This month's release of documents related to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy continued the Trump administration's chaotic process that confuses the public under a guise of compliance with a 1992 law requiring full release this year..

Mary Ferrell Foundation President Rex Bradford has described the Trump release process via the National Archives as a "travesty." Future of Freedom Foundation President Jacob Hornberger, an attorney and book publisher, predicted what he called a "fiasco." He followed up with the column The JFK Cover-Up Continues  describing the process as successful cover for criminal rogues at the CIA, with the agency's successors probably grateful to President Trump for his role in confusing the public.

Baldwin Helps Us To Understand

Fortunately, the famed actor Alec Baldwin helped cut through the confusion last month with a bold, civic-minded revelation of how the NBC and MSNBC continue to support the disputed Warren Commission account of the murder and to suppress alternative discussion. Baldwin is shown at right in one of his most frequent portraits and below left on the cover of his memoir Nevertheless published last spring.

There's more on that below, along with a mini-history of how the major media have avoided reporting on evidence in the murder through the decades.

Instead, the broadcast networks, major newspapers, wire services, book publishers and academic institutions distract their audiences by using smear terms like "conspiracy theory." They create so much needless confusion that it's understandable that President Trump accuses such organizations of delivering "fake news" even when journalists have a sound basis for their coverage.

Today's column first provides an opinion about the JFK case and cover-up. We then report specifics on the latest release by the National Archives, which occurred at the end of the workday on Friday, Dec. 15 (the traditional time for public relations operatives to bury news). Finally, we report the announced timetable for future JFK document releases. An appendix lists recent, relevant news stories and the 48-part "Readers Guide to the JFK Assassination."

The national media have missed for the most part how voter reaction against Alabama’s corrupt Republican rule helped Democrat Doug Jones defeat the GOP U.S. Senate nominee Roy Moore on Dec. 12 in the state’s special election.

Recent financial, law enforcement and sex scandals at the highest levels of all three branches of government in Alabama helped prepare voters to defeat Moore by 49-48 margin last week. Republican Jeff Sessions had won that seat with 97 percent of the vote unopposed by Democrats in 2014 before vacating it this year upon his appointment as U.S. attorney general.

It's true also that Jones (shown at right) and his campaign team orchestrated a masterful strategy to generate high turnout against Moore, a religious zealot with a scandalous past.

But Moore would not have been so vulnerable in the overwhelmingly Republican state if previous Alabama scandals and the dubious performance of the new Trump administration had not softened GOP support even amongst those who normally trust righteous-sounding candidates. 

Moore’s predatory activities followed a decade of scandals by others. One led to the resignation of Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley (shown below, at far left) this year in a mind-boggling sex scandal. Also, House Speaker Mike Hubbard, the state’s most powerful legislator during recent years, received a four-year prison term last year for massive corruption, as reported here.

Bentley’s scandal included several aspects that are particularly relevant to the Jones-Moore senate race. For one, Bentley’s longtime claim to have been a religiously inspired “family values” Republican was destroyed by massive coverage of his affair with his married staffer, Rebekah Caldwell Mason. The former television reporter and Miss Alabama contestant is shown at center.

At right is Stephen Collier, the former head of ALEA [Alabama Law Enforcement Agency]. The governor fired Collier for not cooperating sufficiently in sinister reprisals against bloggers exposing the governor's sexcapades. Collier responded with litigation that helped keep the scandals prominent.

Our Justice Integrity Project has developed deep sources in Alabama and has reported on many of these scandals and their cover-ups. One overview was our 2016 column How To Understand Political Sex Scandal Allegations.

In Alabama, the state's one-party governance was created in part by a long-running and massive political prosecution beginning in 1999 of former Gov. Don Siegelman, the state's leading Democrat during his term (1999 - 2003) and for years thereafter until Republican prosecutors and judges finally flattened him. Complete dominance by Republicans weakened accountability that might have come from civic leaders and their institutions. Our reviews of Alabama newspapers and other supposed watchdog voices show far less initiative and independence in recent years than a decade or so ago.

The harm? Corruption involving sex, bribery, dishonest law enforcement and/or national security contracts (all covert factors in the Siegelman case, like many others) often causes blackmail and huge rip-offs of federal taxpayers, as well as other harms to third-party victims.

And, while this column is headlined to focus primarily on Republican-led corruption in Alabama, the ripple effects strongly implicate many Democratic leaders.

These include such Washington-based leaders as President Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder and Supreme Court Associate Justice Elena Kagan, as amplified below. For such reasons, our Project opposed the confirmation of Kagan, shown in a graphic at right to emphasize our opposition on ethical grounds to her confirmation despite her endorsement by about 100 of the nation's law school deans, including those two awarding this editor his degrees: Yale Law School and the University of Chicago School of Law..

The Alabama scandals deeply involving the Department of Justice and FBI raise questions also about the integrity of other investigations, including the ongoing probe of President Trump by Special Counsel Robert Mueller's team.

Whatever one thinks of Trump or Mueller (shown as FBI director), it is difficult for an independent observer to conclude that the U.S. Justice Department has acted professionally and non-politically in Alabama. That should concern those who believe the much-praised Mueller, former head of the FBI during most of that time, will automatically act purely according legal principles in his current work.

U.S. Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, the longest serving member of Congress, resigned this week under sexual harassment allegations and Minnesota U.S. Sen. Al Franken was pressured to do the same in a resignation confirmed Thursday.

At least 32 Democratic colleagues signed statements Dec. 6 urging Franken to resign following multiple claims that he had harassed women years ago, primarily when he was an entertainer before his 2008 election to the Senate, where he has been reliable liberal voter.

