. Walter’s deposition testimony was forthright and believable. He had a credible answer to almost every question put to him. He had nothing to gain by testifying. In fact, as Walter told assassination researcher Mark Lane, “he feared for his life since many key witnesses in the JFK investigation had died of ‘unnatural causes.’” Walter’s testimony shows that he was not an embittered or hostile ex-FBI employee; he was proud of and still admired the Bureau. Nor was he some sort of “conspiracy kook.” He testified: “I still feel Oswald was alone as far as I am concerned… [and] that there was no conspiracy either domestic or international…” However, in its 1979 Final Report the House Assassinations Committee rejected Walter’s testimony, concluding that his “allegations were unfounded.” Today, nearly 40 years later, we can say with confidence that the Assassinations Committee erred in disbelieving Walter. There is now so much information (much of it previously unavailable) about the inadequate protection given JFK during his Dallas visit, about the actual assassination itself (which is now recognizable as a military-style ambush), and about the substandard investigations carried out by the FBI, the CIA, and the Warren Commission, that William S. Walter’s testimony now has the clear ring of truth. This is why, in the JFK assassination research community, Walter’s account has gained widespread acceptance. The Assassinations Committee gave two basic explanations for rejecting Walter’s testimony: (1) it was not corroborated by anything in official FBI files, and (2) the various FBI agents and employees who would have seen or been aware of the telex all denied knowing anything about it. In light of what we now know about the performance of law enforcement and intelligence agencies before and after the 1963 assassination, these explanations are pathetically unpersuasive. As to the first reason, we now know for certain that in regard to its JFK assassination investigation the FBI repeatedly destroyed or denied the existence of files and documents it thought might compromise or embarrass the FBI. One notorious example was the destruction of the allegedly threatening note Lee Harvey Oswald wrote and delivered to the Dallas FBI field office approximately two or three weeks before the assassination. Shortly after the assassination the note, it is now firmly established, was secretly destroyed by a Dallas FBI agent acting on instructions from his superiors. The absence of anything in the FBI files confirming William S. Walter’s statements about the telex, therefore, is meaningless. It is ridiculous to think that J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI would not have purged its files of documents (including the telex) that might confirm Walter’s account, which was highly embarrassing to the FBI since it had failed to alert the Secret Service of a dangerous threat against JFK, or to take investigatory actions that might have saved JFK’s life. No one has explained how gigantically embarrassing a revelation of the contents of the telex would have been for the FBI than Jim Garrison, who wrote: “The telex had been most explicit, naming both a place and dates for the attempt to assassinate the President. It was addressed to all special agents in charge, which meant everyone in the country, including Dallas. Yet the FBI did nothing. There is no record that it notified anyone…” We now know, for similar reasons, that the fact that the FBI agents and employees asked about the telex by the Committee denied its existence is also meaningless. J. Edgar Hoover ran the FBI with an iron fist and regarded any action or inaction by FBI personnel that would embarrass the Bureau as practically felonious. In that toxic atmosphere FBI people were willing to and would commit perjury to cover up FBI blunders and prevent criticism of the Bureau. To avoid Hoover’s wrath, and out of loyalty to the FBI (a fierce devotion to the FBI was part of the Bureau’s institutional culture), FBI people would deny the truth whenever they thought it necessary to protect the Bureau’s reputation. When Mark Lane once asked Walter whether the other FBI people who had seen or heard of the telex would confirm his story, his reply was, according to the Enquirer, “Not a chance.” It is thus almost comical when we read that (in its own words) the Assassinations Committee “found it difficult to believe that such a message could have been sent without someone 15 years later—a special agent in charge, or an employee who might have seen the teletype—coming forward in support of Walter’s claim,” and that the Committee “declined to believe that many employees of the FBI would have remained silent for such a long time.” What a disturbing display of naiveté by a Committee inquiring into the murder of a President! Space limitations make it impossible to set forth here the numerous additional reasons we now have for concluding that William S. Walter told the truth. that the telex did exist, and that Walter accurately reconstructed its contents. But one of those reasons does deserve brief mention. Vincent Michael Palamara is one of the most respected JFK assassination researchers. In his excellent, eye-opening book Survivor’s Guilt: The Secret Service and the Failure to Protect President Kennedy (2013), he expresses no doubt that William S. Walter “received a memo via telex warning of a plot to kill JFK [by] ‘a militant revolutionary group [which] may attempt to assassinate President Kennedy on his proposed trip to Dallas…’” Palamara has come across an obscure official Secret Service document, dated only two days before the Walter telex, and published by the Warren Commission in 1964, which seems to substantiate Walter’s testimony about the telex. The document states on its face that it is based on “nformation received telephonically from FBI Headquarters, Washington, D.C.” It also says that the FBI acquired its information from an individual “interviewed by the FBI on November 14, 1963…” On page 65 of his book Palamara writes: “Some have tried to discredit the authenticity of this telex, but a document ignored by the Warren Commission, and since discovered by the author, appears to corroborate it. Originating from the San Antonio, Texas field office [of the Secret Service] and dated 11/15/63, here is the pertinent part of the text: ‘… a militant group of the National States Rights Party plans to assassinate the President and other high-level officials.” (For anyone interested in crosschecking, a photocopy of the Secret Service document Palamera refers to is on page 566 of volume 17 of the Hearings Before the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy.) William S. Walter could not have known of this Secret Service document. Was J. Edgar Hoover Behind the JFK Assassination? No, he was not. There is no doubt that J. Edgar Hoover despised President Kennedy and his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, whom he regarded as lightweight impertinent upstarts. In fact, he hated Robert Kennedy. Nor is there doubt that Hoover feared that if JFK was re-elected in 1964 he would lose