Category Archives: documentary

Robert Reynolds on Trumps Release of JFK files

www.mattkprovideo.com/2025/03/07/robert-reynolds-on-trumps-release-of-jfk-files/

http://www.onthetrailofdelusion.com

http://www.jfkarc.info

I say:

If you believe most Conspiracy media, you’d think the same people who theoretically got away with killing the President left conclusive evidence of their crimes in locked off files.
The same blood thirsty super villains that are said to have murdered witnesses, confiscated and either edited or suppressed all the photos and documents that might reveal the truth of the conspiracy, didn’t destroy the incriminating material in the files?

The sealed off files have the names of the government agents who conducted the investigation(s) and THAT needs to be kept secret!

TRANSCRIPT:

Noted author Fred Litwin and of course Fred is also the author of I was a teenage JFK conspiracy freak, on the trail of delusion and Oliver Stones film flam-the demagogue of Dealey Plaza F

red Litwin is here he’s a longtime author and certainly Watcher of politics

joining us

Fred Litwin great to have you here

thank you very much

so welcome to another edition of on the trail of delusion where I try to separate the wheat from the chaff and actually try to give you something sub stal on the jfk assassination rather than the usual crap that you find on the internet or on YouTube and so I’m really delighted once again to have my friend Robert Reynolds here to discuss the JFK assassination files there is no other expert no other person on this planet who knows as much about the assassination files as Robert Reynolds and so it’s just a delight to have him to have him with us once again this is his second appearance on the trail of delusion so welcome Robert well it’s great to be here Fred I’ve really been trying to get back for another for another go around and working hard well you you’ve been really busy I mean you have posted some absolutely important very important articles on your blog which will be linked to Below in the notes um so anyways why don’t you lead it off and tell us a bit about the files okay um uh I guess the best way I can do that is sort of introduce how I got involved in this and and it’s the simplest explanation is I started a Blog um after I had read some of the first files that were released from Nara in 2017 and um been doing that for I guess almost over seven years almost eight now and so that’s what I do and I guess that’s why I’m here um so maybe I can um perhaps give people a a general introduction to the subject a really quick one um so the blog I run is called the JFK Arc doino and um it’s basically a series of occasional notes about the JFK assassination records collection and hence the name of the block and what is that um the JFK assassination records collection which I will from now on call The Arc is the US government’s primary collection of Records on the assassination of President Kennedy it also includes all the records they’ve got on the multiple ass investigations of the assassination and a bunch of stuff on the Cold War background uh the collection was established by the JFK act which is a law passed by Congress in 1992 and this law gave final custody of the records to the National Archives and Records Administration

which I’ll call narrow from now on uh the JFK act also created a limited term Federal board called the assassination records review board which I’ll call the AR arrb and the arb’s function was to secure review and oversee release of all those records so by the time the board closed up shop in 1998 uh it had put more than 300,000 records in the collection about 88% of them released in full and so already we get these technical terms that are such a pain in the butt to explain um but basically uh Records are not Pages um call them do documents or even uh collections of documents sometimes they’re not even documents there are things like recordings or photographs the release is a very tricky term but here let’s just say it means um you can see everything in the records if they are released in full everything is there for you to see there’s nothing that’s been left out right um so 88% were released in full what does that mean it means 12% of the arc records were not released in full how come the JFK act allowed for postponing sensitive government and personal information in the records up until a final release date of 26 October 2017 and this is not a random number this is 25 years after the bill was signed into law as soon as the law was passed um it had this provision which allowed departments bureaus and a agencies which provided the records um to request redactions subject to a caseby case review by the arrb now redaction is another one of these technical terms redacting refers to removing information usually text okay that’s the vast majority of the collection uh removing text from a document and replacing it with a holder um that indicates something has been removed okay they’re not permanently removing it they’re removing it from the copies that they make public and the arc uses currently uses a blank box as a holder so one blank box indicates one redaction okay and that’s how we count count boxes now it’s not quite that simple but it’s pretty close so um even though the arrb had very strict um guidelines about what what they would let people redact um 12% of the records met their strict criteria and um as a result they were these portions of these records sometimes a whole record was held back for periods of time ranging from a few years I.E maybe 1995 up until 1997 uh all the way up until October 2017 which is the final release date but even before October 2017 Nara had already begun releasing some of the information previously held back they did this obviously with the consent of the agencies that were processing all this stuff um and the first one of first big release of this was in uh July 2017 and want went there were repeated releases of uh information that had been redacted previously redacted stuff from 2017 all the way up until 2023 and even after all this uh there is still a small number of Records today that have portions held back exactly how much information is still held back and how significant is this information for people who are interested in the JFK assassination that’s the kind of questions that interest me and that’s what I write about in the blog now a lot of people have been uh talking about this regular news um on the YouTube on podcasts and all these places since president Trump signed an executive memo which ordered senior government officials to come up with a plan to release the stuff that was held back in the arc what can I say it was clear even before the election that he was going to do something like this and so I started working on my project uh in December and I’ve been working on this for about three months now going over all the redacted records yet again not the first time I’ve done this but I’m doing this in agonizing detail this time every last page um to come up with my own wish list that I’m gonna send to Trump and ask him if he can please get these out right away and that’s that’s what I’ve been doing and so the stuff that you mentioned is up on the web page uh the probably the most useful one for people who care about this maybe not not even that interesting subject is a an Excel sheet that lists all of the currently redacted CIA records in the arc and it gives things like um how many redactions there are remember redactions are the boxes blank boxes that of thing so how how many CIA documents are there that that have redaction still in in in the collection I originally said uh 1484 but it looks like it’s down to 1482 these numbers go down um and I you know I I I feel like I should justify why they’re they they weren’t right the first time and the thing is that I use the postponement documents that the Departments and agencies sent to uh president Trump and to the National Security Council that give these documents give detailed lists of all the records that they say uh we still want to keep some stuff held we still want to hold some stuff back in these records uh Records are identified by record numbers and sometimes they’re called riff numbers because RI is an abbreviation for Reader information form which is the finding Aid that all every record has staple to it or on top of it actually not even that um but now we’re getting into the details that I talk too much about okay so so you have these uh 1500 documents so you’ve gone through you know what’s in those redactions I mean tell tell us a bit about you know we you could tell from the document as what kind of redactions are there so what what are what are what’s been redacted in those documents they they have they were required all of the agencies that want to do this are required to tell people what kind of stuff they’re holding back and to explain why they want to do this and they they have to give a schedule for when they’re actually finally going to release them if they can’t tell people a date then they have to at least tell them how often they’re going to look at them again and see if they can let them out now so um I call these explanations of what’s being held back I call them redaction categories and the CIA has three types of redaction categories um but they they mix sometimes especially in the long complicated documents um you get mixt of them the three three types are people uh information relating to people uh information relating to locations and information that’s CIA locations okay they’re not going to try and hide hellsinki or something like that um but the CIA had and perhaps has a Station in Helsinki and they don’t want that released or they didn’t um and that’s a complicated story about why they didn’t but that’s they felt that’s very important and there’s still locations of CIA facilities that are held back and finally the third detail is called operational details as you can imagine this is pretty complicated but um it turns out that this time around there’s probably the the thing that struck me that I’m seeing now that I didn’t see in the earlier releases is they releasing cover details and when the CIA stations people overseas outside the country they they can’t just put up a sign that says CIA you know apply for weapons here or CIA spill your guts here they can’t do that they have to have some sort of cover and this is not just the CIA this is every country in the world that have an intelligence agency does this and so uh different kinds of cover um most of them are official cover meaning that they have some official government status right obviously State Department is a very important one uh you US military can provides cover for CIA officers and then there’s non-official covers which if you watch Mission Impossible you know that these guys are called knock officers non-official cover officers and there’s the knock list good God is there really a knock list you gotta be kidding me there’s not a knock list and I got up put a list of all this stuff together um but but they do have um you know this this kind of cover and um they’re particularly tight mouthed about that obviously some of them are business Commercial cover deep commercial cover is a phrase that’s been released okay so when you go through you know when you I mean you can go and look at all these documents anybody can go look at these documents now and see for themselves what’s redacted for for the large part most of them you could read almost the entire document and get a real good feel for what’s in there yeah okay so um first let’s uh let me just mention that um I’m distinguishing in my on my blog and when I talk about it I try and distinguish between two basic ways of holding stuff back number one I call withheld withheld documents means you can’t see it period but there is B basic metadata information about the document how many pages who does it belong to What’s the title uh who is it from who is it to Etc okay and there are 515 records that are withheld right and there 499 of them are income tax returns and the reason is that the JFK act says you we don’t we we let the United States tax code U forbids the release of personal uh income tax returns and we want you to continue that in the collection so that’s that um in fact some of them can come out if the people concerned were to sign an agreement and this gets into a this is a specialized subject I’ll just leave it there right every else in the collection is

released 99% of the collection is released in full that is there is nothing held back 99% is a lot yeah okay and I mean it is hundreds of thousands of things and the total amount of records that have something held back in them is my estimate was at first uh 2544 2544 that number has gone down it’s probably really close to about 2,500 right why because I was looking at the documents the ageny sent to the NSC and as they’re sending in those documents they they have a deadline right where they have to send in the document but they kept on looking at the stuff later and they were actually release stuff after they sent in those documents because they were under severe pressure to get this stuff out okay so that that’s uh like for example I found another 1520 NSA documents that were released in full that they said you know we’re applying for we want to redact these still and then they decided no we’re going to release that stuff so um in those documents that have redactions um the question is how much are they holding back right yeah and so looking we’re looking at boxes that’s one thing how big is the box that tells you they’re holding something small or big back and then how many boxes that’s that’s the other thing right and so um the biggest box you can have is what I call a whole page redaction that is to say there’s a box on the page and that’s basically all you get it’s a little tricky because sometimes they put like a page number on it okay right or there’s a stamp at the top says top secret don’t tells and uh you know that that’s still that’s still a whole patod action right uh but some of them there’s really it’s really a messy border right a lot of the FBI documents have like a title at the end a very short title at the top of the page right Memo from Belmont okay is it is it and then you have no idea what Belmont said right everything that Belmont said is gone but you have you know at that page Memo from Belmont and then nothing else not even a page number and so those that’s that’s the biggest kind of redaction you can get right and uh the number

one record for whole page redactions is an FBI record that has I don’t know okay because it’s it’s so it’s extensive right it’s a 1,400 plus page record um that was part of the FBI’s administrative file for the church committee and of those 1417 Pages 350 of them have redacted have redactions and I would say that they’re probably close to 200 pages that are whole page redactions that’s the biggest one however um This Record has nothing whatsoever to do with the JFK assassination which is uh I’ll I’ll back it up if we want to talk about this later right in fact most of these records are they are class they are labeled um by the agencies that contributed them they are labeled either NBR or n uh not believed re relevant or not assassination related and um the vast majority of them are are that kind of record yeah and hasn’t hasn’t tonim said that basically all the assassination related documents are really out there um here’s what he said okay this is an important point that I don’t think that I emphasized the last time I was on so I’m gonna I have a I have my script to read here okay so uh the ARB was determined to release before went out of business they were determined to release any and all records judged Central to the assassination story and they said we did it there’s the board members staff or members have always vigorously defended their perform their record in this regard and so tun uh John tunan who was the chair of the ARB uh told Vincent bugliosi who in his massive book buosi said what else is in there there’s got to be some goodies in there and he said the board protected IE released uh held back excuse me protected I.E held back nothing not one document or page that was centrally related to the facts of the assassination itself so that’s you know that’s not obviously they held back 12% right and then and he didn’t you know I feel like you don’t quite get an idea of the scale of how much was hold back 12% of course is is a small percentage but remember there are five million pages so it was a lot right and the first set of releases in 2017 um release a bunch of stuff and Trump said uh you know I people were you know giving him a hard time about this when the stuff started coming out he said I didn’t mean it that way I meant it you know really get it out there and so they did it again they took a six-month break they took they took another six month to go over everything that they had said we’re going to hold back again and they released a bunch more stuff another 5,000 plus records and by the time they got through with this it was a substantially reduced he heap of paper that they were holding back um in 2021 Biden said we’re g to start releasing this stuff guys you know first put out the stuff that you know you’ve decided you don’t want even want the hassle of writing about it okay and so they released another 1500 records then 2022 they released a lot of Records okay many of them were short redactions just single page records um but it it really killed a lot of it and by the end of 2022 they said basically we have

it’s in different parts okay this is the postponement documents but say there were 4,500 pages right um then in 2023 they started releasing more right and and one reason there’s some confusion about this is because people are not really didn’t really go over the 2023 releases close enough but we do have the postponement documents which give us exact numbers for what was left at the end of 2022 except that sometimes you know even more is gone right and so this is you know going over this in agonizing detail is how I figure out where where stuff is held back and where it’s not I mean it’s incredibly boring and it’s bad for your eyesight I I spent 5 hours today going over a 1444 page FBI document I knew it it’s really explicit there’s nothing in here that has anything to do with JFK right and and uh but it there’s redactions okay how many redactions 1,444 pages there are four Social Security numbers redacted in this

document I spent five hours going through it my eyes felt like they were bleeding at the end I’ve been over it twice um I’m pretty sure that maybe I missed one okay right big hairy deal I missed one social security number in 1400 pages that is not unusual for the documents that we’re looking at so so but you know so T I’m said you we we’ve released all the assassination related records do you think there’s still assassinated amongst the redactions are are are many of them actually related to the assassination or any of them or do we know I believe I believe that I mean I’ve looked at this okay I bear in mind what tunheim said to buosi uh nothing was held back that was centrally related to the facts of the assassination itself I I believe that’s true right pretty cl to true now um related to the investigations of the assassination yes there was and last time we talked I said they they held back a bunch of stuff I said that more than once but I wasn’t talking about the facts of the assassination okay so take it back quick and uh um I mean some of the things that were one reason that people were dissatisfied with the investigation is that some of the you know how do you know that right Oswald visited the Russian Embassy in Mexico City uh four weeks six weeks how long was it like six weeks before he he shot Kennedy how do you know that right that’s a question that everyone wanted to ask and they refused to say until uh the hsca they started having newspaper stories about how they had a telephone tap but they still didn’t say how do you get the telephone T and uh it’s only in 2018 that we finally find out that um the CIA had a very close liaison relationship with the Mexican Government and they actually did joint operations including tapping the telephones of the Russian Embassy and this is something that they would they you know pounded their heads and didn’t want to do that and the the ARB was going to make him do that in 1998 and the state department finally you know submitted a memo saying well if you do that our estimate is that the Mexican Government will fall so don’t do that theb said oh well all right and so they were in a very difficult situation and ton heim’s words in that statement to buosi is he’s thinking exactly of that facts of the assassination itself now facts of the investigation some things were held back because how do you know that’s investigation right yeah and I you know I’ve been struck I’ve I’ve gone through I mean I you know I don’t have the time to go through every document but when I do go through some of those CIA documents I’m always struck by the fact that I can read the whole document and and like a city is is redacted in the distri ution list right like but I but I can see the whole document I mean a few years ago somebody sent me a Clay Shaw document that had just been released and and I was very excited oh Clay Shaw document and I opened it up and I said well I’ve seen this before and the only thing that was now unredacted was the name of the CIA agent who wrote it right so um and this is um very much the arrb style and um um it’s it’s actually they’re actually doing what the CIA asked them to do they said don’t don’t tell don’t make us publish the names of people who work here if it’s people who are you know acknowledged administrative heads of the CIA yes now in England they they didn’t used to do this who is the head of MI5 who who is the head of MI6 right don’t no no no we’re not going to tell you that and if you attempt to publish that in your newspaper we’re going to send you a d notice yeah yeah if you ignore the D

