U.S. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna told prominent podcaster Joe Rogan that Russian intelligence has information on John Kennedy’s assassination. But she said the CIA destroyed its own copies of those records years ago.
Now she says agents from Russia will share the vital information with her. In an appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, the St. Petersburg Republican said her House Select Committee on Government Secrets has worked to declassify information about the assassination. On that front, Luna revealed she has spoken to Russian intelligence about gaining information from files overseas.
“The KGB had actually come forward with their own independent investigation, and they actually gave it at Kennedy’s funeral to U.S. officials. We never got those documents, and it’s my belief that the CIA actually destroyed that information and evidence because it would have confirmed with this the KGB,” Luna said.
This isn’t the first time, though, that Russia has claimed to have vital information about the Kennedy investigation. In the 1990s, a report was released with KGB insinuations that President Lyndon Johnson, Kennedy’s Vice President and successor, was “responsible for the assassination,” as reported by UPI at the time.
The KGB also commissioned a book shortly after the 1963 assassination that implicated the CIA in plotting to kill Kennedy. Experts say those findings were based largely on fabricated evidence but were eagerly passed among a community of conspiracy theorists in the United States, according to former KGB officer Vasily Mitrokhin, who wrote a book on the topic with Christoper Andrew and discussed the disinformation campaign with The New York Times in 1999.
The faked evidence included forged letters between CIA leaders and Lee Harvey Oswald, whom a federal investigation led by Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren determined was the sole assassin. Oswald was shot and killed by another man, Jack Ruby, shortly after Kennedy’s assassination.
Luna said after meeting with a Russian ambassador on the assassination, she feels it is worth taking another look at the KGB’s files. She said the CIA had plenty of reason to cover up details about the investigation in the 1960s.
“Mind you, at the time, JFK was actually in talks with the President of Russia at that time, and his perspective is that he actually wanted to do a joint mission between the U.S. government and the Russian government to the moon,” Luna told Rogan.
“And there are aspects and divisions within the intelligence community. You obviously saw the Cold War was happening. They wanted war in Cuba. They wanted war with Russia. So for them to be able to say that Kennedy, who was not a communist, but that he was a communist sympathizer, and how dare he talk to these dirty communists? I mean that, in itself, would have given them any ammunition to turn a blind eye, or at least not fully figure out who assassinated Kennedy.”
The CIA for its part has long said the Russian information campaign was aimed at undermining the overall reputation of the American intelligence community.
In an agency-distributed paper by Max Holland, agency leaders said Russia spread misinformation about Kennedy’s death through the same European channels used to raise international skepticism years prior about whether the U.S. was involved in an Algerian coup. Those eventually drew the attention of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, who made many allegations that later informed director Oliver Stone’s film “JFK.”
But numerous investigations after the Warren Commission’s report have found no evidence of CIA involvement in the assassination.
“The bottom line in each instance gave no credence to any of Garrison’s allegations,” the Holland piece reads.
But of note, Luna’s committee has uncovered previously classified information about the CIA’s interactions with Oswald before the Kennedy assassination. Documents published show CIA officer George Joannides had worked with Oswald during his time with the Cuban Student Directorate, an American movement sympathetic to Cuban dictator Fidel Castro.
Luna suggested the documents dumps have proven Oswald was not a lone gunman and that agents of the CIA lied to Congress at the time, and that the Warren Commission intimidated witnesses to reach its desired conclusions.
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