President Donald Trump’s administration on Tuesday began releasing what it said were all of the government's classified files on the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, making potentially tens of thousands of pages of unredacted records available to the public for the first time.

The release of the files comes after Trump signed a day one executive order in January aimed at fully releasing government documents related to the assassinations of Kennedy, his brother and presidential candidate Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, D-N.Y., and civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr.

The contents of the documents, and whether any previously unreleased information is in them, wasn't immediately clear. Historians quickly said they would need time to assess the flood of files to understand if they were significantly different from previous releases.

So far, nothing in the documents has changed the long-held findings that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in assassinating Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963 while the then-president rode in a motorcade in Dallas.

Looking to read the JFK files yourself?

You can find them on the National Archives' website https://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/available-online

Most of the files are scans of documents, and some are blurred or have become faint or difficult to read in the decades since Kennedy's assassination. There are also photographs and sounds recordings, mostly from the 1960s.

One document dated Nov. 20, 1991 appears to be a teletype of U.S. intelligence reporting on Lee Harvey Oswald, his time in the Soviet Union, his stormy relationship with his Soviet wife – and his apparently poor marksmanship.

The document says that a KGB official named Nikonov reviewed files from the feared Soviet security service, the KGB, to determine if Oswald “had been a KGB agent.”

Reuters reported that the document cited a report from an American professor named E.B. Smith who reported he had talked in Moscow about Oswald with KGB official “Slava” Nikonov, who said he had reviewed five thick files about the assassin to determine if he had been a KGB agent.

“Nikonov is now confident that Oswald was at no time an agent controlled by the KGB,” the document says.

From the description of Oswald in the files, Nikonov “doubted that anyone could control Oswald, but noted that the KBG (sic) watched him closely and constantly while he was in the USSR.”

Nikonov also commented that Oswald had “a stormy relationship with his Soviet wife, who rode him incessantly/”

The KGB files “also reflected that Oswald was a poor shot when he tried target firing in the USSR,” the document said.

Some conspiracy theorists have latched onto bits and pieces of the CIA’s files on Oswald, including those about his erratic behavior, as proof he either didn’t act alone – or didn’t actually have anything to do with Kennedy’s assassination.

Some of the documents also include references to various conspiracy theories suggesting that Oswald left the Soviet Union in 1962 intent on assassinating the popular young president.

Department of Defense documents from 1963 covered the Cold War of the early 1960s and the U.S. involvement in Latin America, trying to thwart Cuban leader Fidel Castro's support of communist forces in other countries.

The documents suggest that Castro would not go so far as to provoke a war with the United States or escalate to the point "that would seriously and immediately endanger the Castro regime."

"It appears more likely that Castro might intensify his support of subversive forces in Latin America," the document reads.

Trump himself did not immediately post about the document release. But Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s director of National Intelligence, hailed their release, saying it was part of Trump’s promise for “maximum transparency and a commitment to rebuild the trust of the American people in the Intelligence Community (IC) and federal agencies.”

Critics have long accused the intelligence community, and CIA in particular, of withholding potentially revelatory information about the case. Still, intelligence officials over the years have insisted that they have released everything important and that what’s left was withheld only to protect highly classified sources and methods of gathering intelligence and protecting sources.

In a statement, Gabbard said that she immediately sent out a directive across the intelligence community after Trump’s Monday announcement ordering everyone to provide all unredacted records within the collection of documents about Kennedy's assassination the national archives for immediate release.

JFK file experts said those documents almost certainly have all been made public and viewed already, but with mostly minor redactions.

The documents were released just before 7 p.m.(More details: https://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/release-2025).

The National Archives and Records Administration, the keeper of the documents, posted them with this statement:

“In accordance with President Donald Trump’s directive of March 17, 2025, all records previously withheld for classification that are part of the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection are released.”

The National Archives said it partnered with agencies across the federal government to comply with the President’s directive in support of Executive Order 14176. It said the records are available to access either online or in person, via hard copy or on analog media formats, at the National Archives at College Park, Maryland.