notice not good now Americans don’t believe in D notices and nothing like that and besides they have to have you know the CIA heads to come in front of of Congress so they can rre them over the cols yeah um these other guys the sorry the the officers who are stationed abroad cannot be identified unless you want to make sure that they never go abroad again right so it’s there were very explicit cases the hsca was going to identify this one CIA officer who had just been assigned I think it was to Germany he had been he was one of the people who questioned nenko right and they wanted they wanted to get this down because they were very unhappy the way nenko a Soviet Defector was treated and he said if you do that then my career is over and so they they finally said okay we won’t do that and uh a lot of these people were there was one guy Tom Flores who who was who after he retired he lived in Venezuela but he was the head of the cia’s Cuban force and you know he there were there were lots of these guys yeah I know that guy he see them and so he got a letter from CIA saying ARB is looking at all this stuff and they’re going to publish some stuff and some of it has your name on it and he said I’ll see you in court um because it was a it was not just a matter of okay whatever you say it was a a a legal deal and if you if you cause me this kind of problem I’m not just going to sit back and take it and it turns out that there’s I’ve seen at least one document where it’s a guy actually whose name got spilled actually got got compensated so that kind of thing is held back right and I I remember seeing some documents in the ARB from I think it was a John Witten who uh a CIA guy who uh had a student in my John skelo I think and he had written the ARB saying uh well you know I’m I’m I’ve immigrated I think to Mexico and and if you release some of the stuff with my name I they may determine I lied on my immigration forms and you’re going to cause me a lot awful lot of problems well he was he made he made a big stink he was in he was in Vienna though and uh he he it was they actually sent people to talk to him to interview him and uh it was towards the end they felt really bad because I mean it was his situation was tough and you know what better way to totally screw someone’s someone someone up right yeah so tell me a bit about uh you you you got all the freedom of access information about um what’s happened under the Trump Administration and the Biden Administration about uh the releases and and you’ve put a lot of documents up on your website uh for people to see so tell us a little bit about um the whole process and what you learned in from your Freedom of Information Act yeah right okay this is um this was a a a request that was actually filed by Larry schnap and but uh couldn’t he he he didn’t send us anything so um max Holland uh submitted a request to a foyer request to Nara and said could you please send me everything you sent Larry snap right and they said why sure Max and they sent everything they sent they sent Larry so um um uh and Max said take a look at this and you know see what you think and it was very interesting um I didn’t see any of the Biden stuff but it was very clear from the documentation that Biden released that they they didn’t change anything they did it the same way um so there is this um component it was done in NC and um I I don’t know what people think NSC is but NSC is belongs to the president and they do what he says and it would never occur to someone to not do what he says they’re there to do what the President says and sometimes they get in big trouble for it but they do it anyway right right this is where Oliver North was yeah yeah he says he’s doing the stuff on your own well wait a minute right right uh so so but there are a bunch of people there it’s a big thing it’s sort of the president’s buffer with these other gigantic federal agencies and they’re there to crack the whip and make those guys because they’re executive agencies and so they do what the President says and the NSC is there to crack the whip that’s it and so the documents um were I mean they were Nara documents essentially but the there was at least one person from Nara copied on all of these documents which was 99% well they were all emails but they all had a t a lot of them had attachments that gave us the documents that were very basic interesting important and so it turns off it turns out that Nara was uh was on it from the beginning they they wanted this stuff out they were very dubious of many claims of this stuff being too important to release and they um brought in NSC and told them what they so these guys have to review their records they’re going to release this or not and they then you have to send us the stuff if you’re going to release and you’re not going to release and tell us why right and so and so that that’s their review and they have to send this to the NSC and the NSC gives it to Nara and Nara gives it to their team and their team knows this stuff and they look at and say no no no no that’s not that’s not what the JFK Acts says uh no no no no that’s not what the arrb decided uh so that’s not that’s not going to work out and sometimes it was just you know so you say that you’ve got to withheld all this but how come you’ve already released these names like 20 times what are you doing you know did you not look at what you had released before please and so um they were polite to the FBI um they were very blunt to the CIA I mean they had nothing but bad things to say to the CIA about the way they did it which is which is correct the cia’s releases in 2017 were crap and they gave them six months to go back over them again and they did indeed throw out a lot they did indeed turn out a lot more stuff a lot but it wasn’t consistent and they shouldn’t they should have they should have taken longer to do it and they should have twisted their arms even harder and we could have had some of this stuff couple of years earlier right okay my that was my conclusion with that is that they Trump was in too much of a hurry to say look what I did and you know he just said get it out I just wanted out is there’s stuff in there that that’s important and everyone finally sort of scratched their head and said yeah some of that stuff still can’t come out and he said okay just you know get it out and then I’ll and then you know we’ll wait a couple of years and look at it again that was the the essence of it now there have been things said about some of these foyer emails Nara Nara emails uh the I don’t think are true I don’t think it’s accurate um there I’ve read a claim that NC the National Security advisor told his guy in NSC to

tell Nara to recommend holding back all of these records he ordered him to do it not true if I if they if it’s in there I wanna I I want I want a citation I want to see it there’s no doubt that they talked to NFC guys about what they’re going to write to president Trump because you have to coordinate if you don’t coordinate it’s like everyone’s saying something different president is very angry guys get your ducks in a row right if there’s a disagreement you have to sit down you send your head honchos in sit down in front of me and talk it out right right so and so there’s there’s no order in there telling them to to recommend to Trump that all these things be held back not true opposite is true NC and Nara are ganging up on the agencies to to twist their arms even harder he said if you guys want to hold back you write your recommendation and we’ll write

ours which is a threat it’s not a threat it’s just a just a statement yeah that you know we’re gonna you know you want you’ll have you will then have to explain to the president why you think we’re

wrong not and remember Trump has already said he wants it out right he wants as much as humanly possible so you’re not and here’s the main guys that are administering this thing and they say we think that can go out and you’re going to argue that it no it can’t to a guy that wants it all out right good luck in the end they they so what happened in the with these email messages it it was I believe that Nara had a strategy though it’s not it’s not stated straight out I think that they said okay they’re redacting way too much they’re holding back way too much so here’s what we’re going to do we’re going to get them to release something from every record no more records withheld in full except for the ones that are mandated by the JFK act and they did it in 2017 and some of it was really just formalism okay so you know they let off one paragraph in a in a in a 200 Page record okay great Le they let out something so we can say right that there are you know no records that are now withheld in full so what um a couple two questions what do you expect in the upcoming releases from Nara and are there any particular documents that you think we uh you’re waiting for that are should that should be interesting a lot of stuff there’s hundreds of pages held back in some FBI records uh there are two kinds of FBI records that have a lot of that have a lot of pages whole page redactions uh one kind is Martin Luther King documents and there’s actually um a Court ruling that sealed those um and it’s it was very puzzling to me that all this ml MLK stuff came out and it turns out that this is a complicated story so I’ll just give a very the this short story is this the church committee went into the FBI’s surveillance and harassment of Martin Luther King in detail and the they got the FBI to submit all kinds of documents and they dragged up FBI agent after FBI agent and grilled them to a crisp and so there’s a ton of this material in the FBI administrated files for the church committee they call it the SSC Senate select committee right right so the FBI SSC theasin file or administrative file was filled with this stuff and for some reason for well for reasons that I I believe it was actually an accident um they they released almost all of those um this is a people didn’t realize this ex until a couple of people who who knew their stuff about FBI MLK looked at it and basically said holy [ __ ] uh they released about 50,000 pages of documents from the SSC file and um big chunks of them thousands and thousands and thousands of pages were on Martin Luther King so uh there some of it was I very sad to read but um the latest Martin Luther King biography written by uh a guy named Jonathan a EIG uh won the Pulitzer Prize in 2023 for history and uh he uses he uses a lot of this he’s looked at it very carefully right so so that was released and there’s a lot of to me very interesting stuff about the intelligence agencies um there’s a detailed description of sort of the history of the what do they call it the DCd uh domestic contacts division that the FBI put together wow in their documents and so it’s very interesting stuff it’s helpful for background but has absolutely nothing to do with the Kennedy assassination just nothing and the reason and the ARB said we don’t want to release it we don’t we don’t want it in our collection why do we want to dump do a document dump 50,000 pages in our collection which is about a totally different subject and uh I apparently Nar missed those memos instead they found the the finding AIDs that the FBI filled out and they said where are the documents and the FBI said oh well they’re over here well you’re they’re supposed to be here no no they’re not and they said yes they are go get them so they did and they’re still releasing them um this is most of the almost all the FBI documents are like this so so what do you think those 2400 New FBI documents are that that uh we’ve seen in the Press

lately uh I’m sure that they’re field office files they’re field office files I heard I have a great find too I heard that um they uh a lot of them are apparently dollar if they’re Dallas field office files I could easily see how they were duplicates uh I would find it very hard to understand how there could be anything new in there FBI documents FBI files are massively redundant they make no mistake about it it they have to be to be useful I mean otherwise it’s a giant pain in the butt to find things right so I think I if they’re field office files I don’t see how they could be and they’re from Dallas um I I don’t believe that there’s 14,000 pages of new stuff he said 2400 pages that were you know JFK potentially V JFK stuff this already tells you there’s a bunch of Cru in there and uh um 2400 pages of Dallas info what could it be right most people don’t realize how much stuff is in there the the Dallas field office files on JFK assassination were merged into the head headquarters file right headquarters file is over 100,000 pages long um it’s you know it’s the front piece on my blog site you want to see picture the picture yes right right that’s the that’s the that’s the headquarters file on the assassination that’s what 100,000 Pages looks like and so um how could there you know what what manner of material was it that somehow didn’t get looked at okay and is not I mean is not in the field office F the Dallas field office file that was released in full to Nara uh very frustratingly this is so I’m this is answering the second part of your question what do I want to see what do I think is really interesting y I want to see the Dallas field office file yes it’s in the it’s in there but there’s nothing on online it was only very recently when Mary frell the Mary frell Foundation website put up uh I think it was like 3,000 pages of of Dallas field office files on the first five days of the assassination it’s it’s gold it’s the stuff I wanted to read and it it it fills in lots of gaps that people have been saying oh they are hiding this and they’re hiding that another not it’s in the it’s in the field office files it just didn’t get published didn’t get released and that leads to my my question on the fact that that what I’m really interested in is the digitization of the collection which will tell us a lot about the assassination and other details rather than the few documents that have redactions uh this is you know if I were Trump my executive order said you have you have two years to do it I’m going to give you you know I don’t know I don’t care you know 20 million I want it done in two years right that’s that would that would transform our understanding of the history of the assassination um but he didn’t do that because all these people are are yelling about these 2500 records yeah that I mean of the 2500 records how many have whole page redactions I would say about 60 maybe May with the FBI Files you know 65 70 right right and the other 2500 files 2,440 files there I would say at least half of them have only one thing redacted one or two things in the entire F in the entire record one or two what could be there what could it be what could it be that’s so fascinating it might be a couple of people’s names that I would now now I can you know connect a few things I think that Ruben ephron’s name who we’ve you’ve written about before was an example of that on the other hand there was this guy named Phil Heath that wrote uh something for who used to work at the Miami CIA station he wrote this thing for the JFK task force the CIA set up in the 70s and you know his name was released okay so what we already knew that the guy who wrote this what his position was yeah in in in W in the JM wave station we knew we knew who he was we just didn’t know a name and having his name doesn’t doesn’t doesn’t give us anything it’s not not useful right not not not important not important I want to know it yes so okay so my position on this stuff is I want the information but I’m not going to pretend that there’s some deeper significance to it the ARB made its decisions on how to handle this stuff Congress appointed ARB to make these decisions carry out ARB decisions it’s only fair on the other hand if you’re going to hold it back for you know a few more years even 10 years even 20 years fine there’s nothing in there I think is is is that important I could be wrong about some things I’m happy to I would be happy for people to tell me makes it so important but no one is doing that they just say oh there’s there’s there’s important stuff in there I don’t another isn’t one thing isaed one thing is left out what is it is a guy’s name it’s the name of some City it’s the name of some CIA base and some in Germany it’s got to be Ram ramot R what is the a Ramstein right right r I’m struck by the fact that most of a good example would be um on the digitization most of the HSC record hsca records are not online uh Mary Ferell is a great source but a lot of hsca stuff is not there and uh that’s why I always go to narra myself to to Maryland because uh there’s so much there to discover in those files it’s it’s it’s ridiculous hsca is is the main thing and they published probably less than 5% less than 5% of those records are available online that’s ridiculous y so and and so I’ve actually talked to n i written to Nara about this and I saying when are you going to do this when are you g to do this he said well we’re working on we’re working on the Waring commission stuff but when we do going and that’s going slow well this is you know I I I Trump could light a fire under their butts right he says you I mean he could he could tell them you know I want you to prioritize stuff like hsca he could say that right and they’ do it like that and then suddenly you know we would have hundreds of thousands of pages that we’ve never seen before Y and instead they’re wasting their time on this yeah can you trying to twist people’s arm to release the social security numbers of people who aren’t dead yeah so and and and the way they do the digitization you want to comment a bit about the way I mean we have they have a new web page up which has uh uh some of their new digitized records on the Warren Commission uh do you want to comment on that oh it’s it’s I uh Nar is an archive and so archists are very finicky people right they want paper that has only 0.00001% acid so that all their stuff won’t turn yellow and become dust in 10 years I understand this and simplifies with it because I have I bought books in Taiwan that must have been like 10% acid you know they burn your hands and they’re they are dust you know if I try and open them it just kind of you know there’s little sigh and the whole dust dissolves into a the book whole book dissolves into a pile of dust so I understand they’re picky about this and they’ve also been you know people say you they’re hiding stuff what do you mean they’re hiding stuff well they didn’t they didn’t give us scans of the backside of the documents and so what they’re doing with the Waring commission documents is they’re scanning both sides of it now it’s you know it’s only like 1% of these things have anything on the backside so you know half of the stuff they’re scanning is blank pages this is this is annoying then um they’re scanning them using Tiff format which is highly accurate right but uh takes up a lot of space on my hard drive buddy and I have to download it off the internet and that takes even more time and then and then they are taking the they are making these available they are posting these on the website as single pages right they said they’ve scanned like a 100,000 pages of Warren Commission documents you mean I have to download not a file but 100,000 Pages maybe 200,000 if they’re actual pages with both sides 200,000 Pages half of them blank and I have to download them all and then put them into a PDF and run my OCR on it to find out to get an index of this stuff have you asked them about that I I I asked them what well I was asking them you know are you going to do something when are you going to do something about hsca and they said after the warrant commission I you know I I try not to hassle the guy I I’ve only talked written back and forth to a couple of guys I did write to um uh a couple of the people who are overseeing the project um and I got them to they had this one CIA record that was had like four pages four whole page redactions and I wrote to them and said hey the I we have the arb’s you know decision on this thing and it said that they they wanted to release these things and they did release these things and now it’s it’s redacted again and you fix that and they said yeah we we looked at that and said yeah they did it wrong and so they released everything in that in that record which is a lot except for two names so they they take it serious ly right right right and they take this business about um accidentally publishing people Social Security numbers they they take that very seriously and so that’s good I I’ll I suppose I could write to them and say can you guys like hurry up yeah we don’t have the money we don’t have the people you know we’ll we just have all we have is time yeah I mean I mean thank God the Mary feral Foundation we’ll take the narra documents and then OCR them so at least we can search within them so that is good right right we have to wait for that but it’s just it is frustrating I am happy to see that they did digitize The Garrison recordings yeah yeah that was great um th were so what do you think of those well I have I already have a lot of them that I’ve gotten in the past through uh um through requesting it from Nara so I have a lot of it already there’s a few obious a few I don’t have some of the tapes are not uh very hard to listen to but I listen I listened to one yesterday which I which I also had it’s it’s interesting it’s a tape recording of Jack Martin and this is this is right before the uh NBC program uh which criticized Garrison and so this is a tape recording over like four or five phone calls of Jack Martin and he starts off calling up Aaron con head of the Metropolitan crime Commission and he says you know I could I he says the NBC people want to talk to me I could blow Garrison out of the water but what do you think I should do and Aaron con says you know what just tell the truth just go and tell the truth that’s all I can advise you he said yes but if I tell the truth Garrison will come after me and he’s going to ruin me and I need some help and and and con says just tell the truth and then he calls up um his lawyer step Plotkin who also represents Gordon Novel you think I should do should I tell the truth what should I do and Plotkin sort of says yeah you know just just tell the truth and then he calls up um Rick Townley who is a WDSU reporter working on the NBC report and Martin says you know um I’d like to tell you the truth I could blow Garrison out of the water but you know what I have no money and Garrison’s GNA come after me so I need can you guys do something for me and Townley to his credit says you know we can’t pay you that’s our strategy we do not pay people for information and to make a long story short Martin hangs up the phone and then he actually puts a note on the recording I’m trying what I’m trying to do here is I’m trying to coax the NBC people into paying me to prove that they are not honest about this and that’s what I’ve been trying to do here and of course uh so it sort of shows that the NBC people were honest yes right I want to put this online but I have to transcribe um the conversations but it’s pretty it’s it’s pretty it’s a fun one yeah that’s very interesting it it shows that the NBC people knew that Jack Martin is a snake in the grass is what shows yeah and so anyways um but yeah I am looking forward to more of the digitization I I I think let’s I think we should so basically what what are your expectations for what’s going to come from Trump I

