Generations of professional and amateur sleuths have spent decades steeped in the details of the JFK assassination. In coming days, they’ll be able to pore through thousands more files kept classified for 54 years — unless President Donald Trump steps in.

Those who are sure that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone are eager for vindication and new jigsaw pieces to fill the void spots in the puzzle. So are those who blame the mob, Fidel Castro, the Soviets or the military-industrial complex.

Lost on neither camp is the fact that the authority to decide which secrets to keep sealed for another decade or more rests with a president known for indulging conspiracy theories.

The deadline is Oct. 26, set by Congress a quarter-century ago after Oliver Stone’s conspiracy-minded JFK movie reignited demands to open the files on John F. Kennedy’s murder in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.

https://www.dallasnews.com/news/politics/2017/10/19/decades-secrecy-end-soon-trump-allows-release-last-jfk-assassination-records

More than 3,000 never-before-seen documents from the FBI, CIA, and Justice Department on the assassination of John F. Kennedy are scheduled be released, with many experts fearing that such a large release of secret JFK assassination documents will spur “a new generation of conspiracy theories.”

According to Roger Stone, the CIA is urging President Donald Trump to delay disclosing some of the files for another 25 years.

According to The Gateway Pundit Roger Stone and Gerald Posner, two New York Times bestselling authors who are polar opposites about who killed JFK, have joined together to urge Donald Trump to release all the remaining classified files on Kennedy’s assassination.

http://theduran.com/cia-urges-potus-trump-to-delay-release-of-3000-never-before-seen-documents-on-assassination-of-john-f-kennedy/

A federal judge in Hawaii blocked President Donald Trump's latest bid to impose restrictions on citizens from eight countries entering the United States, which had been set to take effect this week.

The open-ended ban, announced last month, targeted people from Iran, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Chad and North Korea, as well as certain government officials from Venezuela. It was the latest version of a policy that had previously targeted six Muslim-majority countries but had been restricted by the Supreme Court.

U.S. District Judge Derrick Watson on Tuesday granted Hawaii's request to temporarily block the federal government from enforcing the policy. It was supposed to take effect at midnight Wednesday.

Hawaii argues the updated ban is a continuation of Trump's "promise to exclude Muslims from the United States."

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/17/us-judge-blocks-latest-trump-travel-restrictions-to-the-us-from-eight-countries.html

The federal government’s long campaign to try to choke off rampant conspiracy theories about the November 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy is threatening to end this month in massive confusion, if not chaos.

Within the next two weeks, the National Archives is legally obligated to release the last of thousands of secret documents from government files about the assassination, most of them from the CIA, FBI and the Justice Department.

And there is every indication that the massive document dump—especially if any of it is blocked by President Donald Trump, the only person empowered under the law to stop the release of the files—will simply help fuel a new generation of conspiracy theories.

Trump, no stranger to conspiracy theories, including totally unsubstantiated theories about a link between Ted Cruz’s father and JFK’s death, has not yet revealed his plans for the documents. His friend and political adviser Roger Stone, the Republican consultant who is the author of a book claiming that President Lyndon Johnson was the mastermind of the Kennedy assassination, said last week that he has been informed authoritatively that the CIA is urging Trump to delay the release of some of the JFK documents for another 25 years. “They must reflect badly on the CIA even though virtually everyone involved is long dead,” Stone said in a statement on his website.

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/10/16/the-next-jfk-document-dump-could-be-a-fiasco-215716

FORT BRAGG, N.C. — Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, who walked off his base in eastern Afghanistan in 2009, setting off a huge military manhunt and a political furor, pleaded guilty on Monday to desertion and to endangering the American troops sent to search for him.

The guilty pleas by Sergeant Bergdahl, a 31-year-old Idaho native now stationed at an Army base in San Antonio, Tex., were not part of any deal with prosecutors.

It will now be up to an Army judge here at Fort Bragg to decide the sergeant’s punishment, following testimony at a hearing that is expected to begin as soon as next week. The desertion charge carries a potential five-year sentence, and the charge of endangering troops — formally known as misbehavior before the enemy — carries a potential life sentence.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/16/us/bowe-bergdahl-guilty.html

THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION is pushing hard for the reauthorization of a key 2008 surveillance law — section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, known as FISA — three months before it sunsets in December.

To persuade senators to reauthorize the law in full, the Trump administration is holding classified, members-only briefings for the entire House and Senate next Wednesday, with heavy hitters in attendance: Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, NSA Director Mike Rogers, and FBI Director Christopher Wray will give the briefings, according to an internal announcement of the meetings provided to The Intercept and confirmed by multiple sources on Capitol Hill.

Section 702 serves as the legal basis for two of the NSA’s largest mass surveillance programs, both revealed by Edward Snowden. One program, PRISM, allows the government to collect messaging data sent to and from foreign targets, from major internet companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft. The other, UPSTREAM, scans internet backbone sites in the U.S. and copies communications to and from foreign targets.