“As the records continue to be digitized, they will be posted to this page,” the National Archives said, suggesting that not all of the documents were being released on Tuesday in digital form.

The National Archives also said some information might still be withheld under court seal or for grand jury secrecy, and because some tax return information is subject to Internal Revenue Code prohibitions.

JFK assassination scholar Jefferson Morley said in a statement late Tuesday night that the release of the first tranche of documents “is an encouraging start.”

“We now have complete versions of approximately a third of the redacted JFK documents held by the National Archives,” or 1,124 of approximately 3,500 documents, said Morley, vice president of the Mary Ferrell Foundation, a non-profit that promotes access to historical government documents

He is also author of the JFK Facts newsletter and three books on the CIA that portray the agency’s involvement in the events leading up to the assassination.

“Seven of ten JFK files held by the Archives and sought by JFK researchers are now in the public record,” Morley said. “These long-secret records shed new light on JFK’s mistrust of the CIA, the Castro assassination plots, the surveillance of Oswald in Mexico City, and CIA propaganda operations involving Oswald.”

But the release does not include two thirds of the promised files, or any of 500-plus IRS records or 2,400 recently discovered FBI files, Morley said.

“Nonetheless,” he said, “this is most positive news on the declassification of JFK files since the 1990s."

Last month, the FBI said it found some 2,400 new records linked to Kennedy's assassination as well.

The agency said it was in the process of passing the documents to the National Archives and Records Administration. It's unclear what revelations, if any, are contained in the newly discovered files.

Kennedy’s assassination has long been the subject of conspiracies after Oswald, the Marine veteran identified as Kennedy's assassin, was shot and killed days later.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump's Health and Human Services secretary, has called for release of the files to see if any U.S. officials were involved in the assassination or potential coverup. Several U.S. investigations had found no such evidence.

While millions of government records related to the Kennedy assassination have been previously released, some information remains classified and redacted. Trump said he instructed his director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, to oversee the release of the remaining files.

A federal law passed in 1992 required the Kennedy assassination records to be fully released by Oct. 26, 2017 unless the president at the time determined their release would cause "identifiable harm" to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or conduct of foreign relations of such gravity that it "outweighs the public interest in disclosure."

Trump was president when the 2017 deadline arrived. He ordered the release of nearly 2,900 records, but kept others secret because of concerns by the CIA and FBI that their release could hurt national security.

Former President Joe Biden acted in 2021, 2022 and 2023 to give agencies more time to review the records.

The documents released in 2017 included details on the FBI and CIA investigations into Oswald and information on covert Cold War operations.

The Pentagon is developing a follow-on to the $9 billion Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability(JWCC) contract vehicle it awarded in 2022 to cloud-service providers Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft and Oracle.

The Pentagon’s sequel to JWCC — dubbed JWCC Next — will similarly be a multi-award contract “but at a bigger scale” than its predecessor, according to John Hale, product management and development chief at the Defense Information Systems Agency.

Defense officials are finalizing the acquisition strategy for JWCC Next, engaging with industry and mission partners across DOD and are aiming to publish a draft request for proposal later this year before it goes out to bid.

“I would expect [JWCC Next] to hit the streets probably in 18 months,” Hale said on March 6 at the OpenText Government Summit.

To date, JWCC has awarded a total of $2.3 billion in task orders to the four cloud service providers, according to DISA, which manages the contract. Those task orders cover a wide range of mission-critical cloud requirements — some of which are classified — across the Defense Department and its many components.

Hale said that while JWCC enabled Defense customers to harness the power and functionality of the four leading hyperscale cloud providers, JWCC Next aims to bring them entire cloud ecosystems and third-party marketplaces—including from smaller vendors.

“What mission partners really want is the ecosystems built around the hyper-scaler provider. There’s a whole ecosystem of third-party providers that are built around hyper-scaler providers, and that’s what mission partners want,” Hale said. “They want the entire enchilada.”

Hale said about 180 cloud providers meet baseline cloud-security requirements for Defense Department consumption, and “we don’t have any way to easily gain access to those cloud providers.”