I I think that um more stuff is going to come out I think that a lot of these whole page redactions are going to get whittel down um it I mean some of this material is information from other foreign governments and so you really shouldn’t release that unless they say it’s okay right but you know it seems that President Trump doesn’t really care what other foreign governments think and so who knows what could come out in some cases um but I think that he probably wouldn’t release the social security numbers it’s just so unhinged so already that tells you that there’s going to be about 400 records that will still have redaction in and there’s this there’s this problem with the way people treat these records it’s just it’s just it’s not like any they’re not treated like any other archival records They they’re it’s a fallacious approach it’s they they have embedded in them serious research fallacies and I I all I can say is that I I think that um there will still be records redacted even after this go around um but uh it they could they could shrink it more but it’s so irrelevant I I don’t know what to say you know I mean there’s really nothing that I want to see there but I do have okay so I have to have a favorite right that I’m push okay ready yeah okay I want to I want to see uh Lee Harvey oswalt’s 20115 now it’s actually released almost totally in full but they released it in pieces and um there is a complete microfilm copy of the file which has been which has not been released period and the deal was that they’ll release that after the individual pieces have all been released right that was the that was the thing so they don’t have to waste time and energy of you know the of doing these uh how doing these dou releases right right and I think at this point there’s so little left on in the Oswald file uh that’s redacted right there are may be 25 records 25 records I mean like Pages 25 pages that have like one or two redactions one or two words right so good enough just release the whole thing thing that’s about 30,000 Pages 25 30,000 pages and it will all be in one place and you’ll be able to sit down and read it like a book right right and that would be I think perhaps one of the most interesting things in the collection now you even that is you know interesting to who now that I’ve spent all this time learning about this stuff it’d be very interesting to me and so I’m selfish in these things and of course there is uh a bunch of stuff of of Interest that’s outside of the collection uh now they there there’s been um there’s stuff that NRA actually has right that people have donated to them or they have you know picked up some way or another and it would be very nice indeed to see all that online that would be great but here’s the question so you mentioned the 2400 Pages 2400 FBI records or whatever um and I and I said I don’t think there’s going to be very much stuff in there that’s new at least maybe they belong in the collection maybe they don’t right you have to look at them please don’t just throw them in there because they’re saying oh there’s some kind of stuff that it showed up you know we did a new digital registry of our records and this showed up in in our search and so we’re not even gonna review it we’re just going to publish it oh my God please don’t do that I mean archival collections need to be selected right if they’re not selective they’re worthless they’re just giant piles of paper why are you making me go through these piles of paper I want you to go through these piles of paper and then give me the stuff that’s relevant forget about important

relevant yeah so I I my question is is there stuff that’s in other places in other agencies in CIA you know archive in Warrington that is you know relevant and that we you know that they can somehow go in and pull it up I don’t I I don’t 100% deny it but I think that uh some of the stuff is just not so would have to be an Act Congress to get a release of let’s say the RFK material on Cuba at the JFK Library I think most of that a lot of that is out but I I can’t I can’t be 100% sure I don’t know about that there’s other stuff B there’s other places besides the JF FK collection The Arc that has JFK material the JFK library has lots of JFK material it’s not in the collection but some of it could I mean if if this stuff about wave is relevant there’s a lot of stuff in the JFK Library that’s relevant they just didn’t stuff it in the collection if you read um Don Bon’s book yeah he got he got a lot of NSC material from the LBJ Library it’s not in the JFK collection is it relevant well it’s about it’s certainly about you know the the Mongoose and and these other issues Yeah by way that’s a very good book his book is terrific oh yeah that’s a great book and he found this stuff and it’s there and so the JFK collection is not an excuse to not research anywhere else it’s not and it you have to know how to use it right and it h you have to it has to be well Chosen and it’s like people don’t just give us the records and will will go over them uh oh please give me a break you have no idea what what’s involved in this what do you you know it’s just crazy some of this stuff and a lot of this stuff is mythical I’ll I’ll be blunt mythical so for

example uh Bill Harvey’s travel records this just really bothers me um this this claim that that Harvey traveled from took a plane from Rome to

Dallas it come it doesn’t come and supposedly it’s from Mark Wyatt right is that the story I believe that’s the story it’s from a CIA gay CIA guy in Rome who accidentally ran into Harvey on the airplane and um his daughter said that doesn’t sound right where does this story come from this comes from from BREC

calie okay that’s you know that’s it as far as I’m concerned I don’t you know I he’s I’ve read some of his stuff I you know no right no no I I don’t I don’t I don’t think it’s right I don’t think it’s correct I think it’s you know some some stuff I I won’t he’s he’s deceased so I can slander him but I I don’t know all I know is that I don’t find his stuff reliable and that leads to the fact that there is sort of a some conspir come some uh researchers are really after a fishing Expedition ah well there’s a there’s a there’s a story behind some of this so that like some of this material that I clearly has nothing to do with the assassination but it does have to do with CIA misdeeds or FBI misdeeds and you can think of it this way that because JFK was assassinated and didn’t get to fill out his term and carry out his the promise of his presidency so we have things the bad terrible things that happened later and these records of CIA and FBI misdeeds are relevant because they show us how bad things got I think that’s putting it sort of uh what can I say you know I’m trying to put it rationally right right and it’s so easy but it’s easy for people to say oh you know um Eladio delal I mean he was he was involved in the assassination so we need his 2011 file well you know there’s no evidence that he was involved so but yeah you want the 2011 file but that does that mean the CIA has to release it just because you think it’s it’s relevant right right I think that’s absurd I think that’s absurd I mean you you know why based on what do you think that he’s relevant now some people might say no it’s it’s relevant I think David Kaiser said that’s that’s relevant I think that’s relevant I don’t know what to say yeah yeah could there be a permanent should there be a permanent body which judges whether or not this stuff should be released this is something that I I find to be I mean a permanent

right then there’s no end to it this is not this has nothing to do with the JFK act yeah it doesn’t invis it envisions no such thing there will always in a hundred years people will still be coming up with more things they want to see that’s right yeah it it’s never ending I have a solution okay okay it’s the Ripple option okay here’s what you do close down the CIA close down all intelligence agencies then release every piece of paper that they have in their in their files so that they won’t be producing more of this stuff and we eventually have a chance to go through it all why do I call this the Ripley option what did Ripley say when the aliens got out of control on the planet and took over all the and ate all the colonists and we getting ready to eat them she said I think we should take the spaceship back up into orbit and nuke the planet it’s the only way to be

sure well thank you for that

solution it’s a great way to end this seriously it’s not serious it’s a joke it’s a joke any parting comments before we go it’s been fascinating talking to you it’s really really interesting uh yeah I I I I’ve had a great a great time talking to you I feel like I you know you you know so much about some of this stuff also that it’s very it’s very helpful to me and uh I’d like to just say one more time y i I really hope that people will try and look at what’s left that’s not available I mean you can find it it’s not that hard do it yourself okay this this this idea that there’s a vast Trove of material still in there is just wrong so recalibrate you know for the researchers recalibrate your approach and focus on the stuff that You’ got which is really a lot I mean it’s a lot just the stuff online at Mary frell at Nara it’s a it’s huge quantities of things and you can really do interesting stuff with it right and I would say for a lot of researchers um go to Nara there’s there’s all sorts of stuff there that’s not online that is fully public that you can go and research and find out about right yeah so I think that trying to get if people can focus on that I think that that would be a very positive development on the other hand I think that you know instead of worrying so much about this really really small amount of stuff that’s left if if you know they could focus more on getting the stuff online yeah it would be a tremendous boom to research you know regardless of what you think about you know the the assassination itself of the events of the assassination the history of the assassination would be vastly enriched by putting this material online yeah I totally agree that’s what I’m waiting for well thank you very much Robert and I’m sure we’ll be talking to you another uh couple of weeks or months when after the after the stuff comes out so uh stay tuned my fingers crossed yeah okay thank you very much

Fred Litwin and the return of Nick Nalli

www.mattkprovideo.com/2025/02/18/fred-litwin-and-the-return-of-nick-nalli/

On The Trail of Delusion, Episode 13,

Renowned scientist Doctor Nick Nalli discusses the dictabelt recording, the physics of the Zapruder film, the notorious “back and to the left headsnap, and other issues related to the Kennedy assassination evidence.

Transcript:

I want to thank everybody for coming this afternoon my name is Fred Litwin noted author Fred Litwin and of course Fred is also the author of I was a teenage JFK conspiracy freak on the trail of delusion in Oliver Stones film flam at the demagogue of Dealey Plaza Fred Litwin is here he’s a longtime author and certainly Watcher of politics joining us uh Fred Litwin great to have you here thank you very much

[Music]

Welcome to another edition of
On the Trail of Delusion
my bi-weekly podcast where I try to separate the the wheat from the chaff and actually give you something substantive on the JFK assassination rather than the conspiracy Gruel you get all over the Internet
so today I’m I’m really quite happy to bring back Dr Nick Nalli foremost scientist who who has studied all aspects of the Kennedy assassination


But let me tell you about his bio he’s got a master’s degree and a PhD in atmospheric and oceanic studies his PhD was from the University of Wisconsin at Madison
He worked for the for NOAA and the the US government which studies oceans and climate and now he’s a Atmospheric or imagery scientist at the Department of Defense
I mean an incredible background and uh so we’re so lucky because the last time Nick was on
On the Trail of Delusion
it was a great show I mean it was just a fantastic show and and there’s a lot more to talk about and perhaps Nick will come back for a third time because the science the science of the JFK assassination is absolutely fascinating
There’s so much to it and in fact there’ll be more and more over in fact I can’t wait until Nick publishes his first book and I’ll be the first one to buy it believe me so Nick welcome to
On the trail of Delusion
thank you Fred for having me back on this I enjoy doing this type of thing when I when I get time to do it sometimes tough to find the time but but I I very much enjoy talking about uh two things the science science in general and then also the this JFK assassination which we’re all fascinated by so today what I’m going to do is I’m going to I have some prepared slides actually right and it’s going to be I think because I want to get through two different things here and to get into it a little a little bit of depth and to do that it’s just easier to have the slid so think of this as like being in a college class um and feel free to ask questions uh if you have any uh the audience won’t be able to do that but uh but you can I hope I don’t fall asleep like I used to in college no this this you won’t because you you like this stuff and and yeah so by the way well done on your debate there uh with Matt crumpton

yeah that was very uh nice and I see you had a lot of viewership on that so that that’s really great okay good so just a quick again upfront disclaimer any scientific results or conclusions as well as any views or opinions expressed during the podcast or those of myself do not reflect the views of the US federal government or DOD just so these are topics that I’m going to talk about uh first being the the dpd the Dallas Police Department dict toel recording is it Acoustics evidence and then the second is the rer film does it suffer from alterations or Illusions okay so starting off with the the dict Bel so and there’s a lot of slides to get through here uh is it acoustic evidence and I’m gonna hat tip to Michael Odell Dale Myers Paul Hulk and believe it or not yes Tink Thompson because his book last second in Dallas contains information on this that uh was sort of an introduction to me when I read it so him him as well okay so the birth of the Acoustics evidence so this is sort of just the introductory slide uh this goes back to and in this information you can find in really nice detail on Dale Meyer’s site he has a report that he U published there and he really goes into some nice detail on the history uh Tink Thompson’s book also has a bit of that a little less detail but it’s there so I’m going to just kind of highlight it um in the mid 70s it was Gary Mack and Pen Jones who first made these unsubstantiated claims that the Dallas police radio recordings captured gunshots and Gary Mack claimed over a period not just one time as an off off oneoff but uh over a period of time that there were seven to eight gunshots that he heard on the recordings um and you know that’s quite an extraordinary extraordinary claim right I mean imagine being around this where you hear someone saying that there were tapes made of police in the motorcade from a motorcycle police officer and they heard seven eight shots on those tapes now if that were the case that would be hard evidence of of a conspiracy of course you have to analyze it and make sure you’d want to get the tapes and of course that’s exactly what happened so the house select committee formed for a different reason and formed mostly in responsibility to the zeep rder film um uh so Blakey met with JFK critics in DC uh and Mary frell is the one who brought up the police tapes this is both according to Dale Meyer’s version and Ting Thompson’s version uh and that’s what led to the multi-decadal boondoggle known as the acoustic evidence so this is going from the mid-70s till now and again so I’m going to try to distill that all down so Acoustics evidence just simply recur refers to an audio recording of a continuous Dallas Police Department FM radio transmission that was came from a motorcycle that had its its microphone stuck open on the channel one so there were two channels that the police used this was on channel one so this next slide here uh channel one was used for or radio communications used by the Dallas Police Department a not special events this just daytoday they use channel one they recorded their Communications in a transparent way to be transparent have full transparency there’s nothing cestine going on they’re recording what they’re doing uh that that was recording on a what’s called a dick to belt and that was basically a tape uh that used a stylus so it wasn’t like a magnetic tape you can’t think of it as like an eight track tape for the older people or or cassette tape it was it was like a tape but it used a a stylist that recorded physically the the sound so right off the bat that gives you a sense that okay it wasn’t even a magnetic tape which is already sort of like an old technology magnetic tapes this is like even older so it’s kind of a primitive recording medium but but but all they were trying to do is record The Voice the the words that that the police were saying to one another that was the important thing they weren’t trying to that was the the they weren’t looking for high quality high-fi recordings they’re just looking for the words so the there’s a second Channel they use so channel one channel two that was used for special events and I cannot think of any more special an event than a presidential motorcade so the police officers indeed were using in the motorcade channel two to broadcast uh and those Communications were also recorded but they were recorded on a different type of piece of equipment which is interesting but it might be due to you know funding or whatever at the time but they used a gray autograph and I believe that was an older technology I think uh don’t quote me on that uh so the the autograph was basically like a a record player it had a disc um and it had a stylus the only difference between that and a regular record player is that um as the needle moved inward It sped up and the reason for that was to keep a linear um because as you get toward the center there’s less less the even though the angular motion is the same the linear motion slows down because you have less less uh distance to cover so it speeds up as it moves in um interpretation of the recordings is also Complicated by these other issues by the way all this is uh stuff that I had learned pretty well from Michael Odell and he’s the one who really kind of become a master of all this uh so it’d be good to have him on at some point yeah for for sure yeah yeah CU he he really figured all this stuff out so to conserve the recording media um both these devices had an automatic sound Activation so they switched off when there’s nobody talking makes sense that’s actually uh uh that’s being economical um but that complicates things right so during times where nobody’s talking there’s no recording and so that makes it difficult to keep time on the tapes again for day-to-day recordings it’s perfectly fine but when you’re trying do this sort of forensic stuff it becomes more difficult you have to account for it um they also had an automatic gain control feature AGC and what that does is it’s dampening out loud noises and elevating soft noises so what it’s trying to do is trying to keep a a constant sort of amplitude or volume throughout and the reason again is all they’re caring about is words so if there’s loud noises like um recycles that can be suppressed down a little bit or if they’re talking softly or they don’t have the microphone up close enough to their mouth uh then it gets elevated so you can hear them so that’s the automatic game control then finally the gray autograph was um prone to skipping let me switch this to um uh here we go I’m going to go to the laser pointer there we go so uh so uh the the gray autograph also had an additional problem so the there’s dict about autograph the autograph was prone to skipping okay because it’s like a record player and so it would could Skip and that’s another complication to deal with right all right so now I decided this is decades and decades and to try to keep it all straight I decided to put it together as uh as a saga in three episodes and so the first episode A New Hope 1978 to 1982 um so just having a little fun with this as well um in so I already mentioned in the mid 70s Gary Mech is the one who claims to hear gunshots on the radio recordings Mary frell provides him with like a multi-dimensional copy or something to that effect and he he goes around telling people I can hear multiple shots seven shots eight shots on these recordings so then the house committee assassinations is formed slowly shortly afterwards not in response to that but Blakey meets with them DC Mary frell brings up the police tapes and and so they get the tapes and they I think they get kind of what’s close to R I think the original copies of the tapes maybe um and they performed their own investigations including an acoustical experiment at D Plaza 1979 that’s when the house sub committee releases this report concludes a probable conspiracy and it’s based upon this Acoustics evidence and specifically this W report which they said was a 9 5% confidence that there was a gunman on the grassing up it was a couple years after that that 1982 there is a panel that’s formed and releases a report NRC is National research Council of the academy National Academy um prestigious very prestigious um they investigate the claims simultaneously Steve Barber a musician discovers what’s called a cross talk uh and we’ll get into what that is which suggests the time is off and ourc report ultimately dis sprws the Acoustics and debunks it and that’s it we would hope that should have been it the end one movie but no about 20 years later out of the blue uh there’s this 2001 paper appears in a um peerreview Journal by um DB Thomas and he what happens in the paper he claims to find an alternative cross talk that uh that changes things and puts things back gets the timing and it overrides the uh the whole cross talk that Steve Barber discovered uh so so what happens is then Odell Michael Odell finds an error but then Thomas conceives it and then says well there’s another cross talk and so so basically we’ve begun a new whole chapter and that’s why I’ve kind of broken it up this this all starts here uh Dale Meyers later goes on ABC national television also British BBC television as well uh and basically shows at the open mic where the uh House Sub committee determined that you had to have a Open Mic motorcycle at this location for these Acoustics evidence to to be to be correct U it wasn’t located there and then 2005 liner ATL that’s the surviving panel members from the house committee the Ramsey panel uh they issue a full rebuttal of Thomas’s 2001 paper and then also his check cross talk and then Thomas though unded according to tank Thompson that’s his word undotted uh in 2010 publishes a pro conspiracy apology um entitled he no evil politics science the forensic evidence in the JFK assassination which is a weird title because science and politics have nothing to do with each other right that’s the whole purpose of science science is it doesn’t care about that stuff it just is what it is the world is what it is and we’re just trying to figure it out the universe does not care about politics anyway so um I read that book has a lot of good information in it but a lot of bad stuff as well um and it exaggerated the confidence of the grassy n shot to a ridiculous number

