I would be surprised if the releases containing anything especially new, but the government most certainly maintains incriminating information on themselves. For instance we now know that the FBI discovered compromising information on MLK and tried to black mail him into suicide. [1] They also discovered his infidelity through surveillance and contacted his wife again trying to damage his character. This was all well documented and maintained for decades after it had happened. If you want death and murder, there's things like US involvement in Operation Condor [2] which was long speculated but finally fully verified by documents declassified under Clinton. And there are countless other examples.

Releases staggered by decades come with great plausible deniability. Is the FBI today responsible for what the FBI of the past did to MLK? If anything relevant was revealed, I'd expect the modern versions of the involved agencies to be the first condemn those actions. Whether that's genuine or not is practically impossible to know. But it's almost certainly sufficient to ensure they'll never face any meaningful consequences for their actions.

[1] - https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/11/fbis-suicide-letter-dr...

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Condor#U.S._involvem...

Didn't know about MLK blackmail. Reminds me of what happened to Hemingway. [1] Sometimes when you have paranoia it doesn't mean that you're crazy.

[1] - https://stevehuff.net/2015/07/02/ernest-hemingways-justified...

If King's affairs are real then why are they not more widely known? I haven't seen any conclusive evidence other than Hoover's letter.

I'd imagine mostly because it's not really relevant, and the media at the time wasn't the tabloid circus that it is today.

Among King's lovers was Georgia Davis Powers, first black senator of Kentucky, who wrote about their affair. According to her for instance she slept with him the night before he was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel. She was climbing into the ambulance to go with him until another individual reminded her of how inappropriate it would be. These are some pretty specific claims coming from a reputable source with 0 motivation to lie, that could be easily falsified.

The letter also mentions another lover by name and implies there was an attached audio recording of King with the classy phrasing, "Lend your sexually psychotic ear to the enclosure..." That audiotape is set to be publicly released in 2027. And then there is the bio of Ralph Abernathy, King's successor at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the man King described as "the best friend I have in the world." Within his bio he discussed King's (and his own) regular infidelities.

Because we like to imagine that our heroes are perfect. Martin Luther King, Jr. was an heroic defender of civil rights for blacks; he also cheated on his wife & plagiarised. His misdeeds don't make his deeds any less great, but … we don't like to think about them.

> It seems any excitement is contingent on believing no just in the conspiracy, but also in extreme incompetence, no?

This kind of belief is more common than you might expect. There's arguably a whole genre of "faceless enemy" in various worldviews that is blatantly corrupt/incompetent/inferior while also being overwhelmingly disciplined and powerful.

Well, put it this way... when an outcome is the product of a collective of individuals, some members of the group may be more competant than others, and different tasks might be carried out with varying degrees of success. Taking it a step further, a group comprised of multiple teams might have one very disciplined team for highly demanding critical tasks, surgical strikes, site reliability, and several weak teams for grunt work, digging ditches, scraping logs, whatever.

In such scenarios, you might see gaps open up in areas viewed as optional drudgery, or dull thankless conveniences.

Consider the Lufthansa heist depicted in the movie Goodfellas. It involved some highly motivated gangsters, who enlisted some sloppy flunkies for assistance. Guys like the getaway driver screwed up and got whacked for failing to dump the getaway car without incident, inviting paranoia that they might arouse suspicion. Then, as paranoia magnified over time, the displined core erased every untrustworthy witness.

The principal stakeholders in an operation will often possess power and skill, but their accomplices might not.

It's not the same people?

If there was a conspiracy it would have been a small clique (most of whom would now be dead) not the whole government or even official channels thereof. In other words it would have been a crime.

These files were slated to be released as ordered by Congress after the JFK film.

BTW TIL Trump is trying to claim credit for what is a scheduled release.

They might all be dead by now.

Yeah, like if burglars taped a door open and a security guard found it and instead of reporting it he untaped it and then they came back and taped it again.

Its not like in books.

Based on other comments in HN it appears that a large amount of key documents have been "lost". I've never checked the source, but many threads about the files mention that.

Theories don't all implicate the US government. There are notions of Russian/Cuban involvement, for example.

Wasn't that the theory put forward by the US government? That Oswald was a communist agent?

No, the theory put forward by the U.S. government was that he was a lone actor (with Communist sympathies).

Had we believed that an agent of a foreign state had assassinated our head of state, we'd have been obliged to go to war.

> Hypothetically, if a group of people was willing to go to all the trouble of breaking laws to assassinate a President, what's forcing them to be honorable in producing and releasing information implicating themselves?

This "hypothetically" begs the question and assumes that some three-letter acronym plotted to kill JFK.

> but also in extreme incompetence, no?

You contradict yourself. If the supposed plotters were so incompetent, how could they have pulled this off and kept the supposed cover-up alive for so long?