The recent release of more classified documents related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy has sparked outrage among some people, who now claim their personal information was leaked without permission, including their Social Security numbers.
One of the people allegedly affected is Joseph diGenova, a former campaign lawyer for President Donald Trump. DiGenova’s personal information appeared in documents related to his role on a Senate committee investigating government “oversteps” or abuses in the 1970s, including secret surveillance of Americans.
DiGenova expressed his outrage at the leaked information and spoke on his alleged plans to take legal action against the National Archives and Records Administration for failing to protect his privacy.
“It should not have happened. I think it’s the result of incompetent people doing the reviewing. I don’t believe it had anything to do with rushing the process. The people who reviewed these documents did not do their job.” diGenova told NBC DFW.
The recently declassified documents, which were made public on March 19, as previously reported by DX, apparently contain a vast amount of sensitive information about various people involved in the investigation of President Kennedy’s 1963 murder, many of whom remain alive today.
In response to some of the backlash caused by the leaked personal information, the White House has announced a plan to “support” those impacted, pledging to issue new Social Security numbers to anyone whose data was compromised.
“At the request of the White House, the National Archives and the Social Security Administration immediately put together an action plan to proactively help individuals whose personal information was released in the files,” Karoline Leavitt, White House Press Secretary, said in a statement.
The declassification of the new JFK files, ordered by President Trump in an Executive Order on January 23, aimed to resolve long-standing questions surrounding that mysterious day in Dallas.
Gerald Posner, author of Case Closed, which claims that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in the assassination, spoke on his concerns over the rushed release of the documents.
“I know that people will probably shake their head if they hear that — because how could they be rushing in after 62 years?” Posner told NBC. “It’s a lot of documents. It’s a lot of files. The Archives in the past has provided a sort of a search guide. So if I want to find James ‘Jesus’ Angleton (former CIA director), for instance, I could do a search and find all the documents he’s in and then I can see what’s different from the last release. This time they didn’t have that.”
The events of November 22, 1963, remain some of the most scrutinized and debated topics in American history, even after the public release of nearly 80,000 new documents earlier this month.