99.999% and then the Final Chapter now so in 2010 by the way the Return of the Jedi the JFK empirically dedicated investigators very good yeah I thought I’d again that’s thought I’d have fun doing this stuff so in in 2007 in 2010 Dale Myers actually puts a report out on his on his uh website his web blog and and it’s over that period because he had different editions but so it’s the 2010 Edition really is the one that but you know it came out 2007 but the 2010 Edition includes a response to Thomas’s book but 2013 comes along and lar Sabel commissions the sellus to do their own independent analysis of the recordings and they come to a conclusion that rejects the Acoustics as well they conclude that the open mic’s not even in the motorcade now again I’m going to get into all this in more detail but I’m just just sort of the overview uh Thompson and so some from 2013 about to 2021 about uh Thompson is at meetings saying that he has a new book in the works and Michael Adell is a consultant for that uh he debunks things that are going on but he’s ignored and then in 2021 Thompson publishes last second in Dallas the book that is his his sort of sequel uh he has a rised reconstruction in there and we’ll get into that in more detail all right so now we’re going to go kind of back and be a little more detailed on what we just talked about so house SE Committee in this late 70s um they were able to get original tapes from the Dallas Police and imagine their disappointment but you you know at the same time I might not have been surprised they listen to them and there’s no gunfire on them they don’t hear anything resembling gunfire whatsoever um um despite that the house committee still decided that they would submit these to acoustical Engineers for analysis that’s you know that’s reasonable and they you know they got the tapes and they probably wanted to just make sure uh and they figured we’ll give them to experts and just to make sure uh that there’s nothing on there so that included J James Barger who is with bolt Baron and Newman BBN and then uh Professor Mark Weiss and Ernest ashkanazi w at St City University of New York these were sort of acoustical experts so it was bargar who first came who first looked at this stuff they they did it in not simultaneously they first went bargar and then Weiss and eskinazi um the an acoustic experiment was set up by uh Barger where they went to D Plaza and they set up a bunch of microphones in an array and then they had live gunfire I think they were using the weapon um the Caro from the Texas School Book Depository and the grassy those two locations so they fired off test shots they had their microphone array and they were looking to see if they can discover uh patterns that would resemble the waveforms that were on the dickout so they did that and then that was handed handed on to Weiss and asazi who performed an additional analysis and it was based upon that Acoustics evidence that the house committee made their their change from a lone gunman to probable conspiracy so this kind of I guess I really talked about all this right here that uh in a way I guess I didn’t need this slide so other than what they did is they they found matches between the waveform impulses and the dictabelt with the test muzzle blasts the echo in D Plaza this shows a diagram from the report that kind of shows what we’re getting at so they had they had buildings in D Plaza there and they were able to come up with different trajectories of sounds uh as they would Echo off of buildings and from the muzzle blast and and such and they were looking for those sounds to see if they correlated with the impulses on the diabel when they did that they came up with a 50% confidence of a way form match with a with the shot that came from the grassy null uh so 50% is half and half so you know it’s it’s like a a random thing so it’s not very good assessment so what happens is then they handed the hell committee said went to Weiss and ask gazi to take a look and what they did is they took the data from Barger and they used a hard copy map and basically pen and P you know P paper and pencil analysis uh to to see what they could come up with and they came up with using their methods a 95% confidence of a gunshot from the grassy null assuming that this specific um that there was a motorcycle located this specific location and the only motorcycle that they could come up with that was reasonably seemed could have been was this HB mlan so it ended up becoming well it’s going to be uh police officer HB mlan he has to be here and if he’s there then we get a waveform match by the way we talk about the waveforms that’s what this is and this is from Weiss and askanazi report so this is in time I believe and so sound is pressure waves through the atmosphere they’re compressive waves coming at you so what it means is that you’ll get momentary high pressure and low pressure coming at you um so so what these sort of waveforms are showing is they’re showing periods of high pressure and low pressure from sways and a lot of what you see here is what we might call static or random basically uh just not much signal there there’s just a lot of what’s you know noise or static uh but you’ll see some places that are spikes that might look like they’re something that’s outside of a a a white noise and definitely here and so that’s where they said the S the suspect impulses are now mind you if you look at the whole set of waveforms you’ll find things like this everywhere right so it’s not anything you unique here but these were the waveforms that they were trying to match is these here um one thing that we got to point out is because of this automatic game control that was on the recording you you the recording itself is never going to have anything that’s really large and that’s the reason why um you wouldn’t expect it that well that was the reason that they hypothesized that we’re not hearing the gunshots is for that reason uh but although even then you you know the the one of the police officers said I believe or someone said that yeah you can still hear gunshots on these things so that that’s that’s ridiculous um so anyway we’re going to go on okay so uh this is the quote First debunking of the acoustic evidence uh it was formerly done by the the NRC Ramsay panel U so they’re the ones who were put together as a result of this Richard sprag I believe this Richard sprag was the one who said you can hear gunshots I think on tapes like this or someone of that nature so he knew that there was a problem because he knew from the photograph the photographic evidence that uh he didn’t think there’s going to be a motorcycle in that location so this is the problem when you rush to judgment to to to borrow that phrase as the house committee did so you know they they kind of rushed this and they didn’t really established things and you have to be you have to establish things they never established that there was a police officer there they just kind of said well yeah he probably could have been there this HB mlan and they let it go with that and this gets you in trouble when you do things like this so This Richard brag knew no there I don’t I don’t think there’s anybody there so he he he didn’t keep his mouth shut um and he went to the justice department and told them about it and then you know they became convinced there’s a problem so that’s what led to this NRC panel being form and that included Nobel prizing physicist uh Norman Ramsey and Luis Alvarez the hated Luise Alvarez he was also on that panel and they immediately found problems but simultaneously in the meantime around the same time they had put out these dick Bel recordings on floppy um bino discs that was in Gallery magazine Gallery magazine now is that like a Gallery magazine that what kind of magazine is that a soft porn magazine like or Playboy that’s what I thought yeah good thank you for that so yeah so so you know Steve Barber and Todd Von they were uh J they bought the magazine for the for the record right like they’re buying Playboy for the interviews they bought the that’s exactly right yes yeah so they’re JFK Buffs and uh but C barara was a musician and uh amaz this is just really these stories are I tell you you can’t make them up so he Steve Barber listens to this and he notices something that nobody else notices that’s this thing called a cross talk where he notices that there’s someone’s voice appears on this channel one open mic and he’s like wait a minute that voice I heard on the channel two and it turns out that’s what the cross talk so so you envision this motorcycle officer has an open mic and but there but the motorcade is still broadcasting in Channel 2 and so someone else’s Channel 2 broadcast got picked up by his open mic and that’s the cross talk now the reason why that becomes um something is because then you can use the channel two to help time things in the channel one because channel one is just open the whole time and so there’s no other broadcast there’s no time markers in there where K to had had time markers specifically things like the the the specific cross talk was this bill Ducker a sheriff he’s saying hold everything secure until homicide investigators get there and we we know that that happened about one minute after the shooting of course we know it’s going to happen after the shooting but it took about a minute before you had police office saying this stuff because they didn’t know even what was going on and so that’s what when I call it the hold cross talk is just because it’s what’s being spoken so that was on channel 2 it got picked up on channel one it’s happening at the same time that the supposed gunshots are happening right so so that’s sort of a debunk right then and there and so Barber notifies the NRC panel of the finding and they uh you know they they found they had found other problems themselves but they they affirmed that yeah that’s that’s that’s the case so the suspect impulses occurred about 1 minute after the shooting and basically all they do is they make sure that it’s true right that they go through their own you know rigor to make sure that it’s not uh that that the the claims here are are correct and so that was it that should have been the end of it and it was for all intents and purposes for uh for 20 years but then again as I said out of the blue uh this paper appears in 200 2001 by a an entomologist at USDA that’s United States dep of Agriculture uh he claims in this paper that there’s another cross talk and this one was spoken by this officer Samuel Bella and that that cross talk trumps the the whole cross talk and that yes it’s the grass andol Gman because it restored the timing the paper receives mainstream media attention because it’s that’s an extraordinary claim I mean I mean that’s it’s huge uh if that’s the case you know he basically saying there’s a grassy old gunman so that became out in the open right away and of course people hear about it so T Thompson heard about it and and Michael Odell this person who up to that point would have been what you call an unknown uh and he was not a JFK buff I talked to him he wasn’t a JFK buff he was just a a computer scientist uh and he he liked this type of stuff and he was quite like whoa interesting so uh you know this could it be that someone really scientifically proved that there’s a grassy n gun so he just looked into it uh but within I don’t know maybe a couple months he can confirm for you I mean short order he he found out the problem and by the way this problem is not necessarily Don Thomas’s fault right so what happened is there are skips in the channel 2 autograph recording that weren’t accounted for they weren’t even accounted for by the NRC they they they didn’t account for these things and so what happened is the the omission of these SK the time due to these skips uh they invalidated Thomas’s conclusion but they did not invalidate the NRC conclusion uh the impulses were too late 30 seconds too late still and Don Thomas acknowledged this so when when U when Michael Adell got a hold of Don Thomas to tell him about this uh Thomas acknowledged it and he actually at a JFK meeting too that his his objections were were overruled and and that was it and the thing is is there was nothing wrong with that and it wasn’t really a bad doesn’t really reflect bad on Thomas it wasn’t error due to himself it was just something that nobody had caught Odell caught was the one who caught it again that should have been in the end of it so the Ramsey panel survivors published a rebuttal paper and that debunked it and that should have been the end of it now this is another little side out here so independently and this is stuff that again Michael D can get into with you if you want uh he independently went back and debunked the uh the Weiss askanazi report so he and this is I think the his um I think Odell’s um paper on this is is online I think you can find it at the the McAdams website he has it out there uh where he what he did is he tried to reproduce their result and was unable to do so and he he concluded the following this attempt to reproduce that experiment has demonstrated significant errors and wa’s results at every step falsifying their report that’s what he did he falsified their report basically puts us back to where things were before the house committee and hired them to do the analysis he tried to contact all of them but they all decline the comment now usually when you have someone declining the comment it usually means that it’s sort of like a tacit admission um and and and it’s also like sort of like in a little bit maybe you’re a little embarrassed by it at least that’s the way I take it definitely that’s the case for Weiss and eskinazi to my knowledge and Fred you might even be able to confirm I don’t think they ever spoke up again about about the Acoustics I think they kind of remain mum um for the rest of their time and and markk Weiss uh he passed away in 2020 and uh his obituary is here and you notice they feature in the obituary that he worked in the Watergate tapes but when you go into the obituary there’s no mention of the Acoustics and so that’s sort of more um I think um pass acknowledgement that they knew that they had problems with what they did um it would have been better if they came out publicly and acknowledged it it’s what I think they should have done but certainly better that they not go out and try to defend the indefensible it just makes things much worse yeah it just better if you if you feel like you can’t admit you’re wrong then just keep quiet about it and let it go all right so now the Dale Myers and sist reports this is all really great stuff because it’s all different it’s all independent lines of argument so Dale Myers used an upper polar geometric analysis that just means you use cameras from different angles and you’re able to redu three dimensionality out of it so he he used the the different films put them all together especially this film but also others and uh he was able to determine exactly where HB mlan was and that was he was 175 ft from the HOSA committee position that he needed to be one and a half seconds before the shot so 175 ft and one and a half seconds it’s a little bit too fast right so so bottom line is he wasn’t there and that invalidated uh the the the house committee um conclusion uh and again this is all published in detail now he went on ABC talked about this in 2003 but but he has a detailed report that you can find from his website that talks about all this independent of that Larry Sabo 9 2013 uh commissioned the sonist solists are are sonar sh for sonar analyst they’re like a engineering and Tech contractor supports the military espec I think especially in the Navy for for sonar which is sound um they performed an independent analysis of the dict tabel what they did is they looked at the channel one audio and they an analyzed the motorcycle engine speed and they were able to determine by the sound and they knew what kind of motorcycle they actually knew what kind of motorcycle it was and they were able to deduce the engine speed was way too fast it was going it was like going like uh like uh 30 or 40 mil an hour or something to that effect it it was it was not in the motor cave basically So Not only was it not in the position that was supposed to be it just wasn’t even in the motor cave right so all right so now that leads us to in spite of all this um tin Thompson still triy to resurrect the Acoustics in his book so as I mentioned he he worked on this book and he teased it at meetings JFK meetings about this book that he he’s going to come up and um and that the book was last second in Dallas and he comes up with a Revis scenario from his from his earlier book um his book six seconds in Dallas this one here he changes what what happened um and he claims that there’s a second shot to the head so Jeff K is shot in the head from the grassy null at z313 and then later he shot the head from behind which is just um doesn’t take into account aam’s razor whatsoever I mean it’s just a very convoluted way of trying to get somebody on the grassy know it’s I can describe it um so so he he relies on Thomas’s check cross talk which was debunked um by Michael Odell uh in and um in his book uh so tin came up with a couple of his own arguments I’m not going to get into detail here that’s the type of thing that uh Michael Dell might want to talk about maybe um but more formidably T consulted with James barer the original the original expert that the H committee uh relied on along with a junior engineer and they wrote an appendix for tin’s book and the appendix is pretty looks pretty technical it is technical uh but Michael Dell already had known about all this stuff and he knew there were problems there um he just kept mom about it uh so so those that something that he might want to talk about as well now this is sort of a sort of an overview conclusion of everything I just talked about um from a scientific perspective so it’s the Acoustics non-evidence uh there’s there’s nothing there it was a was a motorcycle uh broadcasting on channel one it wasn’t part of the motorcade and had its microphone stuck open it did not record anything from the crime scene uh there are three General categories of arguments that discredit it I’m going to distill it down one is timing issues so this is the original one this is the one that most everybody had been focused on this started with the uh with the hold cross talk that uh Steve Barber came up with that went into the ramsy report uh basically the suspect W forms on the dict to Belt happened one minute after the shooting approximately the open mic location assumptions uh the open mic motorcycle was not in the location it needed to be that’s at Myers talked about and not only that but it wasn’t even in the motorcade it was someplace else uh and that’s what sonus came up with and then finally insufficient audio information content what does that mean it means that the dict belt Was A Primitive recording media and it did not contain information that could tell you that there were gunshots that’s the reason why we didn’t hear the gunshots is the waveforms themselves one thing about a gunshot it’s loud what does that mean High amplitude so if you were to look at a waveform that really captures that information that what you’re hearing you’ll see like a very large amplitude and then it might come off and then maybe there’s shock wave or something like that that’s not there um and that’s because they they didn’t record that information they they did not record that information they could not they could not record that information now why is that such a big deal um it’s because right from the start before all this stuff they should have known this they should have realized that the these recordings we we cannot definitely tell you that there’s an acoustical signature that’s associated with gunfire to the exclusion of other ambient sources what are other ambient sources motorcycles people yelling oh also cross talks so the whole cross talk discovered by Steve Barber uh that itself from Channel 2 is a non-ambient is an is an ambient source of sound that is not a gunshot turns out Michael Dell has looked into that a little bit and uh it can create impulses that look just like it and so the suspect waveforms are most likely I think uh and this is what Michael Dell thinks uh were due to the the whole cross Talk itself so the gunshots was just the the cross talk so when when Weiss and as asanagi did their test of firing from the sixth floor window what they were they they claimed to have matched that wave form to the the dictabelt where did they really go wrong in that in sort of that match I don’t think that they went wrong there because what they were trying to match were all the different sounds that came out of De Plaza due to a gunshot from certain locations right so from both from the you know and from the Texas schoolbook depository and so you got like a muzzle blast a Bist ballistic crack or shock wave and then Echoes from buildings and so they were looking for matches between those types of sounds along against the waveforms of that was on the dicta Bel so they they in other words they created the they created those sounds and then they recorded them from a microphone array and then they were able to find for that one microphone near the intersection that there was a a waveform match but the thing is what does it mean what does match mean right so this is where you have to get into the you have to kind of get into the weeds a little bit which is not what I’m doing yeah you have to figure out well how what does it mean that something is matched and then not only that but is that the only source that can create those waveforms that’s what this here is and that’s where the whole thing was sort of doomed even if a lot of these other problems are going away as I mentioned um even if the timing even there was no hold cross talk let’s say there’s no you know F maybe Dale Meers found that there was the police officer there even if all that were the case in my opinion is still a problem because you haven’t proven that the recording is a gunshot it could be due to other things right and that’s what that’s what Michael had already shown but like but in theory it could be I mean there’s other sounds that can give rise to things so that’s called that’s the information content problem it’s what you can derive out of data certain data you know data gives you information and then it depends on how much information is in there what kind of conclusions that you can make oftentimes you don’t have enough information so you make assumptions that const strain things a little bit in this case the assumptions they made was that the dict number one was a police officer in the motorcade number two they were located at that location and number three that the dict Bel had gunshots on it but we didn’t even hear the gunshots and there’s no way for him that suggests that that’s a gunshot right so those those were the problems they were fatal problems from the beginning in my opinion in my opinion all they could have ever claimed if everything else were to go away all they could have ever claimed was we did an analysis and from our analysis we cannot rule out the grass SE null as a location we did an analysis we got a waveform match from a grassy n shooter a waveform match as I mentioned um uh so we can’t rule it out but we don’t know if it was gunshot or not that’s it okay all right so let uh and that’s what I just said here so yeah so this just uh I forgot what he even had in these slides uh that so that that’s that’s kind of what these are showing when I was just talking about so this is what a grassy null test shot looks like this has got the amplitude information in there see how how you got this loud sound this is the muzzle blast and you might have a shock wave after that and it kind of goes off into this tiny little area here see uh so but then this is what the dicta Bel had right there’s a big difference between these and what they did is they just assumed that well that’s because there was this automatic game this got truncated and that’s an assumption though you know that and that assumption you you can’t make that assumption unless you have very good proof to do so so that’s where their mistake was and by the way this here this is Michael Odell doing his own waveforms where he just made a k sound I guess he went and that’s what it produces so so a k sound can make uh you know can make impulse matches basically what he’s trying to get at and that’s that’s what the the hold was right so the whole cross talk was most was very likely causing this U anyway again he can get into much more detail about that all right so I think if you don’t have any other questions about Acoustics we can go on to the zville no just one question a very quick question about Ting Thompson I mean what where did he what fooled him or what you know what what you know he he he overrides all of this and accepts the Acoustics evidence and and so how how did he fool himself yeah well that’s a great question and that’s a great way of putting it because I think that is the best way of putting it is he’s fooling himself and I think Michael I think um Richard feineman had some sort of quote about be careful about fooling yourself because you’re the easiest person to fool um I I think that he probably was looking for Vindication of his earlier work which was perfectly fine I mean again he had a wrong conclusion but otherwise was a contributor to to the knowledge base and I I I think he was just looking for validation of that for whatever reason I don’t know if it’s ego or if he wants it to be and um and and it’s this uh don Thomas provided part of that so they I know that those two because I’ve heard about this I wasn’t at these meetings but I heard that the two of them kind of collaborated quite a bit um and so he’s one of the ones who Who provided him that and then and then there was other people at these meetings that provided other things things that he he he just kind of took and ran with one of them being David wimp uh who is the one who first put the idea in his head about the blur illusion which we can get to and uh and then there was another person too at at one of these meetings that that uh talked about the second shot to the head oh you know if you notice later in your own data you know there’s a forward there’s a there’s a emotion forward and that was more than the head snap and so yeah he was shot in the head you know again twice um and no it’s not what’s in the data it’s not there so it it’s too bad that Thompson did that I think his last second Dallas could have been a really it’s like I say it was a missed opportunity to me he could have come out and re um he could have corrected things from his first book in a proper way and and uh instead he he he didn’t he sort of doubled down and and made it worse worse than his original book but other than that it was a it was a you know interesting book you read it he talks about his he does a lot of biographical uh talking in in the book about his what he did you know during that time period during the exciting time period with his Life magazine and he got his hands in the zi rer filming looked at stuff and so you can kind of get a sense of being that person and being sort of in that moment and and being excited by it and you know it was like big part of his life and so you can read the book and enjoy it for that reason but not not for his conclusions

