Donald Trump’s former campaign lawyer is furious after his personal information and social security number were made public as part of this week’s release of unredacted JFK assassination files.
“It’s absolutely outrageous. It’s sloppy, unprofessional,” Joseph diGenova, a long-time Trump supporter who formerly served as the president’s lawyer on the campaign trail, told The Washington Post.
“It not only means identity theft, but I’ve had threats against me,” diGenova said. “In the past, I’ve had to report real threats against me to the FBI. There are dangerous nuts out there.”
More than 60,000 documents related to the assassination of former president John F. Kennedy were released by the Trump administration on Tuesday, the vast majority of which were unredacted.
Included in the document dump were the social security numbers of around 200 former congressional staffers and others, according to the Post, including 100 members of the Senate Church Committee established in 1975 to investigate abuses of authority by American intelligence services such as the CIA and FBI.
Many of the individuals mentioned in the documents are still alive, including 80-year-old diGenova, who served on the committee in the 1970s.
“It makes sense that my name is in there,” he told the Post, “but the other sensitive stuff — it’s like a first-grade, elementary-level rule of security to redact things like that.”
Speaking of his prior work for the committee, diGenova, who regularly appears on cable news to defend the president, added: “It was fascinating work. One of the lawyers on our team located the girlfriend of a mafia guy who was supposedly seeing JFK at the same time.
“He found her in Nevada or Arizona and got chased away by her husband. Other work we did was looking into assassination plots against Castro and people who were assets of the CIA. Incredible stuff.”
Other staffers said they were furious about now having to worry about identity theft and financial fraud after being included in the document dump. Some of those interviewed by the Post said they had been forced to freeze their credit cards and bank accounts after being doxxed by the files, while another said they were now looking into the possibility of suing the National Archives.
“It seems like the damage is done, but clearly we have to talk to some lawyers,” they said.
What appeared to be missing from the 60,000 page document dump was any new insight into the actual assassination of JFK.
Although the outcome of the documents is yet to be determined, many appear to be under 10 pages long and mostly consist of handwritten notes or typewritten reports, many of which are heavily faded due to age and borderline illegible.
The New York Times reported that the files were “profoundly more impenetrable than all the previous more annotated ones,” and lacked proper classification, with some containing “random Cuban stuff from 1965.”
Historian Tim Naftali told the publication: “I am trying to find stuff that has been re-reviewed and re-released with new information,” adding “Some have and some have not.”
Meanwhile, Kennedy expert Larry J. Sabato told the Associated Press it will take a long time to sift through the documents and discern if there is anything truly important contained within.
“We have a lot of work to do for a long time to come, and people just have to accept that,” he added.