Both programs ostensibly only “target” foreigners, but likely collect massive amounts of Americans’ communications as well. And despite persistent questioning from members of Congress, the Obama and Trump administrations have repeatedly refused to provide an estimate of how many domestic communications the programs collect. Civil liberties advocates have long warned liberal defenders of the program under President Obama that one day the surveillance apparatus may fall into the hands of a president with little regard for rule of law or constitutional protections.

https://theintercept.com/2017/09/29/trump-administration-lobbying-hard-for-sweeping-surveillance-law/

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has offered to provide evidence that the Russian collusion narrative is false in exchange for a pardon from President Trump.

The president, apparently, has not yet gotten the message. On Saturday, President Trump told reporters that he has "never heard" of Assange's offer to make a deal.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) told The Daily Caller that Trump is being blocked from knowing about the potential deal with Assange. “I think the president’s answer indicates that there is a wall around him that is being created by people who do not want to expose this fraud that there was collusion between our intelligence community and the leaders of the Democratic Party,” Rohrabacher said.

https://pjmedia.com/video/julian-assange-says-will-provide-evidence-russia-narrative-false-exchange-pardon/

US investigators wiretapped former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort under secret court orders before and after the election, sources tell CNN, an extraordinary step involving a high-ranking campaign official now at the center of the Russia meddling probe.

The government snooping continued into early this year, including a period when Manafort was known to talk to President Donald Trump.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/09/18/politics/paul-manafort-government-wiretapped-fisa-russians/index.html

Gary Cohn Is Giving Goldman Sachs Everything It Ever Wanted From the Trump Administration

STEVE BANNON was in the room the day Donald Trump first fell for Gary Cohn. So were Reince Priebus, Jared Kushner, and Trump’s pick for secretary of Treasury, Steve Mnuchin. It was the end of November, three weeks after Trump’s improbable victory, and Cohn, then still the president of Goldman Sachs, was at Trump Tower presumably at the invitation of Kushner, with whom he was friendly. Cohn was there to offer his views about jobs and the economy. But, like the man he was there to meet, he was at heart a salesman.

On the campaign trail, Trump had spoken often about the importance of investing in infrastructure. Yet the president-elect had apparently failed to appreciate that the government would need to come up with hundreds of billions of dollars to fund his plans. Cohn, brash and bold, wired to attack any moneymaking opportunity, pitched a fix that would put Wall Street firms at the center: Private-industry partners could help infrastructure get fixed, saving the federal government from going deeper into debt. The way the moment was captured by the New York Times, among other publications, Trump was dumbfounded. “Is this true?” he asked. Was a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan likely to increase the deficit by a trillion dollars? Confronted by nodding heads, an unhappy president-elect said, “Why did I have to wait to have this guy tell me?”

Within two weeks, the transition team announced that Cohn would take over as director of the president’s National Economic Council.

https://theintercept.com/2017/09/17/goldman-sachs-gary-cohn-donald-trump-administration/

http://www.theinvestigativefund.org/investigations/politicsandgovernment/2376/government_by_goldman/

President Trump has become the third president to renew a post-9/11 emergency proclamation, stretching what was supposed to be a temporary state of national emergency after the 2001 terror attacks into its 17th year.

But the ongoing effects of that perpetual emergency aren't immediately clear, because the executive branch has ignored a law requiring it to report to Congress every six months on how much the president has spent under those extraordinary powers, USA TODAY has found.

Exactly 16 years ago Thursday, President Bush signed Proclamation 7463, giving himself sweeping powers to mobilize the military in the days following terrorist attacks that crashed planes into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a Pennsylvania field. It allowed him to call up National Guard and Reserve troops, hire and fire military officers, and bypass limits on the numbers of generals that could serve.

Presidents Bush and Obama renewed that emergency each year. And on Wednesday, Trump published a now-routine notice in the Federal Register extending the emergency for the 16th time, explaining simply that "the terrorist threat continues."

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2017/09/14/permanent-emergency-trump-becomes-third-president-renew-extraordinary-post-9-11-powers/661966001/

The U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments sometime in its coming term in one of the most significant Fourth Amendment cases in years.

At issue in Carpenter v. United States is the question of whether the FBI violated the Fourth Amendment when it obtained, without a search warrant, the cellphone records of suspected armed robber Timothy Carpenter. With those records, federal officials identified the cell towers that handled the suspect's calls and then proceeded to trace back his whereabouts during the time periods in which his alleged crimes were committed. That information was later used against Carpenter in court.

http://reason.com/blog/2017/09/01/in-warrantless-cellphone-search-case-its

The Trump administration is preparing to lift a controversial ban on the transfer of some surplus military equipment to police departments whose battlefield-style response to rioting in a St. Louis suburb three years ago prompted a halt to the program.

The new plan, outlined in documents obtained by USA TODAY, would roll back an Obama administration executive order that blocked armored vehicles, large-caliber weapons, ammunition and other heavy equipment from being re-purposed from foreign battlefields to America's streets.