though all right so we’ll go on now this is a good segue say that PR film does it suffer from alterations or Illusions um this is hat tip to Roland Zada he’s a uh Kodak film expert Francis Corbat who’s the who’s the principal scientist at the itch Corporation Max howand Paul Hook and the six floor Museum de Plaza uh particularly Max and six floor for giving me a couple frames from the Z film uh okay so just background again on what the film is it’s forensic photographic evidence and so I I love photographic as physical because it’s uh it’s tangible but also it records phys physicality um uh remote sensing is what it is it’s the process is deriving information from em radiation and photogrametry is a subdiscipline of remote sensing um and so it involves the measurement of photographing images it’s applied in numerous fields of study including forensic science obviously but others as well um just a quick overview of the zapa camera so it was a bell and Hall zoomatic had a shutter speed of about 55 milliseconds per per per frame um and then it exposure time of 25 milliseconds so what happens is the shutter opens for 25 milliseconds and then it closes and then it’s closed for about half of the time so you got to keep this stuff all in mind so opens captures an image closes and then for about 25 milliseconds or 30 m milliseconds it’s closed things are going on and it’s not doing anything then it opens again um he used smartly K Krome 2 outdoor reversal film it was not opt it was not highspeed it would mean and we’ll get into what that means it was optimized for bright lighting conditions which is what we had in November 22nd okay so there’s this thing that’s going on there’s this thing called zilm denialism was what I’m going to call it and it’s one of these again these things can’t you can’t make some of this stuff up so ad hoc assumptions we know what those are and conspiracy theorists using them in drove so if there’s something you don’t like just come up with well that an ad hoc assumption um and and you just keep doing it and so what they’ve done is they’ve built so many ad hoc assumptions that come around the universe is sort of circular it’s a curved Universe due to relativity I guess maybe or something it’s come right back around and now the that Pruder film which is the whole impetus for the first generation waren commission uh critics including tankk Thompson uh you know they relied on it for criticizing the warrant commission report for the single bullet theory the back end to the left and that’s why the house select committee was form was because of it um so but now we’ve had so many of these head HW hypotheses that now ironically you got a lot of people out there a lot of them it’s not even fringed by The Fringe standards it’s you know there’s it’s almost become a mainstream thing and now Tink Thompson is becoming the one who’s sort of being uh forgotten about out uh they they deny it’s authentic they think that it was tampered with and altered and and then if they don’t do that that’s alterationist if they’re not doing that then you have uh others who just deny things like so for example you watch it in full watch it in full speed and Jeff K and Connelly they react at the same time you can see it I mean it’s it’s it’s so obvious when you watch it um people deny that they say no they’re not reacting at the same time I I think I do think this was one of the faults of the Warren Commission that the Warren Commission didn’t really adequately um examine or discuss the zuder film they yeah they missed the lapel flip they missed the fact that they react at the same time you’re right about that yeah they they they didn’t do that did they now uh yeah and that it’s and it’s it’s it is I mean it’s a fact and then then and another thing is there’s the head snap uh which we’ll get into but that’s being denied right so there are two different lines of reasoning for denying it one is the tink Thompson it’s a blur illusion uh de motion blurring and then the other is uh a lot of people are saying this too but I’m not going to get into it too much is that it was due to limo limousine breaking uh we’re g to get into both of these um but first before we do that is it authentic yes it is um first of all how do you determine it’s authentic well one of the things is you you do have to rely on Expert uh testimony uh because uh most everybody out there even I’m not an expert when it comes to the K kod Chrome Kodak film um I know a lot about it I’m an imagy scientist um I know a lot about how this stuff works but I I don’t know the details on that film so you have to go to The Experts first of all and so Roland Zada has said that there’s no detectable evidence and manipulation IM image alteration on the zip prer in camera original film and all supporting evidence precludes any forgery there too so this is what he said he he because he was paid by the way to take a look at it and found nothing he found found all the markings were there it was his codex film produced and at that time period I think 1962 um or 1963 and and and it it’s it’s authentic uh also there’s an i Clan cha of custody now this David ran who’s no long he’s not a lone gunman guy uh read his book read his book he talks about the chain of custody um there is no chance for conspirators to do anything with it they never got a chance U and then zaper himself testified that uh that they are authentic and Camera original and first generation Co copies another thing is that coherent alter those they say co coherent meaning yeah you can go in and screw it up you can go in there and take the film and ruin it basically I mean it was 8 millimeters and Kennedy’s head on that fatal shot would have been was Tiny um you can go in there and try to mess it up but if you’re going to try to do something that’s coherent through a film to to meet some sort of preconceived notion about what happened before it happened or after or before you know what happened I mean it’s it’s it’s not possible um it was not possible in 1963 and not even trivial today and by the way it was a reversal film meaning that there was no negative the film actually got produced as was there’s not a film negative now what happens in the real world let’s say in the real world there was a conspiracy and they did this comp cockamamy thing they they sh have been broad daylight um what they would have done is they would have tried they would Seas they would have send the the gusto in get everybody’s camera films you know and because it would take a Gusto to do this basically and then destroy them um they wouldn’t have come up with this thing about trying to you know alter it and then finally this is me a philosophical question if the zpp film could be altered and was then how do we know the assassination even happened now you could say well you know you know Vince bully obviously doesn’t think it was needed to determine what happened right well that’s true we didn’t need the film to know that it happened but that isn’t what I’m talking about I’m talking about once you go in that rabbit hole of denying evidence that you don’t like uh then you can deny all of it you can deny everything in fact you you know they deny the autopsy they deny a lot of things um so you can deny everything you can deny the fact that the you could say that the media was in on it you can deny you could say that uh that they set it up that it was a contrived thing that happened uh you can come up with all these head hoc hypothesis the the whole thing was conted because Kennedy just wanted to to get out he he didn’t want he wanted a nice soft exit from the presidency and he ended up going to uh you know Aruba or something like that I don’t know yeah it’s it’s the only play left to conspiracy theorists because the evidence points to Oswald so okay we have to claim that’s planted and altered and faked that’s the point and once you go down that rabbit hole you can just do it everywhere and you go no then you’re just spinning your wheels and you’ve got nothing and that’s so so that’s just my philosophical question about it so yes the zpp Brut film is authentic sadly it shows uh the president being shot in the head graphically and gruly all right so um this is the materials here that we’re going to be looking at I just everybody knows this so it’s SE frame 32 12 and 313 I rendered them in Gray scale notice I put a scale on here I put that on there because it’s I’m trying to show this is a quantitative Endeavor uh what I’ve done is I’ve this this image is a matrix of numbers and the numbers I’ve got Grace scaled according to this scale here but so what I’ve got is a matrix of numbers here and and here as well it’s uh frame 313 that we have this uh what is claimed to be the um camera the the panning error due to to the fact that what’s happened is the The Limousines got a little in front of the camera now you so you got you got both of them by the way this woman is a little bit blurred here because she’s moving but you but you notice she’s a lot more blurred here uh that’s again so what’s happened is it’s a lot like Lee Harvey Oswalt shots what’s happened is because the limousine is orthogonal the the that the amount of tracking the linear the angular tracking is at the maximum point so it turns out it’s right here at this fatal moment that it was the most difficult to do the filming uh because the limousine has to take the most panning and then not only that but it’s on a Downs slope so if you notice he’s had trouble zaper had trouble keeping the limousine centered right I mean this Frame here is mostly all wasted on the on the lawn and we barely got them down here um if you were centering it JFK would have been more up would have been more up here um so so that’s all just matters effect so that so what’s happened here by the way this is not due to the gunshot this is not a startle error which be kind of more erratic this is just the limousine got a little bit ahead of him he had a little difficulty tracking it because this moment happened before he would even heard the sound I believe um certainly before he would have react maybe maybe he would have heard the sound but but uh he wouldn’t have reacted that fast and and one other thing too this is how you know it’s tracking error also is because these the sunglint here off the Chrome is horizontal it’s maybe one degree off of horizontal but it’s a totally horizontal thing so it just has to do with limousine got a little ahead of him as he was trying to hand along and it it was it got difficult all right so this shows them in the typical fashion the repeating animated uh jet file uh and you see a lot of these all over the place in the internet uh they’re in full color it’s very gory it’s some the reason why I rendered it in Gray scale by the way I mean one is because we’re just doing some photogrametry here but but another thing is because you know it’s it’s just very gory so you know you don’t need the go to to do the analysis um anyway you could see between the two frames that he has a forward head snap uh it’s clear as day and it was measured by Ting Thompson to be about 5 cmers uh you’ll notice though that the second frame blurs and you can kind of see that especially here you can also see it in John Connelly’s head you can kind of you can just kind to see it in other places uh that’s where the blur illusion comes in but however before we get to that I want to point out it’s not due to limo breaking because to get into physics again classical mechanics what we’re talking about here something called a fictitious force that happens from a decelerating frame of reference Newton’s laws apply in an inertial frame meaning that Newton’s Laws hold in the frame basically that’s what the initial frame is so so whenever you got a reference frame that’s accelerating and decelerating it’s not inertial anymore and what happens is fictitious force is going to arrive now you can get rid of the fictitious forces by using let’s say we use the the street pavement as our initial frame then what happens is it’s no longer it’s no longer fictitious forces uh but but but what happens is in this analysis is more convenient to use the limine as the as the frame of reference in which case then you end up with fictitious forces if it slows a fictitious Force though due to this in a deating reference frame means that everybody in the reference frame all the objects will behave in the same way and what that means is that their Center masses all react in the same way so you got a center mass in your head and one in your body and what happens is it would both snap and not only that but everybody in the limo would snap that way as well because there’s a lot of time that went through the between these two frames 50 milliseconds that’s a lot of time if you’re talking about you know narrowing down your your um scale your time scale if you have like a high-speed camera there’s a lot that can go on between those two that 50 milliseconds so there’s a lot of time between there and so if you’re GNA say that this is due to limo breaking then everything else in there is gonna be due to you’re gonna have the same thing happening I’m really hammering this home maybe I’m beinga a dead horse but there are people who claiming this is do limo limo breaking and it’s not one other thing too it’s 5 cm approximately in one frame that implies deceleration of the car by 2 miles per hour per frame or 40 mil hour per second so hot damn this this limousine can do a break it’s like going from zero to 40 in one second that’s that’s one uh sports car there so other words it’s it like there’s no breaking that’s going to cause that is what I’m also trying to say I mean if there was a breaking it’s not going to cause that much all right so anyway I I beat that to I’m sorry about that but I just feel like I have to to hammer it home so now what about the blur illusion we could see that it becomes very blurry here is that see see con’s head kind of goes is that what’s happening here so let’s take a look all right so what is that so it’s an ad hoc hypothesis the forward motioning of that head is due to blurring um extreme motion blurring can indeed cause Distortion in film images all right so this is why you know Paul hul is the one who said I should look into it I didn’t want to because I’m thinking it’s not necessary but but but he did point out you know this is these are I believe these these frames here from the Zep P film they’re frames uh 405 408 409 409 this is later in the film a part of the film that most people don’t care about um I believe Thompson includes these in his book to illustrate the point uh and it was something that I had to think of a little bit about because because I I looked at and well they do have a point here and that is that did you know so so what happened is after Kennedy was shot in the head then Z prud became quite unsteady and it was no longer just panning error he was just probably nervous as hell and I’m surprised he didn’t just drop the camera which I probably would have done um so so that that led to this sort of extreme blurring and if you notice the lamp post here is distorted uh and then there seems the white bleeding in on it and there’s a person in back of it here so don’t worry about this guy here back there so that’s what’s going on there but it’s sort of like um looks like it’s moved right so so that’s what the point was and so what’s what’s what’s interesting is this is a legitimate phenomenon you can have blurring creating um distortions I don’t want to call it illusion but distortions U but so the question is that’s what is that what was going on here so to to get to this I got a hold of Roland Zada and asked him about it and unfortunately he provided me exactly what I was looking for he provided me this this this kod chrome movie film specs um for that particular film and um it’s this page here the second page that I was most interested in providing me something exactly what I was looking for which is this curve here now I’m gonna go ahead and zoom in on that that’s what this is so I took that and I zoomed in in on it and then what I did is I digitize it now what is it it is a plot of the density of the film versus the log exposure in Lux seconds which is intensity seconds and what that means is intensity seconds just means that the the shutter opens the film is exposed to light coming in and it’s exposed over a period of time and it’s both the combination of the intensity of the light how bright it is along with how long it’s sustained so it’s a combination of both so so so if you have a like a a light that comes on very bright and goes off before the the shutter closes then that will register is less bright than if a is just on the whole time while the shutters open so so that’s what this is depicting so what I did is I took this and I digitized it so then I have I have my computer now so I got numbers in my computer density means it’s more opaque so the film is more opaque at lower exposure they have it in log rhythmic here I I then took it to to linear and this where you can kind of see it becomes nonlinear um so it’s a linear axis but the curves are nonlinear and so what’s happening is it’s saying that the film is opaque and it becomes um less it becomes less opaque as it’s exposed longer but it sort of like starts very fast and it tapers off that’s the What’s called the non- highspeed part of it the outdoor part it’s trying to make sure that it doesn’t saturate the film’s design so you don’t saturate then what I did is I took the gray scale so I averaged gray scale is just an average of those three colors here and I took the negative so now what happens is um it’s the opposite so now as exposure goes up um the U it becomes higher numbers and now I wanted to get rid of these numbers because these numbers don’t really mean anything now so I I turned it into what’s called brightness it’s a number from zero to one so so from lower exposure to higher exposure you end up from numbers of zero brightness so now it’s really making sense zero brightness means it’s going to be black and then we go up to White all right so and it has to do with how long again the the film is exposed I won’t go into all this in detail uh I don’t we won’t have time but this is just my methodology so what I did is I simulated the effect of the film response on motion blurring and then I assessed whether motion blurring can create the illusion of isolated motion let’s worry about this side more so what I did is I took that that response curve and I took it and I and took the brightness array that came to me from the zap prud film itself I converted it back to exposure and then I blurred the exposure by applying a box car filter horizontal so I blurred it and then I took the exposure back to brightness so what this is doing is simulating the effect of blurring according to a film that has an exposure curve that sort of is nonlinear that it responds to the light in a nonlinear fashion this is all the try to investigate the idea does this effect which can cause Distortion Like lamp posts against the with extreme you know the the camera was extremely um um unsteady at that point can that also cause the JFK effect and that this is the result so the left side is c312 and a blurred c312 so 312 and blur Z 312 what we’re looking for is do it create a head snap and the answer is no it does not you see a lot of the other stuff is very similar right you can see that these the the the the Chrome here becomes distorted and you see his head kind his head does what it does but everybody kind of blurs out and there’s no isolated motion on his head conversely or on the other hand also if we go over to the right what I’ve got is the Blurred 312 and z313 which is already blurred and now you notice this all looks quite the same they’re all blurred about the same way the only difference is just that I only had a horizontal blur where that PR had a little bit off about one degree off so that’s the only thing you could kind of notice here otherwise uh that all looks fine but then you go over to here and his head’s still snapping forward uh so it it there’s no there’s no blur illusion and that doesn’t explain it so so blur or not it’s his head that’s being hit

