There's Probably No 'Smoking Gun' in the JFK or Epstein Cases. We Should Be Allowed To Look Anyway.
You don't need to uncover a vast conspiracy to find valuable revelations—and without transparency, you don't know what revelations might be there.
The CIA's coverup about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy is unraveling. Despite the agency denying that it knew anything about assassin Lee Harvey Oswald before the murder, newly declassified documents shed light on the links between Oswald, a Cuban guerrilla group known as the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil (DRE), and CIA case officer George Joannides.
Several months before the assassination, Oswald had offered to work for the DRE, a CIA proxy overseen by Joannides. Years later, Joannides—operating under a fake name—became the CIA's liaison to Congress during a congressional investigation into the assassination. The documents add to a pile of evidence that the CIA had been following Oswald for years and deliberately covered it up afterward.
Oswald "really wasn't alone, he had the CIA looking over his shoulder for four years," said Jefferson Morley, a historian who has long pushed for opening the Joannides files, in an interview with The Washington Post.
Decades of dogged investigative work have poked plenty of holes in the official story around Kennedy's assassination. But they haven't produced a smoking gun, a single document that demonstrates what the CIA wanted out of Oswald or what knowledge it had about his fatal plans. And that smoking gun may never turn up; Morley and others speculated to the Post that Joannides was running an "off-the-books" operation through the DRE.
The same is likely to be true about another case that's in the news this week: that of the late sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. After he died in custody in 2019, calls have grown for the government to release the "Epstein client list." As I argued several months ago, such a list likely doesn't exist. What does exist is a scattered patchwork of evidence about the people Epstein associated with and leads waiting to be followed up on.
To be clear, the official story on Epstein has some troubling inconsistencies. Last week, the Department of Justice and FBI released a memo stating that they found "no credible evidence found that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his actions." But it has been publicly reported that Epstein attempted to extort tech tycoon Bill Gates over Gates' (legal) extramarital affair.
The Trump administration has not exactly inspired confidence in its transparency or diligence. Attorney General Pam Bondi said in February that bombshell information was "sitting on my desk," then released a heavily redacted set of documents labeled "Epstein Files: Phase 1," most of which were already public. Last week, the Department of Justice claimed it would release "raw" surveillance footage from Epstein's prison wing on the night he died, then published a sloppily compiled video clip with a minute of footage missing.
President Donald Trump himself told his followers on Saturday not to "waste Time and Energy on Jeffrey Epstein, somebody that nobody cares about." (It was a change in tune from last year, when Republican politicians attacked the Democratic administration for not pursuing the Epstein case enough.)
Government coverups rarely involve compiling one document that lays out all the wrongdoing in detail—such as the CIA's "family jewels" in the 1960s—and hiding it from the public. It makes far more sense for officials to keep the wrongdoing from being put to paper in the first place. Conspirators make informal plans off the record. Internal investigators turn a blind eye to evidence that they think might lead to inconvenient places.
Epstein was only arrested in 2019, after all, because reporting by Julie Brown in the Miami Herald and a lawsuit by victim Virginia Giuffre forced the federal government to reopen the case. Authorities had originally struck a plea deal with Epstein in 2007 that gave him a short prison term along with immunity for any co-conspirators who might come to light.
Official defensiveness around information is not necessarily proof that officials know about a smoking gun hidden around the corner. Oftentimes, it seems that they fear an investigation because they don't know what it will turn up. And that's exactly why it's worth pushing for more transparency, whether in the Kennedy assassination or the Epstein case. Even if there is no smoking gun to be found, following the trail can bring worthwhile revelations. Often the search can go in completely unexpected directions.
The JFK Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 has helped uncover many other mysteries of Cold War espionage history. Just this year, the U.S. government was forced to release information about its espionage in Mexico and on U.S. soil, its foreign election interference, its 1961 assassination of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, and its role in the South Vietnamese coup of 1963, all because these documents touched the intrigue surrounding Kennedy's assassination.
Following Epstein's connections to world leaders could similarly uncover modern political intrigue. While some conservative media have fixated on Epstein's connections to former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, his Rolodex also included a British prince, a close confidant to the royal family of Dubai, a Russian cabinet minister, former U.S. President Bill Clinton, and Trump himself.
Not everyone who crossed paths with Epstein was involved in his sexual crimes. (Although the paraplegic physicist Stephen Hawking visited Epstein's private island, for example, the internet memes about his debauchery there were completely fake news.) Still, it's worthwhile on its own to figure out which powerful figures Epstein brought together and what they discussed at his gatherings.
While there's a danger in being too credulous about fantastical conspiracy theories, there's also a danger in being too credulous when powerful people insist that there is nothing to see here. After Trump told conservative journalist Charlie Kirk to tone down his criticism of Bondi over the Epstein files, Kirk said on air that he's "done talking about Epstein. I'm going to trust my friends in the administration. I'm going to trust my friends in the government."
With that attitude, we wouldn't know what we know about the Kennedy assassination—and Epstein would still be a free man.
