Oliver or Roger? First JFK hearing has a bit of an identity crisis.
The surprise of the first hearing of the Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets wasn’t about the identify of who shot John F. Kennedy. Instead it was about who wrote a conspiratorial book about it.
The Capitol Hill hearing held Tuesday in the aftermath of the 80,000-page document dump by the Trump administration last month about the 1963 assassination, came to a cringeworthy pause more than halfway through Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) asked filmmaker Oliver Stone about a book he wrote alleging that Lyndon Baines Johnson was behind the Kennedy assassination.
Stone, who made the 1991 movie JFK which alleged a wide-ranging conspiracy behind the assassination but not focused on Kennedy’s vice president seemed confused by the question. Eventually another witness, former Washington Post reporter Jefferson Morley, worked out that Boebert had confused Oliver Stone with Roger Stone, the political consultant and longtime Trump confidante.
Boebert sheepishly paused and said “I may have misinterpreted that. I apologize.”
The hearing was chaired by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) only minutes after her triumph over Speaker Mike Johnson in an effort to force a vote on her proposal to allow proxy voting for new parents in Congress. Stone was urging the committee to fully investigate the 62-year-old crime.
Luna, who has indicated deep skepticism about Lee Harvey Oswald being the lone assassin, hailed the hearing as an “historical day in our nation’s history” and described to her efforts to uncover the truth about the death of the 35th president as crucial to ensuring that “what happened to President Kennedy can never happen again."
Democrats though were less focused on Kennedy and more focused on Donald Trump. They took shots at the slapdash nature of the document release by the White House, which left the personal information of a number of former congressional staffers exposed, as well as taking shots at the Trump administration over the fallout of top officials communicating via Signal.