Meanwhile, President Trump and the Republican National Committee ramped up their support for Alabama's embattled GOP U.S. Senate nominee Roy Moore in the special election scheduled next Tuesday for one of the state's two seats.

A New York Daily News front page story headlined "I'm With Perv" on Dec. 4 mocked Trump's decision to back Moore over Democrat Doug Jones despite multiple allegations from women that Moore had sought to date or molest them while they were in their teens and he was in his thirties and working as a state prosecutor.

Allegations against Conyers, 88 (right), included claims that he forced himself upon staffers during a career that began with his election to Congress in 1964 in a district representing part of Detroit. Earlier this week, he issued a statement from a hospital room, reportedly being treated for stress, saying that he was resigning.

Republicans and their sympathizers had mounted a campaign against Conyers and Franken following the Moore revelations. As part of the Justice Integrity Project's coverage, this editor attended a news conference last week at the National Press Club featuring several accusers of former President Bill Clinton who called for renewed investigations of his conduct during the 1990s and the removal of Conyers and Franken from their current posts. 

A Dallas ceremony and a Washington, DC vigil and a documentary film premiere were among the events on Nov. 22 commemorating the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy and protesting the official cover-up that government and the major news have maintained until present.

Proponents of that historical view convened at noon in Dealey Plaza in Dallas among other places that included the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and, separately in the nation's capital, a free showing on Capitol Hill of the new documentary film The American Media: The Second Assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

The movie's producer, director and writer John Barbour answered questions after the 2 p.m. screening at the Stewart Mott Foundation, which is located at 122 Maryland Ave., NE between the U.S. Supreme Court and the U.S. Senate Hart Office Building.

Barbour, the only man to win TV Emmys for both news and entertainment, described mainstream coverage of the assassination as “fake news.”

His compelling film alleges that a false narrative continues to the present in hiding the truth:

That New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison documented in the 1960s about how powerful American oligarchs used the CIA and allied operatives to kill Kennedy for what they regarded as a traitorous foreign policy that emphasized peace too much during the Cold War era.

The documentary further shows how Kennedy's 1963 commencement address at the American University illustrated his break with Cold War thinking and along with his actions infuriated his critics, including those within government, research has shown.

This editor and the Justice Integrity Project have been active in reporting, commenting and supporting these disclosures because they highlight ongoing, shocking aberrations by government and the media following the president's murder during his motorcade through Dealey Plaza. I lectured at two separate conferences in Dallas over the No. 17-19 weekend about the media's role in mis-reporting key events.

Following the historic release of new JFK assassination documents since this summer, two three-day annual JFK assassination research conferences in Dallas will focus on the latest insights beginning Friday.

Many of the nation's most prominent and committed experts are convening at the JFK Lancer Productions and Publications 21st Annual 2017 November In Dallas Conference at the historic Adolphus Hotel and at the Fifth Annual 2017 JFK Assassination Conference organized by author and lecturer Judyth Vary Baker and her team at the nearby Crowne Plaza Hotel on Elm Street.

The latter is several blocks from where President John F. Kennedy (shown at right with his daughter Caroline) was killed on that street on Nov. 22, 1963.

Two conferences with minimal overlap provide an extraordinary opportunity for speakers and audiences alike to hear in-depth presentations from notable, still-living witnesses, medical doctors, historians, legal experts and authors who are expert in the topic.

That expertise includes those sensitive matters that the mainstream media normally ignore or suppress because the evidence would, among other things, show how careless (at best) and dishonest their coverage has been since the shooting occurred.

Registration and speaker program details are here for the JFK Conference, whose program begins at 10:30 a.m. Friday, Nov. 17. That information can be found by clicking on the title here of the 21st Annual 2017 November In Dallas Conference, whose program begins at 1 p.m. on Friday. The conference is named for Kennedy's Secret Service code name "Lancer" and is led by a team of researchers, authors and book publishers that include Debra Conway and Larry Hancock. 

The Justice Integrity Project (JIP) and the Citizens Against Political Assassinations (CAPA), on whose boards this editor serves, supports each conference as important to both the public. 

Famed news and entertainment leader John Barbour will host two free screenings of his latest film, “The American Media: The Second Assassination of President John F. Kennedy,” and will deliver a lecture at the National Press Club over the next 10 days to underscore the media cover-up, continuing “fake news” on TV, and the ongoing importance of the true facts of President Kennedy’s 1963 assassination.

Barbour, the only man to win TV Emmys for both news and entertainment, will premiere in the nation’s capital his documentary at the American University on Nov. 15 and on Capitol Hill on Nov. 22. 

Also, he will deliver a dinner lecture on Nov. 16 at the press club “The Last Hurrah for JFK and America.” All three events are free and open to the public, although the dinner is a no-host, Dutch-treat event before the McClendon Group speaker society. The society, named for famed White House correspondent Sarah McClendon, has featured important speakers with alternative viewpoints at the club for the past quarter century.

Barbour, 84, a five-time Emmy winner, is also known as “The Godfather of Reality TV” for his co-producing and co-hosting NBC-TV’s No. 1 hit “Real People” credited with spawning the genre. He is shown at left in a photo from the show.

“No matter what people know about the assassination of JFK,” says Barbour, “they will be stunned by what they learn in this film. It is the definitive film about the assassination and the birth of fake news, which plagues us to this day. Fake news impeded New Orleans District Attorney’s Garrison’s 1960s investigation at every turn.”