JFK Files Hearing: What to Know
An ode to Oliver Stone's yellow notepad
“I think John F. Kennedy was the last great hope. And that’s why I dwell on that subject. He was someone who could stand up to the militarist element in our society.”
— Oliver Stone
Straight from a late morning luncheon ceremony at the State Department—hosted by our First Lady in leopard (more on that later)—for the 19th International Women of Courage Awards, I raced across town to make the JFK files hearing at the Capitol. The stressed time crunch, and the fact that I still don’t know my way around DC and what happens in what building, had me barefoot with heels in hand, sprinting through security and across marble halls, only to arrive at a surprisingly lax setup: no line, and plenty of open seats. One day I’ll surrender to practical footwear.
I claimed a spot in the front row, dropped my bag, and made my way toward the media pit, where Oliver Stone sat surrounded by a semi-circle of press crouched at his feet.
He groaned that he doesn’t love getting his picture taken and resisted when someone leaned over to whisper that he should probably remove his red sunglasses, which were slightly—but noticeably—too small for his head.
“I will,” he muttered. “When they start talking.”
I interjected to say I liked them.
He smiled back when I did.
Florida Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna, who’s boldly heading the new Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, kicked off the hearing (the first of its kind) by reopening the case of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Not to solve it—to blow it wide open. After all these years: a 60-year-old mystery still relevant in modern political war.
Key Witnesses:
Oliver Stone, who called the CIA’s decades-long stonewalling “criminal”
Jefferson Morley, investigative journalist and editor of the JFK Facts blog, who went a step further—stating under oath that the “intellectual author” of the Kennedy assassination was “probably the CIA and the Pentagon”
The tone repeatedly turned partisan. It always does. Democrats on the panel pivoted from JFK to Trump, while Republicans like Nancy Mace and Eli Crane used the hearing to draw parallels between the original American conspiracy and what they see as the Deep State’s targeting of Donald Trump.
I’ll admit that I loved Mace’s fiery monologue on the conspiracy carousel we’ve all been forced to entertain for decades. When she’s not bashing “trannies,” she’s pretty great at giving concise Covid critiques.
“The Deep State is here today. They are right before our eyes,” Mace said.
“Do any of you believe we’re seeing history repeat itself?” Crane asked.
“I would see similarities here,” Stone replied.
That’s a big deal, no?
Stone, who directed JFK and later JFK Revisited, openly admitting he sees connections between Kennedy’s assassination and the attempted hit on Trump at the Butler rally? I wish they had followed up. Word is, Trump’s planning to declassify the Butler investigation soon, too. Good. It’s been nearly nine months, and we still know next to nothing about Thomas Matthew Crooks.
Morley revealed that hundreds of documents remain sealed—even after Trump’s 2017 declassification order, which had already unearthed bombshells: CIA-FBI domestic break-ins, internal memos admitting the agency had “exceeded its mandate,” and signs of surveillance gone rogue.
Rep. Crane: “What is the most interesting information you found in this newest release of documents on the assassination of President Kennedy?”
Mr. Morley: “The nine memos about James Angleton that were fully declassified on March 18 are the most important collection that I’ve seen so far. There is a lot of information that has come out. Jim mentioned that the Arthur Schlesinger memo that really sets the stage for the alienation between the Kennedy White House and the CIA that lasted for the rest of Kennedy’s presidency. So I would say that the Angleton memos and the Schlesinger memo are the most important things I’ve seen so far.”
Rep. Mace: “The American people deserve transparency, not just on JFK files, MLK, Epstein list, all the things […] I am grateful to President Trump for keeping good on his promise to transparency […] Sunshine, literally, is the best medicine. They’ve just seen over the last few years, regardless of their politics, we saw 51 intelligence leaders sign a letter saying the Hunter Biden laptop was fake. Turns out that was a cover up. We saw presidential candidate Donald Trump spied on by the political opposition. We saw Biden’s health decline. The previous administration lied to the American people about the President’s health. They called him falling down, ‘cheap fakes.’ We saw the origins of COVID covered up by our government. […] And so we talk about this, the deep state. Not only was it around during the JFK assassination, but here today, it is right before our eyes, and they are doing this in real time.”
While Democratic panelists argued that the hearing risked politicizing intelligence and jeopardizing data privacy, the larger message was inescapable: This isn’t just about 1963. It’s about now.
The Kennedy assassination, still unresolved in the eyes of most Americans, has become a cracked mirror reflecting the chaos of today.
Suspects Named & Implied:
A rogue CIA “clique,” possibly acting without oversight
Pentagon leadership
Mafia involvement (touched on but not emphasized)
Gary Underhill, a CIA contact who allegedly claimed foreknowledge before dying under suspicious circumstances
Stone didn’t hold back.