and bonus but wait there’s more but wait there’s more uh so I I just thought I’d talk about this a little bit so the there’s this thing on the internet that oh you know his head is blacked out the back so that’s part of the alterationist they went in there they knew within hours that there had to be D he was shot from the in the head from the front and there was a big blowout we have to cover it up so they they so so this bottom line is this whole thing that I just talk about explains what’s going on uh what’s happening is that there’s a point in the curve where if you don’t get enough exposure you don’t get enough intensity exposure uh you’ll end up with just a blackout right and and that that’s what’s happened here so all has happened here is his head’s in the shadow the sun’s on that side you’re facing the Sun and his head’s in Shadow and so it’s just it’s too dark because it really is in Shadow and by the way his back is also in Shadow it’s blacked up too but but you know details but but that’s what’s going on is just that there’s not been enough intensity uh seconds to to cause a reaction so it’s blacked right and and really that’s uh that’s all it is and uh this paper by Farid he actually modeled it and he showed the same thing use a 3D model to show you get the same effect and one other thing too is when it comes to photo fakery it’s nothing new there I’m not saying it can’t happen that you can’t do it but this is also extremely difficult to to fake shadows and then especially if it’s a 8 millimeter and his head is a tiny little part of the 8 millimeters it’s very difficult to fake this type of thing all right so that’s what the black patch is it’s simply the the the the it’s like today you can even take your your your camera phone if you take it out in the dark and you try to take a picture and there’s no lighting it comes out black and this is sort of the same thing the only difference here is you have a film response whereas with cameras you don’t have to worry about film all right so conclusion um this forward head stap again I didn’t Discover it all I did was analyze it um it was discovered by Rich fan I believe uh and it’s exactly what it appears to be it’s not due to illusion it’s not due to limo breaking it’s just a measured isolated forward movement of JFK’s head on the order of 5 Centimeters between two frames um in accordance with principles of classical Dynamics It could only originate from an impulse from a directional real Force real Force means not fictitious Force but a real Force um his his head suffers a fatal wound so the force is due to a bullet impact uh and that’s only consistent with a impact that’s going from back to front uh so it’s it’s him being hit and had and that if you do a an in-depth dynamical calculation which is what I done had done in a certain way using forces I did I I treated the skull and the soft tissue in certain ways you end up with a movement on the same order of magnitude about 5 cenm so it so what’s observed agrees with what physics would predict um so the Z film provides independent Cooperative forensic evidence that JFK was shot in the head from the rear and I believe that’s all I have well that’s a great presentation I mean I really really appreciate that that’s fantastic I mean what what what again going back to the warrant commission well the first the first generation critics I mean it used to be the first generation critics would take all the evidence the 26 volumes the zuder film or whatever c399 and they would argue the evidence and the problem is now is the ne the new generation of of critics do the opposite we we we do not want to argue the evidence we’re going to tell you the evidence is phony planted fake and whatever that’s the only it’s it’s a whole new way of arguing and it means you can’t really discuss the the the assassination because they reject all the evidence it’s extremely frustrating you can’t Bec is impossible to to discuss it at that point it’s uh the analogy I always like to use is that it’s like um it’s like talking about how many angels can dance in the head of a pen you know arguing with each other about that um you’re G to get nowhere and so soon as people start denying it then you can’t go I just say well how do you know that he was assassinated then and then they think that’s oh I’m not no but no but You’ gone down that path and and there are people by the way believe it or not I come up with that crazy thing but then there are some out there who think that is what happened that he wasn’t assassinated yeah or or people saying Jackie Jackie shot him or whatever you know really gets really yeah yeah Mrs Kennedy you know with her poison dart gun Ting Thompson’s not responding to any of any of the critiques of of his book yeah I noticed that he there was that interview recently that was circulated on the social media I I listened to it and he um he had a sympathetic interviewer who didn’t bring anything up like that no hard questions the only hard questions were or what You Know What’s the magnitude of the conspiracy that would have to go into doing all this and he was very uncomfortable with those questions I could see it um because because he’s not IR he’s not irrational but he’s irrational about this uh but but he because I could see that he’s thinking oh my God that’s like Fringe you know I’d have to be saying that you know everybody’s in on it he doesn’t want to go there he’s wants to say well no all I proved is that he was shot by more than one gunman and I didn’t we’re going to leave it go at that but we’re like you can’t just leave it go at that I mean you can’t just say that and say okay well I’m done you know you you have to you know okay what who was the gun you know you have to you go further than that he doesn’t want to do that it’s too bad well look it’s this is all uh fascinating stuff and there’s still a lot more to discuss uh about um uh the head wound and stuff youve because you’ve written so much and so obviously a third a third uh session is going to be upcoming in the near future uh but thank you much it’s been been amazing okay great Fred I’m glad uh glad that hopefully we uh everybody’s uh enjoys this who’s watching it okay thank you very much and uh we’ll see you soon for another edition of on the trail of delusion

[Music] [Applause] [Music]

About the secret JFK files

www.mattkprovideo.com/2025/02/11/about-the-secret-jfk-files/

Is there anything of interest in the so-called “secret files” about the President John Fitzgerald Kennedy (JFK) assassination?

President Donald Trump said he would release all the files in his first term, then “THEY” asked him not to do so. Suspicious?

Then Trump said he’d release everything in his SECOND term, and so far… he hasn’t?

Why won’t Trump release the files? What is in them that needs to be kept secret?

Was the Warren Commission hiding something? Something that might indicate a second shooter or that Lee Oswald was working for a government security agency?!?!?

Was the Church Committee hiding something?

What did the 1978 House Select Committee on Assassinations have to hide? What were they afraid of?

What material(s) did the Assassination Records Review Board decide not to release to the public and Why?

Welcome to the first episode of On the Trail of Delusion, a podcast that separates reality from fiction in the JFK assassination. Our guest is Robert Reynolds who is an expert on the JFK assassination files. You can visit his terrific website at http://www.jfkarc.info

kennedy,#assassination, #jfk,#conspiracy,#history,#dallas,#texas,#washingtond.c.,#washington, #dc, #records, #201,#file,#201_file,#trump, #obama, #biden, #douthit,#kordelski, #litwin,#youtube, #mexico,#mexico_city,#oswald, #assassin, #lho, #kordelski,

Live Speech Videography.

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These are samples of my experience in shooting live speaking events.

I used multiple cameras to shoot this fundraising event at First Presbyterian Church in San Antonio, ( November 2024.)

I also created their graphics using Photoshop and After Effects. It was edited in Adobe Premiere.

This is a speech by a former FBI agent Chris Combs at the Argyle in San Antonio, Texas.

Johnny Gannt Memorial Speeches. Georgetown, Texas

http://www.ganttaviationinc.com/

http://www.ganttaviation.com/memory-johnny-gantt/

A speech I shot and edited in Dallas, Texas. November 22, 2024.

Dealey Plaza Dallas, Nov 22, 2024

www.mattkprovideo.com/2024/11/23/dealey-plaza-dallas-nov-22-2024/

Two years in a row…?

Here are some video clips of the goings on in Dealey Plaza ( Dallas, Texas) to commemorate the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963.

I disagree with many of the things said and done today ( November 22, 2024,) but remembering President Kennedy will always be a good thing.

Is this YouTube show too good to be true?


I’ve been enjoying a YouTube show about the history of SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE.
It seems to be made by two 2 very knowledgeable SNL superfans. There doesn’t seem to be ANYTHING these don’t know about their favorite show.

Everything You NEED to Know About SNL 


We’ve all met the type. There isn’t much superfans of something can’t tell you from memory about shows like STAR TREK or whatever else…

Its interesting and engaging and VERY well put together.


SO well put together that it has sparked a benign low level conspiracy theory in my head.


The show is so well produced, has high quality 4K footage from SNL’s earliest days. At first I thought that they were such devoted fans that they had every episode on VHS or DVD and that they “ripped” the source material and edited into their show.
And that may be the truth. BUT, they seem to have footage from episodes ( that I don’t think) was ever released on home video. And you can’t “rip” material from a professional streaming service, can you? I can’t think of how somebody could “rip” materal off of something like PEACOCK. But where there’s a will there might be a way…
And if that was the case, wouldn’t PEACOCK send them a cease and desist?


Using copyrighted material on YouTube is a confusing, slippery slope. If I owned the rights to SNL’s reruns and found out somebody had made an elaborate love letter to my property, I wouldn’t have a problem with it. But that’s me, we’ve all heard of copyright attorneys coming after content creators with a hammer. Maybe because they HAVE to? If they let something slip past, it weakens their claim to ownership? (“Why are you coming after ME when you didn’t go after them??”).


Every episode of this YouTube show ends with saying “SNL’s reruns are viewable on Peacock.”


I didn’t know that. I have PEACOCK and didn.t know they were streaming the earliest SNL episodes. So I clicked on Peacock and started perusing the crude ( in every sense of the word) early episodes. Some of it was better than I remember, some it has not aged well.


I spend more time on YouTube these days than regular TV or even streaming. I assume a lot of us do. I wouldn’t have known to click on PEACOCK to see SNL re-runs if not for this YouTube show made by these superfans.

BUT! a lightbulb went off over my head!


Have I been tricked? Was that YouTube show made by Superfans a ruse? A hidden commercial made BY Peacock itself???


How else would those guys get such extremely high quality footage from episodes that ( I don’t think) were ever released on home video?


The camera and sound quality are both top notch. As good as anything on regular professional TV- let alone YouTube. Their opening and closing graphics were also of professional caliber. Not that some YouTubers don’t put their heart and soul into making pro grade content, many do. But this is a cut above.

Does anyone know if “Everything You NEED to Know About SNL” is being produced by PEACOCK itself or if it really is made by fans who happen to be damn good at what they do?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRqyVjTQ_fE

“An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live” : Author interview (2003)

Video About MAD Magazine

www.mattkprovideo.com/2024/10/03/video-about-mad-magazine/

A youtube video documentary about the history of MAD magazine.

I saw a newly made YouTube documentary on MAD magazine. A lot of stuff I’ve seen in older documentaries, but its put together well and includes newer references like MAD-TV.

It also mentions MAD’s forays into television and animation..

I knew about the sketch show on FOX-TV “MAD-TV” but I was surprised that I’d never heard about the cartoon networks show just called “MAD.” that was full of 2D animated cartoons and stop motion animation. I want to find and see THAT show now!

On the Trail of Delusion, Episode 9, Dr Alecia Long

On the Trail of Delusion, Episode 9, Dr Alecia Long

www.mattkprovideo.com/2024/09/08/on-the-trail-of-delusion-episode-9-dr-alecia-long/

I want to thank everybody for coming this afternoon my name is Fred Litwin noted author Fred Litwin and of course Fred is also the author of I was a teenage JFK conspiracy freak on the trail of delusion and Oliver Stones film flam at the demagogue of D Plaza Fred Litwin is here he’s a longtime author and certainly Watcher of politics uh joining us uh Fred Litwin great to have you here thank you very much

hey welcome to another edition of On the trail of Delusion where we try to separate the wheat from the chaff and we actually try to present serious discussions on the JFK assassinatio

the kind of material that you just won’t see on typical Conspiracy YouTube videos

I’m absolutely delighted today to have Alicia long as my guest Alicia is a professor of history at Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge Alicia has written four books the latest book that she’s written is cruising for conspirators which is all about Jim Garrison’s prosecution of Clay Shaw in the 1960s

this is her fourth book and there’s another book coming on the way which we’ll talk about

Alicia has a ma from Ohio University and a PhD from the University of Delaware and I have to say that your book Cruising for Conspirators is not only one of the best books written on this topic but I I know this topic but in fact when I read this book I found it exciting I found your narrative to be incredibly exciting even though I knew it was going to happen

www.//a.co/d/bt4UT6C

I said wow this is so well written and so interesting um that uh this book is going to stand the test of time I mean a 100 years from now people will still be referring to this book as one of the classic books on the case so I’m absolutely delighted um to be here and my first question is sort of what got you interested in Jim Garrison

So you know my work and training as a historian uh my dissertation was focused on the City of New Orleans and so New Orleans really is kind of like the central location for the stories and histories that I’m interested in as a you know research historian and um my first book was um about the history of prostitution in New Orleans

between the end of the Civil War and 1920 and the Storyville vice district and one of the sources that’s very rich in New Orleans is court records

and so the first book was really based on a series of Court records and um what you see immediately whether you’re looking at New Orleans or Louisiana more broadly is you know that there are many miscarriages of justice and that’s that’s true everywhere um but because New Orleans is such a distinctive place and has so many characters

Sometimes these stories are just super Vivid out of the court records and um I originally set off I think to write a book about morals in the 1960s just to kind of understand that decade in the city’s history but you know I came across the Shaw story and the Garrison prosecution and that seemed like you know a glaring example of a miscarriage of Justice and um you know as you know the evidentiary record around just the Garrison investigation is huge and so you know it’s it’s that was plenty of material to write a book and it’s plenty of material to write half a dozen

you know more books in terms of uh you know that particular h District Attorney’s tenure in office

but it was also really uh you know it was a very volatile time in the United States

but it’s also a really volatile time uh of change in New Orleans and so that’s you know that’s my background as a historian and a research historian is is New Orleans

and also the history of sexuality so so the first book is really about you know kind of as a feminist take on uh prostitution and this book uh really reflects kind of my sense of uh you know how badly uh LGBT plus people were treated

in fact and in law um in the mid 20th century and how this case not only is an example of that but it really kind of provides us a window into um how that worked uh you know on a kind of mechanical level in law um and in culture and society and so that’s kind of that’s where my research comes from

it’s an interest in New Orleans in the history of sexuality it’s you know New Orleans is a fascinating place so you know you’re you’re an historian and I think you’ve probably read a lot of uh conspiracy books on the JFK assassination but can you talk a bit about uh your expertise as a historian and what that brings to the table and how you might when you read conspiracy books how you know how are they lacking in what you would call good material for historians so you know I mean I was I was thinking about this a lot and I’m teaching a historiography course for graduate students this semester where we really look at the history of how historians are trained um what they’re taught to believe about what they’re doing um and how that changes over time and you know in the early 20th century I think historians were uh really obsessed with the idea of objectivity and they felt like they could just be objective enough that they could you know rebuild the past in a very reliable um way and that that belief and objectivity uh I think has really waned over the course of the 20th century and into the 21st and I think most people are willing to acknowledge that they have uh you know presumptions about things um that they have sort of you know they bring things to the table with them that help shape their work but having said that I mean I think the really valuable thing about the way historians are training in graduate school is that you really are taught to focus on evidence right right I mean question formulation is uh you know an act of creativity and Imagination and you know predisposition what are you interested in um but once you settle on a question you know you really are trained to identify as much archal material as you can and try to put that story together in as complete a way as you can understanding that there are questions you won’t be able to answer much of the material written about Garrison at the time um and then let’s say like in the late 20th century no one was super polarized but beyond that the books that seemed to me the best books were the books that were dealing in evidence right either um archal evidence or they’re going out and doing interviews like you you’ve done a lot of interviews right um and you’re talking to people um you know about things they experienced or saw firsthand and there you know this whole class of books related to The Garrison investigation that are so obsessed with defending Jim Garrison um and defending his um activities um particularly around the Kennedy assassination but more generally I think I tried really hard to be fair to Jim Garrison um as a historical figure um I don’t think he’s an admirable person um or public official um but I really looked at his you know his record from you know the late 40s forward and a lot of the things that happened and you know this I mean a lot of the things that happened in the Garrison investigation there was a pattern that was already set you know before he got there that uh is that gets replicated uh in his prosecution of Clay Shaw and there are numerous examples of that so you know I think looking at that you know staying in the evidence um is something that I think historians are trained to do and I teach a course for undergrad um called the history of conspiracy in the United States and we really look at it from the time of the Declaration of Independence to the 21st century and you know there’s a question that I always ask them you know when they make U assertions about things and there are um I have numbers of students who are you know predisposed to conspiracy thinking um but we always kind of you know land on that question about what is the evidence here yeah right and you know in terms of the Kennedy assassination the preponderance of the evidence is that Lee Harvey Oswald did it are there many you know questions about you know where he was and what he was doing and what the hell is going on here and you know mean obviously um but if if we’re going to stay in the evidence that’s where you land yeah very true and I think the the same can be said the evidence against Clay Shaw is pretty weak if not of almost non-existent right yeah it’s very shoddy