“What we’re seeing is a lot of our mission partners are wanting multi-cloud solutions,” Hale said. “And so what we’re trying to do is get a feel of the landscape and then hopefully come out with another way to allow access to those other providers that mission partners are asking for.”

One of those mission partners is the Army, which has been seeking the kind of commercial cloud services and ecosystems accessible in industry, the service’s chief technology officer said.

“So it's been trying to figure out how we just quickly make it for integrators to leverage those things with the same experience that they're trying to use to fit in the commercial realm,” Army CTO Gabe Chiulli said in a panel conversation with Hale March 6.

The Defense Department declined to comment on the size, scope or timeline of JWCC Next, but told "we are actively assessing the lessons learned that can be applied to JWCC Next.”

According to data from Deltek, the federal government spent a record $16.5 billion on cloud computing last year, driven largely by the Defense Department’s growing comfort with and appetite for offsite computing. Deltek projects federal cloud-computing spending to exceed $30 billion by fiscal 2028.

JWCC is just one of several multibillion-dollar cloud computing contracts across the Defense Department and intelligence community. In 2020, the CIA awarded its multibillion-dollar C2E cloud contract to Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Google, Oracle and IBM, enabling them to compete for specific IC task orders. Amazon Web Services also won the NSA’s $10 billion cloud contract internally dubbed WildandStormy.

JWCC was itself a sequel of sorts to the canceled Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure contract, an attempted single-award contract the Pentagon scrapped after years of litigation and controversy.

The president-elect has been asking his close associates for their opinions on ending government subsidies for the agency.

In his first term, Trump tussled with the USPS and tried to get it to hand personnel decisions and rate-setting powers to the Treasury Dept. (which it did not).

Now, the post office could be a prime target for the incoming administration’s DOGE cost-cutting effort.

Advocates fear that without the postal service’s “universal service” obligation, which means it must provide delivery to people regardless of the profitability of doing so, rural and remote communities will be impacted and that small businesses will suffer without the ability to send parcels at USPS rates, which are often cheaper than other carriers.

Also, President-elect Donald Trump said Monday that his new administration will challenge a deal reached between the Social Security Administration and its union that would allow employees to continue teleworking into 2029.

Trump blamed the Biden administration for what he said was a "terrible" and "ridiculous" agreement that would allow tens of thousands of federal workers to continue working from home several days a week.

The president-elect said "it was like a gift to a union, and we're going to obviously be in court to stop it." He said federal workers who don't return to in-office work will be fired.

"If people don't come back to work, come back into the office, they're going to be dismissed," said Trump, who will be sworn in for a second term Jan. 20.

Work-from-home policies for the federal workforce have come under scrutiny by the leaders of Trump's newly created Department of Government Efficiency, billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who have said they are looking to cut $2 trillion from the federal budget.

"Requiring federal employees to come to the office five days a week would result in a wave of voluntary terminations that we welcome: If federal employees don't want to show up, American taxpayers shouldn't pay them for the Covid-era privilege of staying home," Musk and Ramaswamy wrote in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal last month.

Musk then claimed on social media earlier this month that "almost no one" who is employed by the government works in-person, leading to "thousands of empty buildings not just in America, but around the world, paid for with your tax dollars!"

In his remarks from Mar-a-Lago, Trump appeared to be referencing an agreement reached by the Social Security Administration and the American Federation of Government Employees earlier this month. The deal keeps in place the agency's current telework policy until October 2029.

Under the plan, employees must be in the office between two and five days per week, depending on their jobs, according to Bloomberg News. There are roughly 42,000 Social Security Administration workers who are represented by the American Federation of Government Employees.

The agreement was signed by Martin O'Malley, who was tapped to lead the Social Security Administration by President Biden but resigned last month to run for chairman of the Democratic National Committee.

The federal government employs more than 4 million people, including 2.2 million civilians. An August report from the Office of Management and Budget found that as of May, about 54% work every day in roles that aren't eligible for telework. The agency said that personnel who are eligible to work remotely spent 61% of regular working hours in the office.