his job. There is no doubt that prior to Nov. 22, 1963, the FBI, because it did not conduct appropriate needed investigations, and because it did not collect and share relevant intelligence information, failed in its solemn obligation to ensure President Kennedy was properly protected. The House Assassinations Committee so found in its Final Report. And no one was more aware of the FBI’s pre-assassination lapses better than J. Edgar Hoover (although of course in public he insisted that the FBI had adequately performed its duties prior to Nov. 22, 1963). To give just one example, Hoover was outraged to learn that ex-Marine Oswald, who had once defected to and lived in the USSR, had sought Soviet citizenship and offered to turn over military secrets to the Russians, who had engaged in public demonstrations in favor of Fidel Castro’s communist Cuba, and who had visited Soviet and Cuban diplomatic compounds in Mexico City only weeks before the assassination, had not been placed on the Security Index, the FBI’s list of individuals deemed threats to the national security. Therefore, less than three weeks after the assassination, 17 FBI officials—five field investigative agents, one field supervisor, three special agents in charge, four headquarters supervisors, two headquarters section chiefs, one inspector and one assistant director—were secretly censured or placed on probation by Hoover for “shortcomings in connection with the investigation of Oswald prior to the assassination.” Hoover was so appalled by the pleas of lower FBI officials that Oswald did not meet the criteria for inclusion on the Security Index that in a handwritten notation on a memo he stated: “Certainly no one in possession of all his faculties can claim Oswald didn’t fall within this criteria.” The American public did not learn of these disciplinary actions for over a decade. There is no doubt that 48 hours after the assassination J. Edgar Hoover had already rushed to judgment and made up his mind that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin and there was no conspiracy. Nor can it be doubted that the entire FBI organization endorsed and adhered to Hoover’s Oswald-did-it-alone position. As a result, after Nov. 22, 1963, the FBI, as the House Assassinations Committee confirmed, failed to adequately investigate the possibility of conspiracy and in other respects was seriously deficient in its investigation of the murder of President Kennedy. Nonetheless, there never has been any evidence that J. Edgar Hoover was the leader of or participated in a conspiracy to assassinate JFK. Nor are there any good reasons for believing such evidence ever existed. And given what we know about Hoover, it is unimaginable that this legendary, high-ranking law enforcement official—who admittedly was a terribly flawed man willing to trample on the constitutional rights of Americans when he deemed it appropriate—would ever intentionally allow the President of the United States to be murdered on his watch. Nor is there any reliable evidence that, as some have claimed, J. Edgar Hoover knew in advance that the Mafia was planning to kill JFK but did nothing to stop it. The Assassinations Committee was surely right when it concluded that the FBI—which certainly would include J. Edgar Hoover personally—was not involved in the JFK assassination. The National Enquirer’s assassination expert offers not a shred of evidence in support of his allegations that J. Edgar Hoover masterminded a plot to murder President Kennedy and that Hoover sent the Walter telex for the purpose of covering himself once the murder had taken place. The truth is that the telex reflects well on Hoover. It shows that he did take some steps to try to prevent JFK from being assassinated. If, as the expert claims, Hoover sent the telex to protect himself from criticism, why did he not make sure it was kept on file and made available to the public? It cannot have been to prevent the public from knowing Oswald was secretly an FBI informant, because nothing in the telex indicated that. In overview, the Walter telex most definitely is not proof that J. Edgar Hoover was behind the JFK assassination, and the claim that Hoover sent it to protect his reputation if and when JFK was murdered is speculative fantasy unsupported by facts. But profound mystery still surrounds the Walter telex: Why didn’t the FBI notify the Secret Service of the threat to President Kennedy, and why did the FBI do nothing to investigate the threat? Donald E. Wilkes, Jr. is a Professor of Law Emeritus at the University of Georgia School of Law, where he taught for 40 years. He has published more than 100 articles in Flagpole. This is his 51st article on the JFK assassination.

You might want to re-check your info. Several months ago I contacted the UofMichigan Library to inquire about the cost for getting photocopies of documents in several GLKS files and they sent me a cost quote for that photocopying. Also---most university libraries can put you in touch with locals (often students) who will perform research and copying services for you -- although it might cost you $15-$30 hour for their labor plus photocopying cost OR you could just post a "researcher wanted" message on Craiglist or other websites.

New Group of JFK Assassination Documents Available to the Public Press Release ·Friday, December 15, 2017 Washington, DC In the sixth public release this year, the National Archives today posted 3,539 documents subject to the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 (JFK Act). Released documents are available for download. https://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/2017-release The versions released today were processed by agencies and, in accordance with the President’s guidance, are being posted expeditiously in order to make the documents available to the public, even before the 2018 deadline established by the President on October 26, 2017. This is the last release planned by the National Archives for this year. At this point, with the exception of 86 record identification numbers where additional research is required by the National Archives and the other agencies, all documents subject to section 5 of the JFK Act have been released either in full or in part. Any information subject to section 5 of the Act, which has been redacted from documents in any of the six public releases this year, remains subject to further review by the agencies and the National Archives, in accordance with the President’s direction. The National Archives will release additional documents in 2018 based on the outcome of the reviews conducted pursuant to the President’s direction. The National Archives previously released 10,744 documents on Nov. 17, 13,213 documents on Nov. 9, 676 documents on Nov. 3, 2,891 documents on Oct. 26, and 3,810 documents on July 24. The National Archives established the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection in November 1992, and it consists of approximately five million pages. The vast majority of the collection has been publicly available without any restrictions since the late 1990s.