Moo Sciaambra who developed a lot of testimony among Witnesses and the the big example there’s the Clinton Witnesses you know whose initial depositions are all over the place but by the time they come to testify these story sort of narrowed into something that is you know moderately coherent and and consistent um but that’s because he he works with these witnesses to develop that testimony that is something districts attorney District Attorneys do um but there was a you know there was a lot of really shady stuff um you know happening there I think the same and I’m gonna I’m gonna flake on the name this morning I’m sorry but the the drug addict who

uh yeah that’s also you know another one of those stories where Bundy understands what they’re looking for and he hands it to them what let’s go back to I mean you you live in Baton Rouge I do you you have a an expertise on understanding New Orleans but also Louisiana um I’m from Canada so I don’t have that expertise I don’t have that knowledge so perhaps you can talk a bit about Louisiana and New Orleans and what what is it about those places that makes this case interesting or stand out or what you know what do people need to know about Louisiana and New Orleans yeah I would say just kind of generally I’m I’m really grateful I I came to LSU at uh in 2007 and that was my second academic job taught at Georgia State University before that and had worked in the Louisiana State Museum for six years before that so I’ve been at this long time now and um but one of my charges and I was hired to teach Louisiana history and I teach a big survey course on Louisiana history every semester um and I’m really grateful for that because you know before I had that job I I really was I think I had a lot of expertise on New Orleans I had less expertise about the state and and that has really kind of enhanced my understanding of um not just how New Orleans is distinctive but how it fits into um the States history and and the States history is very it’s not it’s not that it’s just conservative it’s that you know there seems to be historically speaking a kind of you know a preference for demagoguery right among among the populace uh at the state level um and and you know in in many cases at the you know local level and it’s also really important and and I do this in in cruising for conspirator is really explain how Jim Garrison became so empowered um in his first term in office that by the time he got to investigating the Kennedy assassination there were no controls over him none I mean he effectively was unsupervised he had the governor in his pocket he he arguably got John mckian elected um and so mckian you know is hands off um he has beaten the Attorney General um at the United States Supreme Court and um you know so he is he is a super empowered local official and you have to sort of understand that larger context of what was happening in Louisiana not just in the 1960s but over time to understand how somebody could be operating in the way that he was operating um during that period of time I think there was a history of of uh police corruption in in in Louisiana as well um yeah and and this um this new book that I’m working on um what’s so interesting to me is how these people uh keep popping up over time and so Persian geret right uh is U dismissed from the police force in 1953 um for um you know they sort of soft pedal but there’s you know there is testimony that he and his partner are actually coordinating these safe cracking robberies right while they’re cops and so ultimately he’s dismissed from the police force and this all happens the the new book is a is about marage and a murder and a miscarriage of Justice in the early 1950s and there’s a a murder of this woman named U Diddy Cooper by her um then husband James Cooper who owned the Quarter Two Sisters restaurants you can sort of see how this all like floating around in the French Quarter and Jer is right in the middle of it right um and this big police corruption Scandal I think in part um accounts for why there is such a miscarriage of Justice in her murder um but so you have to sort of you know know who these people are and who these characters are and so if you know that backstory about persan jery um Jim Garrison making him his chief investigator in 1962 is this extraordinary kind of Fu right um and you know and also a kind of indicator of how that office will be run in terms of um using that office to um enrich themselves using the legal process um in ways that are very Sim iCal yeah one one of my favorite stories about persing jery was told to me by Milton brener um that he that he would find out which cases in the DA’s office were not going to be prosecuted and then he we go to those people and say well I can get your case dismissed if you pay me money and of course it would all it would looked at those people like he was highly successful right yeah he he he was a real operator uh and I love after he left the DA’s office um at the time of the um first campaign for re-election for Garrison that he told I don’t remember who he told this to but he described himself as an underworld on budsman right you know it’s it’s classic it’s it’s fascinating tell me a bit about um perhaps a history of homosexuality in Louisiana or New Orleans and how it was looked upon in the 1960s because sometimes people think oh New Orleans was so uh open about stuff but it wasn’t completely open so if you want to perhaps talk a bit about homosexuality sure I mean there’s you know this is important I think you know particularly because of you know contemporary uh kind of conservative culture War issues and I think sort of understanding the longer history of this is really important particularly for young people who have you know grown up in a world that is so different yeah from you know the uh 21st century uh you know world and and and you know New Orleans likes to Pride itself on being liberal um and its critics like to think of it that way but there is actually you know there are a lot of these uh you know reformers in New Orleans in the early 1950s who are themselves kind of obsessed with homosexuality and particularly the visibility of it in the French quarter and they battle it really hard um through city ordinances um through uh lobbying the state legislature and having a sort of legal regime set up in place by the late 1950s in New Orleans or for the state actually and you know homosexuality which it would have been called at the time you know it’s becomes the kind of this placeholder for uh decadence and the kind of disreputability uh that the city has and so you know there’s a huge campaign there’s a big one in 1953 there’s another one in 1958 um and the early 1960s police are raiding gay bars on a very very consistent basis and just hauling people in and often they’re not even charged but it’s you know it’s the it’s the harassment and and and I’ll also say because you know I think it’s really important to distinguish you when particularly when doing this kind of work like uh you know kind of close historical work really to distinguish between the police and the District Attorney’s offices um because there’s often a lot of tension in there and and what I found in the historical record and I’ve written a couple of articles about it um is you know the police are kind of dragged into to right uh this um because for them it it’s a lot of trouble and a lot of hassle to be raiding These Bars all the time and and dragging these people in and processing them and then a lot of these cases just get n acrossed so it’s like you know it’s it’s you know it UPS their level of uh you know work you know and and processing people in the French Quarter and and I think they knew that for the most part uh you know not always but for the most part the the establishments that were gay or gay adjacent um were no different than and in many cases a lot um less criminally adjacent than many other places in the French Quarter but they ultimately get sort of drawn into these reformers quests to uh rid the City of New Orleans of this reputation and a visible you know homosexuality homosexual communities in the French border that is something that’s important again to understand with regard of the Garrison investigation and the shaw matter and there’s a there’s a photo that I use and I think youve probably I’m sure you’ve seen this one of three of Garrison’s investigators sitting at a table and it’s full of you know mug shots of men and boys and you know exactly what those are that’s that big pool of pretty vulnerable gay people they have arrested and now they can sort of you know try to button hole and harass and there are you know a number of specific cases of that type they don’t create that uh you know situation but they exploit it mercilessly not just in the of Shaw but in trying to uh find witnesses who will confirm these you know this crazy theory that they have developed about you know David fery and Clay Shaw and Lee Harvey Oswell and and that also I mean the going combining that with the DA’s power of subpoena he actually could actually um subpoena to appear either before the grand jury or in his office but um people were sort of scared of Garrison he had a lot of power they were nervous absolutely they were I mean a lot of G people went underground and you I mean you have people uh you know talk about that in interviews um that the District Attorney’s Office does um and they also uh there’s one interview and again I’m not going to remember the specific name because there’s so much of this kind of stuff but that um you know one gay bar owner uh said that his partner had been told that if they would produce testimony you know putting Clay Shaw and David FY together that they could run their drag shows um without harassment right and and you also see it in Jean Davis’s testimony before the grand jury where he you know is essentially like saying I’ll say whatever you want me to say because I’ve always given you evidence isn’t that right Mr Garrison and then Garrison says yes and like Gan Davis is a kind of quintessential you know kind of gay bar owner who uh is you know very much part of a certain segment of uh the gay community in the French Quarter um but also an informant for the police um you know trying balance all those things so he can stay in business yeah and stay out of jail ideally exactly yeah so it’s an incredible milu and I I mean I’ll go back to there’s one conspiracy author who claims the problem with me and others like you is that you don’t understand New Orleans and only this person understands New Orleans and I find that you know quite quite ridiculous that uh people say that because you certainly understand New Orleans and Louisiana well you know I think you have to under just with regard to this particular um author um you know I recently discovered that there was a second part of um a very absurd uh it proport to be a book review um of cruising for conspirators and and you know it’s not I can’t really take it seriously because at the first one in the first review uh that this person wrote uh it was clear this person had not read the book right I mean I think they might have read a um you know an excerpt or a preview um but yeah I mean there’s some people just so um defensive and uh and mean is not the right word but just so sort of like angry and costic and toxic yeah and you can’t I you know you cannot engage meaningfully with a person who approaches their subject matter in that way and I’m about as a as a professor you know as a teacher I’m all about you know having just you know having respectful disagreements with people yeah and walking away with a relationship with that person intact um and and you know that to me is teaching and that to me is dialogue and I think there are some people in the conspiracy Community with whom you can have conversations um you know but not many not many it’s really it’s a how few you can and and and then I’ll just say this and then we can move on but you know I also think there is no little sexism in in you know some of the treatment that I received um from one author in particular and you know I hope that person will do some self-examination um because I think they have a problem with women I hope so too and I think you’re right but uh I somehow doubt it yeah well I’m not g to get my hugs up but don’t hold your breath no so let’s talk a bit about um Clay Shaw okay what led Garis Garrison to Clay Shaw and what kind of life he was leading um in New Orleans in the 1960s he had it pretty good uh right up until um you know he becomes a suspect and um he’d been traveling he was in Spain for a period of time he was in England for a period of time he had uh saved enough money and made enough money from uh you know flipping properties in the French quar that he had a secure retirement in place and uh I think he was enjoying himself despite the dangers I think he had a you know pretty uh active uh sex life and that was an important part of his life um and had been for a long period of time he’s very attractive man you know and I didn’t have problems finding Partners when he is identified I mean you have to I mean know what happened in December when he’s interviewed in December I think the tone of that interview is is really interesting because you see him in that particular interview kind of like balancing the danger he’s in with a kind of covering you know a sort of closedness around his identity as a homosexual and and when he is uh you know when he’s arrested there’s this whole period of time where for practical reasons I think but also because he’s doing a lot of self-examination he stops picking men up and and having relationships and a lot of people you know fall away from him and he kind of isolates himself and there are a very small number of people with whom he has relationship Jeff bson is probably like the you know the closest example with whom he’d been a couple for you know many years before and um you know this upends his life I mean he you know he becomes identified as a potential conspirator in the assassination of JFK and I just I think about him often in you know in the courtroom uh watching the Auda film over and over and over and watching Kennedy’s head be blown apart and being identified as a person had something to do with that to you know to stand in that room that was a really devastating you know thing for him uh and he never quite recovered from it and you know even when he is you know like there’s a letter I want to say it’s like from maybe six months before he dies he says you know it doesn’t matter that I was found not guilty this is going to be my legacy this is you know and and and that’s also you know a part of the tragedy is that despite losing resoundingly in court right um in a you know in an environment that he largely controlled the terms of Garrison I mean you know despite losing uh he still goes after him and and you know when he dies all bets are off so you know people who support Garrison just seem to like you know alide the the the verdict in court you know there’s always there’s always a reason that it’s corrupt you know there’s always a reason that you know these people are wrong and it’s a you know it’s a I don’t think it’s a very balanced way to look at those events no the G gon’s supporters would say well Garrison never mentioned homosexuality well that is BS and it’s not true Garrison was kind of a u a master of you know saying something and then disowning having said it you know what I mean as as it became inconvenient I mean and you know you can say what you want about James failen but you know Garrison didn’t sue him over that article you know um in fact you know also think Garrison was one of those people who understood the value of publicity um good or bad right as long as he was in the news uh that was that was working for him in some way um and you know so this not true and um you know I once saw um a noted Garrison Defender um I was on a panel with this person it’s one of the rudest people um I’ve ever been on a panel with I me just like astoundingly rude and unprofessional but um you know this person you know in talking about that James failen article uh in in response to a question from the audience says well you know he made a mistake there and he was sorry well how do you know number one what difference does it make I mean you know you don’t have to out somebody multiple times to you know to have used that as a methodology um to make somebody you know um legible as as suspicious um and so you know that is what happened and you know if you want to excuse it you’re welcome to do that but it it that is not a um that is not an evenhanded um you know uh evaluation of of that evidence I’m I’m struck by uh his Playboy interview in September uh 1967 if you look at the Preamble the intro to that interview um they talk about Clay Shaw being the queen bee of the homosexual community in New Orleans well that’s not Garrison saying that but he wrote a large part of that it really is him saying he never objected to to Playboy putting that in and that there’s these Illusions all over the case yeah and then you and you’re the person who made me aware of the confidential um article um that appears just months before this case goes to trial and the fact that it’s you know fed by evidence from the District Attorney’s office and the way that evidence was handled in that case is I mean just scandalous in terms of like chain of custody and I’m talking you know about the the material taken from Shaw’s home uh the night of the arrest and how that gets like moved around to Robert Heath’s office how it goes to you know uh Garrison’s Suburban home for a photo shoot with Life magazine and you know these are uh you know that is just it’s like a complete uh you know betrayal of the public trust the way the evidence in that case was used and I would be more shocked by it if it were a kind of unique circumstance but um you know it was not and um you know there were many Shenanigans undertaken by Garrison and his investigators as regards evidence in that case and many others what’s amazing is that the case went to trial that’s the amazing thing and that really has to do with cowardice on the part of those three judges who who let the thing move forward I think they were afraid of Garrison and they were afraid of um somehow being branded as people who didn’t want to get to the truth about the Kennedy assassination and that that was a scary thing um at that period of time and that points to another thing about G Garrison had a very very uh he was responsible for some of the judges getting elected so he had some of the judges sort of in his back pocket he absolutely did and I you know I have read somewhere and I don’t I don’t know this to be the case and I’m trying to remember it was in a transcript of of you know of an interview that somebody gave a deposition and and there was an implication that Hagerty who had a drinking problem you know hackery actually had like bounced a bunch of checks the District Attorney’s Office you know kind of knew this and kind of threatened to make it public if you know if Hagerty didn’t uh you know play ball uh in their View and and that Hagerty made some of the calls he did I think actually you know was to his credit um in that in that courtroom knowing you know that Garrison could make him look bad if he wanted to but and then you know his behavior after the case when he’s like you know caught in the motel room with the prostitutes and you know uh brings porn movies from that have been seized I me you know it sort of gives you a sense of the irregularities that you know uh you know are part of criminal district court in in New Orleans during that era um and uh yeah it’s you know it’s a crazy crazy story yeah and you you could see it in some of the grand jury testimony I mean Carlos koga’s grand jury testimony Garrison sort of threatening them continually threatening them you know um you know you should think about what you’re saying and and uh I’ll give you time to go outside and take a break and come back in and and bobu too right I mean who they you know I mean literally threatened physically threatened um yeah and and and have material um of him um that is um you know very incriminating um and um you know try to hold that over his head and that he refused to testify and that he refus to uh help you know underg guard that flimsy story um I think also was pretty brave right um you know in in that moment because you know they’ll threaten anybody um to get what they want I mean it seems to me that’s what the record suggests is happening yeah yeah for sure the other thing that I I’m found striking is the um perhaps this whole case would have gone wouldn’t have gone forward if if there had been Discovery in Louisiana courts right the Garrison didn’t have very stingy yeah yeah um yeah and you know this is also a period of time when they have the you know non-unanimous jury verdicts um and you know so in this case I think there were 12 I think you know only nine of them would have had to say guilty um you know to to get a guilty verdict the way you know this worked at at that time in Louisiana law and that has since been addressed and now you do have to have unanimous jury verdicts particularly in capital cases but um you know also I mean I mean I’m asking you a question now but like what’s interesting this is such a low bar case I mean it’s a conspiracy case now conspiracy cases can be extremely serious and if he was convicted he could spend a long time in prison but I mean they’re fairly easy cases to prove if there is in fact a demonstrable conspiracy right the crime didn’t even have to happen they just have to have people in discussion with each other but the evidence you know that they present for that of this you know conspiratorial discussion is so flimsy um and Russo is such a disaster on the stand also a very vulnerable person uh who is you know manipulated threatened uh you know um in certain ways it’s it’s it’s amazing that it went ahead it’s amazing that the trial you know went on um and I guess I’m less familiar and you may know more about this I sort of less familiar with uh how that was evaluated from outside Louisiana you know how people saw that um and and did they see it as just a kind of you know Banana Republic kind of you know charade you know uh in Louisiana or was it you know something that was taken seriously and I’m trying to think you know if if I know the answer to that I’m not so sure that I do but I think you know like the national networks I think had Garrison’s number um but but they covered the case you know because it was big news and and I think also well certainly in Louisiana the times pikun and the state’s item really took him seriously and and they could have really blown a lot of this out of the water but didn’t and didn’t say Garrison until after the verdict yeah and that you know that too is you know the newspapers yeah then he needs to resign you know but they’re hedging their bets the whole time it reminds me of that uh the time of the 1927 flood in the Mississippi River and everybody in the city can see that the river is rising but the newspapers are not printing anything about it you know and um it’s you know because they’re it you know they’re involved in the business community and the business Community is concerned that this could hurt business and you know there’s and and and in a way you know they give Garrison a pass for a long time it’s not that it’s not that they’re not critical of him sometimes they are um but just in terms of you know the reporting on the thing it’s it’s often very you know shallow um and and there were people who you know bucked that Trend I think like Rosemary James is probably one of those people um but you know it um it it makes you think about like what you’re seeing in the newspapers and and how to evaluate that on balance you know um in in any case that you’re looking at yeah you were you were one one of very lucky to talk to Rosemary James what what did she tell you about Garrison so I talked to her twice and and in one of the cases I did a formal uh oral history interview with her and I have a transcript of it and um you know she she knew Shaw I mean she had dinner his house uh she was married to her I think first husband at the time and uh you know they were they were so social people but she was also you