Today is the day. The last of the files relating to the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy are finally scheduled for release. For over 5 decades our own government has kept the infamous “JFK Files” hidden from us like a trust fund executor. Now the jig is up. As the beneficiaries of this storied trust, the state has finally deemed us “mature” enough to access our own property. Of course, the intelligence community is lobbying to keep certain documents classified. This is understandable, as some of the documents already released have confirmed that the CIA was at least negligent in the prevention of the assassination, if not complicit in covering up the true circumstances of the crime.

Anyone expecting a “smoking gun” or quick, easy answers to whatever happened on November 22nd, 1963 will likely be disappointed. If there was a document that proved a conspiracy to murder President Kennedy, it would have been destroyed long ago. After all, we already know the FBI  destroyed a document that merely proved they knew who Oswald was prior to the assassination. This is not to say that the documents will not be useful in advancing our knowledge of the assassination and the circumstances surrounding it. Many researchers are hoping to gain more insight into what exactly happened during Oswald’s visit to Mexico city prior to the assassination and his contacts with Cuban and Russian agents at their respective agencies. This has long been the part of Oswald’s story with the most holes, and if the alleged assassin was in fact connected to the CIA, KGB or the Cubans this is likely where that connection occurred. The new JFK files may reveal that the CIA knew more about Oswald’s motivations and intentions than they have previously led us to believe.

The most likely result of the document dump will be that many conspiracy theorists who have failed to prove their theories will no longer be able to hide behind the excuse that the government is hiding the evidence from us. The fact that a secret cache of documents has been stored away for over 50 years has been a powerful tool for JFK conspiracy theorists. If you know for a fact that the government is “hiding” something from you, it isn’t difficult to believe that they’re covering up a conspiracy. If anyone doubts your theory, you can always point to the classified documents and claim you could prove your theory if only the documents were released. Now the time of reckoning has come. Once the documents are released, debunked conspiracy theorists will have one less excuse for their lack of evidence. Anyone deeply entrenched in defending a particularly zany theory about the assassination and pointed to the sealed documents as “evidence” probably feels like Harold Camping before the “end of the world.”

It’s nauseatingly appropriate that the man presiding over the historical release of the final trove of documents is perhaps the most dangerous conspiracy theorist the world has ever seen. Perhaps the release of the JFK files will finally prove our President’s theory that the father of Texas Senator Ted Cruz was the man who pulled the trigger on Kennedy. We all wait with baited breath.

Like most irresponsibly unsourced conspiracy theorists, it’s unclear if the current “President” is simply a liar, insane, or an idiot. Whatever the answer, never have more untruths, lies, nonsense, hearsay, and good old-fashioned hogwash been puked out of a President’s mouth than during the brief tenure of Donald J. Trump. Now he is using the release of the remaining classified documents relating to the assassination of President Kennedy as proof that he is a shining beacon of truth, honesty and transparency in the dreary swamp of the District of Columbia.

Of course, even Trump’s declaration that he is allowing the documents to be released is at best misleading and for all intents and purposes a straight up lie. The Donald isn’t signing some fiat to open a musty government bunker to let the truth be told from sea to shining sea.  If you want to laud any particular President for releasing the documents, send a nod to President Bush (the first one) for signing the Assassination Records Collection Act into law a quarter century ago. And if you really want to place credit where credit’s due, thank Oliver Stone for his 1991 film JFK which caused a public outcry forcing Congress to pass the bill.

The Donald still reserves the right to hold off on releasing the documents if the intelligence community talks him out of it. Trump has had an unusually adversarial relationship with his own agencies so hopefully he will ignore their requests. However, I wouldn’t be surprised if he ended up going against his word and keeping the last of the JFK files away from the American people. He is, after all, a heinous liar. Either way, today is the day. See you on November 22nd, we’ve got a lot of files to read in the next three weeks.