Gabbard Team Entered Secret CIA Warehouse to Retrieve Kennedy Files: Report [View all]

Source: Newsweek

Nov 25, 2025 at 09:44 PM EST


Officials working for Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard turned up unannounced at a secret CIA records warehouse in early April and forced the transfer of thousands of classified files on the Kennedy assassinations to the National Archives, Reuters has reported. Acting “on a mission” from Gabbard, the team asserted legal authority over the documents and stayed at the facility until about 2 a.m. the next day, when a “massive trove” of papers was moved out of CIA custody, per the news agency's report.

The purported files transfer, previously unreported, highlights tensions between the agency and Gabbard’s Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), as Trump-era appointees raced to fulfill the president's order to rapidly declassify data related to the assassinations of former President John F. Kennedy (1963) and his brother, ex-U.S. Attorney General and Senator Robert F. Kennedy (1968), among the most shocking acts of political violence in modern American history.

Why It Matters

The reported April warehouse operation underscores an apparent power struggle at the heart of the U.S. intelligence community over who controls some of its most sensitive historical records: Gabbard’s ODNI, which oversees 17 agencies including the CIA, versus the Central Intelligence Agency itself.

Trump signed an executive order in January directing agencies to declassify records on the JFK, RFK and Martin Luther King Jr. assassinations. A 45-day deadline for reviewing the RFK and King files expired in late-March, and frustration was mounting inside Gabbard’s team over what they saw as CIA foot-dragging, Reuters reported.

Read more: https://www.newsweek.com/gabbard-team-search-secret-cia-warehouse-for-kennedy-files-11109612