GBH political reporter Adam Reilly is running down the big ways that the Trump administration and its decisions are intersecting with the politics and people in Massachusetts. Reilly joined GBH’s Morning Edition host Mark Herz to share his analysis on last week’s developments. What follows is a lightly edited transcript.

Mark Herz: So today we’re pondering a bit of a different topic than usual: the recent release of more than 63,000 pages of documents related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Kennedy, of course, was born in Brookline to two storied political families. Boston political families. He represented Massachusetts in the U.S. House and Senate before becoming president. And of course, his killing has been the subject of absolutely endless speculation and conspiracy theories. Adam, why is President Trump releasing these documents now?

Adam Reilly: Well, the president promised during the campaign that he was going to bring more transparency, as he put it, to the subject of Kennedy’s assassination. I should point out, President Trump also says there needs to be more transparency around the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., as well. Here is how President Trump put it in a January executive order that mandated the declassification of documents in those three cases:

“More than 50 years after the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the Federal Government has not released to the public all of its records related to those events. Their families and the American people deserve transparency and truth. It is in the national interest to finally release all records related to these assassinations without delay.”
President Donald Trump in an executive order from Jan. 23, 2025

Herz: OK, so President Trump, he’s just being driven by a pure love of transparency?

Reilly: There may be some of that, but I would say there seems to be a little bit more going on. Take a listen to what President Trump had to say when he signed this executive order back in January. And listen closely, not just to his words, but to his tone.

Unnamed White House aide, pre-recorded: Sir, we have an executive order ordering the declassification of files relating to the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and the Rev. Doctor Martin Luther King Jr.

President Trump, pre-recorded: That’s a big one. A lot of people are waiting for this for a long — for years, for decades. And everything will be revealed.

Reilly: “Everything will be revealed.” So after what we just heard, the president told the aide who had given him the executive order to take the pen that he had used to sign it and give it to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. RFK is, of course, Trump’s secretary of health and human services. He’s also RFK Sr.’s son, and JFK’s nephew. And RFK Jr. has questioned the official narrative of both his own father’s death and JFK’s death. He said he thinks the CIA was involved in JFK’s assassination, and might have been involved in his father’s as well.

It’s not clear whether President Trump agrees or not, but he has his own history of claiming that dark forces operating from inside the government are looking to take him down. So I’d say that at the very least, there is a convergence of conspiratorial sensibilities going on here.

Herz: And the RFK and MLK documents, they haven’t been released yet.

Reilly: Right.

Herz: So the JFK documents were made public this week. What, if anything, are we learning? What was, as the president said, revealed?

Reilly: There is a massive amount of material here and people are still going through it, in earnest. So anything that we say here, any characterization I offer you comes with that asterisk.

So far, it seems that there is a consensus that we’re not getting new details that transform our understanding of JFK’s death. I should point out much, if not all, of this material was previously released, but contains redactions that have now been removed. So there’s new details sort of coming into the fore, blanks being filled in, extra color being provided. But again, nothing transformative yet.

Herz: OK. No proof of a second gunman, no mysterious figure revealed on the grassy knoll?

Reilly: Nothing. Nothing like that so far. Instead, a lot of new texture about the operating methods and atmospherics of 20th century spy craft. For example, there are details about the CIA using positions inside the State Department as cover, new information on American election interference — interference in the elections of other countries. One thing that emerged was a summary of a nearly 700-page CIA report from the mid-’70s on cases where, as the summary described it, the CIA’s actions may have exceeded its mandate, which was rather expansive at the time. So an allusion to this gargantuan tome containing CIA misdeeds. Also things like instructions on how you wiretapped phones back in the 1960s, the names of people who were recruited as double agents at the Soviet embassy in Mexico City around that time. So some really interesting stuff, especially if you find this whole world interesting. But again, nothing revolutionary yet.

Herz: You were talking about the family in general, how RFK Jr. got the pen, and how some of his sensibilities and President Trump’s sensibilities seem to be coming together around this. But, you know, at least one member of the Kennedy family is deeply unhappy about the release of this information. In a post on X , Jack Schlossberg, JFK’s grandson, accused Trump and his cousin RFK Jr. of being obsessed with “JFK’s carcass.” You know, there’s another group of people who aren’t thrilled, who are they?

Reilly: There are dozens, if not hundreds, of former civil servants whose names pop up in these files. They were previously redacted. They are no longer redacted. And you’re getting their names and information, like their Social Security numbers. And they’re not pleased about that. That’s not how it’s supposed to work. That’s one of the reasons that you redact.

Ironically, one of the people who is aggrieved at this happening is [Joe] diGenova. He was previously a campaign lawyer for Trump. He said he doesn’t blame the Trump administration for rushing to push this out, but he thinks the people at the National Archives and Records Administration who amended these redactions, that they moved too quickly, did their job really poorly. He’s planning to sue, and I honestly would not be surprised if other people whose information was released followed suit, because, again, this is just not how it’s supposed to work. It’s sort of very basic stuff. You keep private individuals’ information private. And that didn’t happen here.

Herz: Wow. Well, if people want to look through these materials for themselves, can they do that?

Reilly: Yeah. If you want to go down this rabbit hole, I would caution you that once you start, it’s really easy to waste a whole lot of time poking around, even though you’re not finding anything necessarily. You’re always hoping that the next thing is going to be shocking or surprising. Even if everyone who’s come before has not found shocking or surprising things, you go to the archives website and it is all there at your fingertips.