On Monday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions is scheduled to address the annual meeting of the Fraternal Order of Police, the nation's largest police union, and he may outline the program changes there.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2017/08/27/trump-expected-lift-ban-military-gear-local-police-forces/606065001/

For all those pundits out there who were concerned that Trump wasn't "Presidential" enough to actually be President, I have some great news for you! This past week Trump wiped out any such fear by doing the most presidential thing that can possibly be imagined: Continuing the never-ending war in Afghanistan!

That's right, the longest war in the history of the United States is not coming to an end any time soon. And just in case you were still operating under the delusion that the current puppet figurehead was any different at all from any of the stuffed shirts who previously occupied the Oval Office, Trump is even copying Obama's failed 2009 "surge" strategy to keep the whole charade going for another 4 (or 8 or 12 or 200) years.

https://steemit.com/news/@corbettreport/trump-continues-the-never-ending-afghan-opium-war

The Trump administration this week elevated the US Cyber Command to a Unified Combatant Command, in a long-awaited move that underscores the growing importance of cyber warfare.

The decision, announced Friday, puts the Cyber Command on par with nine other combat commands, and may lead to its separation from the National Security Agency (NSA). In a statement, President Trump said that Secretary of Defense James Mattis will examine the possibility of separating the Cyber Command and the NSA, and that he will announce recommendations “at a later date.”

https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/20/16175638/trump-cyber-command-nsa-decision

Attorney General Jeff Sessions has announced that the FBI has formed a new team focused on investigating potential leaks to the press. During a press conference on Friday, Sessions said that leak investigations have tripled since President Donald Trump took office. Civil liberties groups criticized Sessions's remarks. Ben Wizner of the ACLU said, "A crackdown on leaks is a crackdown on the free press and on democracy as a whole." We speak with John Kiriakou, the former CIA analyst who exposed the Bush-era torture program and became the only official jailed in connection with it.

https://www.democracynow.org/2017/8/8/formerly_jailed_cia_whistleblower_john_kiriakou

Hawaii congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard has been very vocal on Syria, and Obama’s illegal regime change war, which involves the United States providing arms, training and money to Al Qaeda and ISIS in Syria, in what was a failed effort to overthrow the democratically elected government of Assad.

http://theduran.com/tulsi-gabbard-sides-with-trump-on-dismantling-cia-program-to-fund-al-qaeda-and-isis-in-syria-video/

Exclusive: A founding Russia-gate myth is that all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies agreed that Russia hacked into and distributed Democratic emails, a falsehood that The New York Times has belatedly retracted, reports Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry (Updated on July 1 with new NYT deception)

The New York Times has finally admitted that one of the favorite Russia-gate canards – that all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies concurred on the assessment of Russian hacking of Democratic emails – is false.

On Thursday, the Times appended a correction to a June 25 article that had repeated the false claim, which has been used by Democrats and the mainstream media for months to brush aside any doubts about the foundation of the Russia-gate scandal and portray President Trump as delusional for doubting what all 17 intelligence agencies supposedly knew to be true.

In the Times’ White House Memo of June 25, correspondent Maggie Haberman mocked Trump for “still refus[ing] to acknowledge a basic fact agreed upon by 17 American intelligence agencies that he now oversees: Russia orchestrated the attacks, and did it to help get him elected.”

However, on Thursday, the Times – while leaving most of Haberman’s ridicule of Trump in place – noted in a correction that the relevant intelligence “assessment was made by four intelligence agencies — the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency. The assessment was not approved by all 17 organizations in the American intelligence community.”

https://consortiumnews.com/2017/06/29/nyt-finally-retracts-russia-gate-canard/

science division out. mic drop. pic.twitter.com/RoYTJqLoXa

— Elle Celeste (@elleabella1112) June 30, 2017

No CTO
No Chief Data Scientist
No staff with relevant expertise
=
Not ready to deal w/ the inevitable crisis that will come https://t.co/1Af2ZqbvI3

— dj patil (@dpatil) July 1, 2017

President Donald Trump ignored important intelligence reports when he decided to attack Syria after he saw pictures of dying children. Seymour M. Hersh investigated the case of the alleged Sarin gas attack.

On April 6, United States President Donald Trump authorized an early morning Tomahawk missile strike on Shayrat Air Base in central Syria in retaliation for what he said was a deadly nerve agent attack carried out by the Syrian government two days earlier in the rebel-held town of Khan Sheikhoun. Trump issued the order despite having been warned by the U.S. intelligence community that it had found no evidence that the Syrians had used a chemical weapon.

The available intelligence made clear that the Syrians had targeted a jihadist meeting site on April 4 using a Russian-supplied guided bomb equipped with conventional explosives. Details of the attack, including information on its so-called high-value targets, had been provided by the Russians days in advance to American and allied military officials in Doha, whose mission is to coordinate all U.S., allied, Syrian and Russian Air Force operations in the region.

Some American military and intelligence officials were especially distressed by the president's determination to ignore the evidence. "None of this makes any sense," one officer told colleagues upon learning of the decision to bomb. "We KNOW that there was no chemical attack ... the Russians are furious. Claiming we have the real intel and know the truth ... I guess it didn't matter whether we elected Clinton or Trump.“

https://www.welt.de/politik/ausland/article165905578/Trump-s-Red-Line.html