Earlier this week, the Washington rumor mill began swirling with reports that RFK Jr. would be dropping his independent presidential bid and tossing his endorsement to Donald Trump. On Friday, he did just that. At the time, I posed the first question that came to mind. What's in this for Kennedy? After all, Kennedy and Trump (at least in his current, MAGA incarnation) are a rather odd pair of ducks politically who don't share all that much in common. I first approached the question based on what most competing politicians look for when folding their cards and offering a high-profile endorsement. That would be a cabinet position of some sort, or at least a senior spot with the new president's staff. But Kennedy doesn't look like a great fit for either sort of role. But what if Trump was offering something entirely different behind the scenes? Perhaps something like this. While accepting Kennedy's endorsement and praising him extensively, Trump promised that he would finally release all of the remaining JFK assassination files, and that's something that RFK has been longing for. (NY Post)

The 45th president slammed the “Harris-Biden administration” for denying Kennedy — who lost his father, the late Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, and uncle, former President John. F Kennedy, to assassinations and faced numerous death threats during his campaign — Secret Service protection until after the Butler, Pa., rally shooting.  

As a “tribute” to RFK, Trump announced that if elected he would establish a commission on assassination attempts that would release all federal records related to JFK’s murder.

“They will also conduct a rigorous review of the attack last month,” Trump noted. “But I tell you, I have never had more people ask me, ‘Please, sir, release the documents on the Kennedy assassination,’ and we’re going to do that.”

My first response upon hearing this was to say to myself, "If that's the deal that's on the table, I'll take it." I don't say this because I believe Kennedy will deliver any significant shift in the polls in Trump's favor, but because I too have been itching to see the last of the JFK assassination files finally be made public. If the price for that is having Trump cut a deal with a highly progressive member of the Kenney clan, so be it. After all, how much damage could he really do from the outside?

But Kennedy may not have gotten as good of a "deal" as he thinks. Keep in mind that Trump has promised to release all of the JFK files before but he turned around and ultimately failed to deliver on that pledge. Let's hop in the Wayback Machine and return to April of 2018. Trump had released some of the JFK files, but he then slammed on the brakes. The National Archives had just released 19,000 more pages of related documents, but Trump then came out and said that he had been convinced that "the potential harm to U.S. national security, law enforcement or foreign affairs is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in immediate disclosure.”

Perhaps all hope is not lost, however. Trump included a couple of caveats in his statement at the time, saying that the American public would need to wait "another three years or more before seeing material that must remain classified for national security reasons." He then ordered the CIA and other agencies to review all of the blacked-out material yet again "to see what more can be released." Well, three years has long since come and gone, along with Trump's first presidency. We haven't heard a peep out of Joe Biden about this, or at least nothing of any substance. I see no record of Kamala Harris even being asked about the topic. Are we really to believe that Trump will come back next year and erase all of that talk about national security and foreign affairs off of the chalkboard and finally open the books?

More books and scholarly papers about the Kennedy assassination(s) have been written than there are grains of sand on your local beach shore, so I won't rehash them all again here. But I will simply remind everyone that JFK was killed in Texas in 1963. That was more than fifty years ago. If there are any people still alive who were even young adults at the time, they would have to be at least in their 80s. No world leaders who were in power at the time and might harbor some lingering resentments are still among the living. Call me a conspiracy theorist if you like, but the JFK hit had the fingerprints of the CIA all over it in my opinion. So asking the CIA to review the documents based on "national security concerns" is like asking the fox to inspect the wire fencing around the chicken coop to make sure it's secure.