Morning Joe had on Marc Caputo, an Axios reporter, about the CIA whistleblower who told Axios that he saw a secret document in which an agency official bragged about misleading congressional investigators about Lee Harvey Oswald's activities in Mexico before President Kennedy was killed.
(Here is why I still write about this: The Kennedy assassination was the original sin of American fascism. Someone had Kennedy killed, and the coverup laid the groundwork for eternal conspiracy theories and mistrust of our government. Seems important!)
"It's really an interesting story. The man's name is Thomas Pearcy, and he was the CIA State Department historian, and his job was to research something called the Foreign Relations of the United States. It's a series that the U.S. government puts out every year, and while in a CIA building and ordering up confidential and classified documents on Latin America, he was mistakenly given a document," Caputo said.
"He was given a box and in the box was mistakenly included this document. It was a 40- or 50-page CIA inspector general's report. And in there, these officers bragged that in 1978 they misled and sort of tricked a congressional investigator who was the head of the House committee probing the assassination of JFK.
"And he was sort of astonished. He kept it quiet for a while, and he just recently decided to go on record because he felt it was time."
"So Marc, put this into some context, then is the suggestion here then, that there's more new evidence, new information about the Kennedy assassination, or at least about who Lee Harvey Oswald was, and that it may not have been as cut and dried as it's meant to be?" Willie Geist asked.
"Yeah, we found that out. over the years, there have been essentially sort of three major dates. There was the Warren Commission after the assassination. There was the House Select Committee on Assassinations that I just referenced in 1978 and 1979. And then there was the movie "JFK," which led to the JFK Records Act in 1992. And that is really what sort of blew the lid off of just how much the CIA knew about Lee Harvey Oswald and was tracking Lee Harvey Oswald prior to the assassination," Caputo said.
"And it showed once you put the documents together --and the documents are still coming out, how the CIA misled investigators ever since the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy. To this day, it doesn't show who might be another killer. It doesn't posit any of these theories we've seen so far, but it clearly shows that the CIA, -especially, and these other intelligence agencies participated in a massive cover-up to hide what the government knew about Oswald prior to the assassination. I should add one thing, because in conversations with the CIA as well as these various outside investigators, Jefferson Morley is his name. He's a historian. they are actually giving cia nowadays credit for coming forward and following through on trump's order to declassify more records. But they're not all out yet, and we don't have the full, complete picture 62 years on."
"There are enough lies and enough cover ups from agents and the agency over the years that a reasonable person would draw that inference.
Now, it's still an inference, but it's pretty clear they knew a lot more about Oswald prior to this. and if we could take an hour describing the various conspiracy theories and how some of them actually might be true now, some of them obviously might be false," Caputo said.
"But what we definitely know is that the narrative that people were given immediately after JFK's assassination was incomplete and misleading. And nowadays we're seeing just how much agents and agencies with intelligence agencies participated in misleading the American public and Congress in that endeavor."
For our own good, of course.
You can read Jefferson Morley on Oswald in Mexico here.