“I ask the committee to reopen what the Warren Commission failed miserably to complete,” he testified. “In good faith, outside all political considerations, reinvestigate the assassination of President Kennedy—from the scene of the crime to the courtroom,” he added, calling for fresh scrutiny of the rifle, the bullets, the fingerprints, and the autopsy that, in his words, “defies belief.”
“There are fingerprints of the CIA all over Lee Harvey Oswald, from 1959 until the day he died,” Stone said.
“The CIA’s muddy footprints are all over this case.”
Then came Lauren Boebert’s embarrassing little mishap—confusing Oliver Stone with Roger Stone. She used her allotted time to accuse him of his motives behind writing a book implicating LBJ in Kennedy’s death.
“You wrote a book accusing LBJ of being involved in the killing of President Kennedy. Do these most recent releases confirm or negate your initial charge?” she asked.
Stone blinked.
“No, I didn’t,” he replied.
“If you look closely at the film, it accuses Johnson of being complicit in a cover-up—but not in the assassination itself, which I don’t know.”
Morley stepped in.
“I think you’re confusing Mr. Oliver Stone with Mr. Roger Stone,” he said diplomatically.
“It’s Roger who implicated LBJ. Not my friend Oliver.” (For the record: Roger Stone wrote The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ in 2013.)
“I may have misinterpreted that,” Boebert said.
The old man sitting next to me, holding a giant iPad like a courtroom camera, silently shook his head.
Stone, a known supporter of RFK Jr. and a frequent presence at his California fundraisers, was complimentary of Trump.
“Those files should have been released in October of 2017,” he said.
“President Trump deserves credit for going beyond that—ordering the release of still-classified files on the Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy assassinations.”
As for the Smoking Gun: “No one expects there to be a ‘he did it’ document,” Stone said. “But what we do expect is a more informed mosaic of the truth.”
And maybe that’s all we can ask for: a sharper picture of the shape in the fog. A cold case that won’t stay cold. A story we keep trying to bury, even as the past continues to dig itself back up.
After the hearing, Stone stepped aside to speak with the press. He explained how the consequences of Kennedy’s death altered the course of the country. Vietnam, for one, never would have happened.
Yes. It matters.
Stone + His Legal Notes
Mr. Morley: “We have a new attitude on the part of the government. We have President Trump’s executive order, which strengthens the existing mandates of the JFK Records Act. So I think if the Task Force and the public and the Congress applied pressure and demand this material, we can get it and we can reach a decisive clarification about the causes of President Kennedy’s assassination.”
Trump, he said, has a good attitude about this stuff—not a left or right attitude.
Naturally, I was distracted by one quiet detail: his weathered hands clutching a tattered yellow legal pad, its pages curled and ink-smudged. Romantic, without meaning to be. A nod to the nostalgia of printed pages—proof of focused intellect now replaced by the far more sexless phone note app. His frenzied scribbles, a reliquary of decades spent chasing shadows and stitching together buried truths behind America’s darkest hour—only to be crushed by critics for getting it right before the country was ready to accept it.
Stone’s role now is an exciting crescendo. He’s 78. Colliding with Trump’s orders feels like a perfectly scripted finale for a filmmaker turned truth-seeker, whose life’s work has been a relentless pursuit of investigating the forces that silenced Kennedy—and exposing the machinery that is very much still scripting where the great American story lands.
Stone is also fighting for NBC to release what is known as the James Darnell film.
What is it? A cameraman for WBAP TV captured the immediate aftermath of Kennedy's assassination in Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963, capturing events like the run to the Grassy Knoll and the search behind the picket fence. The claim is that NBC cameramen Dave Wiegman and Jimmy Darnell filmed Lee Harvey Oswald outside the Texas School Book Depository during JFK’s assassination.
This is tied to the "Prayer Man" figure in one frame — what I’m told is a shadowy person standing in the depository’s doorway during the shooting. Some researchers and theorists argue this figure is Oswald, suggesting he wasn’t on the sixth floor firing shots. The footage is reportedly grainy and the figure’s features are unclear. Stone wants it made public as experts and official investigations, like the Warren Commission, have long concluded that Oswald was inside, on the sixth floor, based on witness accounts, physical evidence (e.g., the rifle and cartridge cases), and his movements after the shooting.
The next hearing will center around four surviving CIA witnesses who were there that day and support these claims — insisting Oswald was not in the building during the shooting.
I’ll likely be back to track it.
Oliver said he would like to be there too.
Love the legal pad as well. This coming from a girl who will never give up paper. 📝.
Thanks for the recap. Now off to cue up Oliver’s JFK. 😉
Love your storytelling. ❤️