know a television news reporter at this period of time and and you know she knew Garrison did not play fair um that he tried to make her the issue you know once they uh you know released that story that they have somehow done him wrong but you know she went and told him that they were going to do it and he could you know ask them not to or you know have his side of it you know kind of and he didn’t and uh you know that too I think is a you know a calculation on his part um you know to get it out there but then act like you know the forces against me are you stacked against me um you know kind of thing and uh yeah it’s newspapers are not objective sources they’re the first draft of things and um you know they make mistakes and they don’t always correct them and so you have to you know make sure that um there’s some kind of you know uh corroboration uh for uh particularly significant claims that they make yeah she by the way one what do you think of um well Garrison’s the prosecution of Garrison after the case for uh the bribery and the with the pinball machines and also the income tax evasion well I think probably um so so two things about it one is it’s very interesting that Jer of course is the person who you know turns the evidence um in the in the pinball case uh you know testifies for the feds um and um you know I’ll say this he wasn’t convicted Y and um you know but the transcripts the recorded transcripts that ran in the newspapers were extremely damaging and I’ve never read and I I don’t you know I don’t even know if full transcripts are out there I’ve never read all the trial testimony in those 1970s cases he’s not convicted in either one of those cases and the justice department then and now doesn’t like to take things to Court unless they think they can win um and you know they didn’t win against him and that’s important to acknowledge um but do I think uh Garrison was on the take absolutely and and I think there is evidence of that it just apparently was not compelling enough um in court to get a jury to convict him and uh but even even that and this is probably some sort of like Poetic Justice but like even at that even though he’s not convicted that badly damages him uh not so much that he couldn’t several years down the road get reelected as a judge because he is an appealing political figure to people but he’s not reelected um you know to that what guess it would have been the fourth term or the third term I’m trying to think yes the third term I think yeah I’m not sure third or fourth I reach TR to 66 four years I think he’s there yeah I think his fourth the beginning of his fourth term and Harry conik Jr or Harry conik beats him and I I didn’t know this at the time I published the book but I you know I found something you know Garrison sued him um and said the uh the the election was corrupt um and and and tried to you know sort of get the vote results overturned and um you know and that’s just you know he’s a sore loser you know and uh and but again he was not convicted and he does then become a judge and um you know that doesn’t make him a saint but you know he you know apparently some voters at least were willing to you know Overlook uh those uh trial you know interview transcripts and recorded uh you know conversations between him and Jer yeah well if you read some of those recorded conversations it’s pretty damning but of course U afterwards Jer sort of retracts um everything because he wants to go back to New Orleans and have a life and he realizes that Garrison still has some power um ultimately he does say no it was it was real but but uh it’s kind of interesting to to note that U yeah and yeah that that is you know I mean J had you know been around a long time and um you know had family and you know um you know children and you know does come back to Louisiana and he’s critical of Garrison in the early 90s you know when the when the when JFK comes out you know he’s one of the voices in the newspaper who says it was you know all a sham and a scam and uh you know and uh late in life he he gives an interview I think it’s to the times pyun and you know he um you know he basically admits you know that you know to being sort of a quasa criminal um as a cop and after um but I think you know he saw that and a lot of people saw that as you know just the way things were uh during that period of time yeah he he actually I think he stole all the the all the money on the take money from the from the police himself yeah and took a police character a woman drug addict to New York City um yeah it’s like this I I’m I’m in the records now for you know 1953 and uh you know the investigation into the police and uh you know he fights really hard to be reinstated and it’s ultimately the Louisiana Supreme Court that turns back his claim he kind of tries to make a you know a civil service claim to be reinstated to the police um so that was important to him but you know at that point he essentially becomes you know like an underworld bar owner and you know um you know uh very criminally adjacent oh and I just wanted say one more thing which is that you know the tax evasion charges Aaron con is the person who turns over evidence to the justice department about a Garrison’s taxes versus you know salary and you know what he’s spending and and you know con was a you know a dogged investigator and um also you know an enemy of of garrisons but he’s the person who does that this is not like the you know the CIA telling the justice department to you know I mean you know you know Garrison had you know throttled them in the press and I’m sure they didn’t like him any um you know but they receive evidence from a local source that leads to the tax evasion charges so this is not some sort of you know criminal conspiracy uh you know emanating from the CIA or the FBI it’s it’s cone and it’s a personal Grudge in that particular case the funny thing in the bribery case was the Garrison uh fired his attorneys in the middle of the case and and and and then became his own attorney MH and that probably turned the case around he gave a a long summation at the end I think that probably uh uh convince people you know part of his whole story was they’re after me because of the assassination blah blah blah and and uh I it was a crazy it was absolutely crazy in a certain way you know he must have been I you know he must have been impressive yeah in in the courtroom you know um with opening statements and closing statements but you know one of the things I say at the end of cruising for conspirators I think he kind of you know do you know what jump the shark means yeah you know he sort of jumped the shark at a at a moment um in that summation where he basically says a conspiracy charge is like a murder you know and he and he he’s gets the thing ginned up into something so big that I think it might have given the jury pause you know um what we have here before us is not a very good case um and then he sort of like you know saying you know this is about the president’s murder and if you don’t find this person guilty you’re you know you’re uh you know you’re implicated um in letting the government get away with this conspiracy to kill the president and you know I think he really overdid it there and I think that probably in no small part uh contributed to the uh you know the outcome uh among the jury members um although they were also just exhausted and worn down by the time they they went into that room I mean they’ve been a marathon of closing statements so do you think there was uh do you think Garrison was actually gay himself there may have been some repressed homosexuality that played a part in this so you know I think um uh again Aaron con is a person who like very closely documents uh Garrison’s extraordinary sex life that’s what con calls it and um you know Garrison certainly was sexually Reckless um you know as a person who was married and you know fathered to five children I think um you know he brazenly you know had affairs um and you know mostly what is documented is uh very young women um and he did you know uh uh you know frequent like normal Wallace’s house and you know so he’s he’s clearly having sex with women but there is a there’s a kind of undercurrent of you know like men having sex with other men on the down low is you know what we would call it now right and and I think there’s certainly the possibility of that and and I think that for two reasons one is um I recently discovered uh a newspaper story about Jer when he was about 15 years old and he’s in a car with a 30-year old man very late at night and there’s a car accident and he’s injured so he ends up going to the hospital and when I first looked at it I didn’t I didn’t a lot about it and then I came back to it and it’s like is he hustling you know and there’s this whole kind of like hustling culture in and around the French quarter and you know again Jer married children but I do think there are you know men who have sex with other men and and of course the best evidence for sort of thinking about Garrison’s sexual compulsivity if that’s a word like you know is is grabbing the teenage boy in New Orleans Athletic Club and and so I think for him it might have been more about youth than about you know gender per se and and I tend to think and again I’m not you know I’m not an LGBT plus person but you know I tend to think of being gay is sort of like an identity that people adopt and you know and being proud of who they are um not just sexually but on the whole and so like I think of being gay as an identity and then I think you know some people engage in sex acts that they don’t identify with do you know what I mean like they don’t see it as part of you know and I and I think there was a lot of that kind of thing um you know in New Orleans in the 1950s and 60s uh you know men who married because everybody was expected to get married you know if you know if you didn’t get married that was like considered the problem um but then might also have been having sex with other people male or female so you know I don’t think he was gay but do I think there’s you know a possibility that you know he had uh sex of some kind or the other with men sure absolutely and you know here’s an example like a weird example around this is um uh it’s in the book of another Garrison Defender who talks about uh Garrison and this friend of his having sex with a woman uh you know a sort of a manaja one gal two guys but that they never touched each other’s penises oh well then like you know good times you know it’s like I mean it’s just sort of there’s this you know desperate attempt to excuse everything he does is somehow you know holy pure and you know um you know it’s just it’s a very strange story um but I think it might in fact be a very telling story yeah I I I went through the papers of Patricia Lambert and and she has I have I have not published it but she has a a full transcript of talking to that boy from the New Orleans Athletic Club mhm um which he talks about what happened and also the boy’s brother two two transcripts and so uh some really damning evidence there but um yeah and you know also where are her papers uh sixth floor Museum oh okay oh that’s great I’m glad they’re there yes that that happened I’m sure but what is also true is that the good old boy Network protected him yeah and he had a lot of control over the grand jury who the grand jury Foreman was and Le I’ve recently discovered leish who was one of the grand jury Foreman during this period of time in the 1950s was also a grand jury foran so there the you know there’s this kind of I I I hesitate to call it this but that’s I mean that’s the way it functions it’s kind of good old boys network uh in which this is kind of covered up and so Drew Pearson writes about it but the local newspapers don’t write about it um and Aaron con you know writes a letter and says you know this happened and the grand jury needs to look into this um and you know he got away with it um you know and that’s certainly you know assault um it’s you know attempted crime against nature um you know he could easily have been charged with a 1489 if that family had been willing to you know come forward and do that but but you know they too have interests in the community y um and I think you know also the interest of their sons you know um one of at least one of whom was a minor um and so you know that would have been a very you know I don’t want to say shameful but I think it would have been a very embarrassing thing um to have pursued charges against the sitting district attorney um yeah they were a prominent Catholic Family with high high ranking Catholic clergy so it was a very uh there was no way they’re going to bring that forward was well and also the the you know speaking of you high ranking Catholic clergy and people covering for them um you know conic did that very consistently uh you know sort of like uh made cases or allegations against a priests um you know uh go away for long periods of time um so you know this again the good old boys network at work um you know people looking out for each other so the sad part of this whole case is the fact that unfortunately Clay Shaw died before his damages case could be heard which then allowed G Garrison to write about Shaw and his book and say what ever he wanted to say right that was very unfortunate it was and I’m not you know what’s so interesting is that that weird quirk in Louisiana civil law that said you know you had to have these kind of immediate family members who could step in as plaintiff he didn’t have anybody in that category so you know the claim ultimately according to Louisiana law dies and the Supreme Court decides that the Louisiana law is not inherently prejudicial which says much more about uh the way people thought about you know families and and categories of you know relationship during that period of time in the law um and again I think that’s really reflective of um our own moment you know where uh we are there are parties uh who are attempting you know in the United States to pathologize unmarried childless pet owners you know and somehow the problem these are levers that people try to pull you know and and Shaw’s sexuality was one of those Le that Garrison was willing to use to try and and bring a case forward um against a person who had some vulnerabilities but also had enough uh resources to uh hire very good attorneys and uh you know defend himself um in court thankfully and that raises the whole issue of people who can afford uh those sort of lawyers the miscarriages of justice that occur because of that absolutely and I don’t I can’t remember the percentage it’s something I talk about um in class in in my Louisiana history class there’s a far higher percentage of people in jail incarcerated in Louisiana and we you know we incarcerate more people than anyone else in the world per capita um and you know most of those people have pled out the majority of people never get to trial they take a lower charge they make some sort of deal for lesser time and and and so there’s a way in which our whole you know contemporarily but also historically the way the law is used not to bring about justice but to really kind of like keep certain populations of people under control you know um by manipulating those things and um you know I I think in many significant ways uh lisiana is um a kind of on the Leading Edge of um you know Injustice uh in the United States with you know with its current carceral crisis and and and many of those things but also because of the way uh the Contemporary Administration in Louisiana has just written off anybody uh who disagrees with a very you know Conservative Christian nationalist kind of uh you know position I.E like putting the Ten Commandments in every classroom in the state including uh at universities uh and I’m hoping lawsuits will uh you know keep that from happening because I would find that deeply offensive right to have teach in a university classroom with um a Biblical passage required to be uh in in every room um you know so yeah it’s a a lot of extremes down here absolutely so you know you you teach a you know you’ve taught a course on conspiracy and so tell me a bit about your students and what they think and and after and and after what they think after going through your course right about this case and other and other cases of conspiracy you know i’ I’ve noticed something uh in the class and I don’t know what this means um I’ve taught it I want to say I’ve taught it three times now um it’s a it’s an upper division course and it’s a fairly demanding course and so they have to you know show up and be prepared or they they just can’t successfully you know navigate the course um and I have more women who take that course than men um they and women are a majority of you know University students in the United States today anyway but the males male students who have taken that course tend to be far more uh conspiracy-minded than the women and I don’t I don’t know what that’s about um but that’s just what I’ve noticed um in that course and I think there’s a you know a lot of young men use Reddit and you know um there is a lot of you know this kind of kind of conspiratorial conversation on Reddit and and I think there’s a way particularly that young men are being socialized around conspiracy that is different uh for young women uh who you know who’s who are being fed different kind of things by algorithms or using different platforms so you know my students are really interesting and they teach me things all the time about you know what’s out there in the digital world and you know what they’re things I have no idea about because I don’t I don’t use social media that much um but you know I think they’re pretty smart and I you know I think they’re self- selected group these particular students but they’re very skeptical of um you know broad conspiracy claims um and they come to their own conclusions about those sort of things I’m not I’m not there to um you know uh persecute uh people who believe in conspiracies but they often you know will you know self-report about relatives or you know stepdads or you know whatever like being like real conspiracy you know nuts um and how uncomfortable that makes them and you know what’s so um what’s so alarming about that is is that you know conspiracy has a very long history uh in the United States and you know sort of like bubbles up here and there but I can’t think of a Time besides the McCarthy era um when consp consp iracy has been so consequential in American politics they just got a tendency to believe in conspiracy and to think very lazily about things um to not think critically about you know claims that are being put out in front of you and so you know it’s it’s particularly consequential at the moment in a way that you have sort of like qanon Advocates who are now very influential members of Congress and you know charlatans are not they hold these offices of enormous consequence in people’s lives um and so you know it’s a it’s a very um it’s a time when I think it’s important to slow down and and think about things uh carefully um rather than just kind of getting whipped up you know by the claim of the moment um I mean on the JFK side it used to be it was the left wing that it was all conspiratorial but now it’s the rightwing has discovered oh my God you know it’s a deep State and I’m seeing more and more more congressmen or senators and Republicans um who are like oh oh the JFK assassination oh my God this is evidence of the deep State um you know and the the same forces it’s it’s it’s striking and it’s it’s very uh it’s horrifying but if you think about it like that’s where the JFK records act come from now I’m very grateful for the JFK records act yeah and I think in the end it’s a good piece of legislation but what it was responsive to is Oliver Stone’s movie yep you know and and and his theory of the case um which runs completely counter to the conclusions um taken by you know the government uh bodies investig investigative bodies who looked into the case um so you know they get whipped up into into cultural you know uh soup too and and do things that sometimes have you know beneficial consequences but come out of you know a willingness to uh you know accept a kind of theorizing about the intelligence agencies or um you know U good Lord I mean you know just yeah uh it’s crazy times yeah so the one thing I I do say about Jim Garrison and and Clay Shaw and the whole case is I I wish somebody would make a movie you know I do too and I wish they would license my book you know but what a great topic for a movie Ian it’s just oh yeah you know I I when I tell people this story they’re so fascinated nobody really knows it and it’s a very interesting story yeah you know I tell you and and this is probably just me being like older or oldfashioned um but you know young people don’t read books and you know and uh and and yeah if somebody could make a you know a version of this that runs counter to the kind of mythologies uh and you know U you know shaming of people um in in JFK and and you know tell that story from you know a different angle um you know I think that’ be fabulous um and uh you know you know time will tell huh time will tell so we’re gonna we’re gonna end the interview but I think um I know is there anything else you want to tell us about you know your terrific book well thank you for your uh compliments and you know um one of the great things about being a professor or a writer or a thinker and and you know you you know this too is that you know you’re constantly learning how to do new things and um and and in part that’s the kind of appeal of that sort of work and um so I was you know moving probably plotting Le a narrative non-fiction Direction there and and I’m going to move further in that direction um uh in in this next project which you know I I see as an as a series of books right that gets us to back to this question and and I hope to retell this story in in a different way um as as I go on this journey uh with this new set of books so um you know I’m excited about the future but I you know I also stand by cruising for conspirators and it’s the book I’m proud of it’s in the evidence and uh and I think I did try to be even-handed and objective but you know I wasn’t in the bag for anybody I had a you know I had an idea that this was had been a miscarriage of justice but um you know I think it was and I think that book shows it and as as does your work kind of like your books show us kind of pathologies not just in you know conspiracy thinking about the JFK assassination but just kind of more uh you know more specifically around the Garrison case so I I appreciate you having me and uh getting to be a part of this broader group of conversations uh with people who I also really admire and respect and learn from and um you know have fruitful discussions even if we don’t always agree and it’s great having you but when when could we expect your next book what is there a time frame so you know actually um I’m getting ready for the fall semester and I’m setting some deadlines for myself so I don’t get pulled Way Off Track and I’m hoping to have a first draft by you know like a year from now right um and these are it’s it’s not you know it’s not a book like uh cruising it’s not a you know it’s not like a 10 year inter um and so I’m hoping to kind of move through these at a at a faster clip um but it’s it’s a different kind of work for me so I feel like I have to produce a full um a full example out of the series uh in order to look for you know an agent and and then try to sell the longer Series so I you know I just I’ve talked to enough people in publishing to understand that because my track record is somewhere else that I have to produce the first uh book in the proposed series and and then go from there so I’m hoping in about a year I’ll have a draft full draft great I I can hardly wait it’s going to be a fantastic book I know it well you’re very kind and it’s it’s a lot of fun to talk to you always so yeah yeah you’re you’re amazing and so we’ll we’ll have more more discussions on Garrison we’ll have a panel discussion etc etc but thank you very much Alicia and we really really appreciate your tremendous work well that’s very kind of you and uh you know thanks so much I really appreciate it okay thank you very much