Of the more than 2 million civilian government workers, 228,000, or 10%, were in remote positions where they were not expected to work in-person on a regular basis, according to the Office of Management and Budget's report.

The day after Vice President Kamala Harris conceded this month's election, California Gov. Gavin Newsom called a special session of the state Legislature for next month to "Trump-proof" California state laws. He's asking for more funding for the state attorney general to fight federal demands that might come from the new administration.

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and Colorado Gov. Jared Polis last week also announced a group called Governors Safeguarding Democracy, designed to coordinate efforts among Democratic-controlled states against Trump administration policies.

Other Democratic governors who could play significant roles include Andy Beshear of Kentucky, Wes Moore of Maryland, Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan.

All of them, by the way, just might be interested in running for president themselves down the road.

Now that President Biden has dropped out of the race and Harris has become the presumptive Democratic nominee, it’s fair to start asking what, exactly, she plans to do for her client if she wins in November. Despite Harris’s long career and remarkable rise in politics — she has served as the San Francisco district attorney, California’s attorney general, US senator, and, most recently, vice president — it’s still difficult to predict what her campaign, let alone presidency, will look like.

Although Harris has been vice president for three years and ran a presidential campaign in the 2020 cycle, she’s managed to avoid being neatly pigeonholed into any ideological box. Unlike candidates Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, who are easily remembered for their Medicare-for-all or wealth-tax proposals, Harris’s 2020 campaign fizzled out with few, if any, policy ideas or slogans being closely associated with it.

A 2015 profile of her in San Francisco Magazine underscored that incrementalist approach. “I don’t admire grand gestures,” Harris was quoted as saying. “I admire goal achievement.”

What those goals are, exactly, has remained unclear throughout her career. Even as recently as her last run for president, they weren’t entirely defined: As one person who sat in on a meeting with Harris about whether she should run later put it, “We launched into a void, without a worldview,” the journalist Edward-Isaac Dovere has reported.

In the last election cycle, Harris’s career as a prosecutor seemed to guide much of her campaign: Her slogan — “Kamala Harris, for the people”— was how she introduced herself in court; her ads focused on her record prosecuting sexual predators, banks, and big corporations; and her promise to Democratic voters was that she’d be the best candidate to “prosecute the case” against Donald Trump in 2020.

But as she campaigned, Harris’s messaging on policy was often muddied. She supported big ideas like Medicare-for-all, on the one hand, but emphasized that she’s “not trying to restructure society” on the other.

Some of her policy positions were also never clear, in part because she flip-flopped on several occasions. There were multiple times, for example, when she seemed to support abolishing private health insurance while campaigning on Medicare-for-all, but she walked back on that position when pressed on whether her plan would leave room for private insurers.

In one high-profile moment during the campaign, she went after Biden’s record on desegregation during a debate, skewering him for opposing court-ordered school busing programs in the 1970s. But in the days after her attack on Biden, Harris gave only vague answers about whether she supported federally mandated busing, leaving many to wonder whether there was actually any daylight between her position and Biden’s.

There was, however, at least one clear and consistent message throughout her 2020 campaign: that she was the best candidate to defeat Trump in that cycle. And while defeating Trump might not be a long-term agenda, it’s also not necessarily an insufficient reason to run for the presidency. After all, that’s what Biden repeatedly said inspired him to run in 2020 and again in 2024. And if Trump does indeed pose a long-term threat to democracy, then beating him at the ballot box can be a legacy-defining achievement in and of itself.

If Harris struggled to define herself during the 2020 primaries, accepting the offer to serve as vice president only made that struggle harder. Early on, there were signs that Biden might want to empower his number two and make her a governing partner, as he said he would during the campaign. His pre-election talk about being a “bridge” to a new generation of leaders also cemented the idea that his vice president might be primed to be his successor.

But it quickly looked like Harris would be sidelined — and that’s what the public and press eventually assumed occurred. Questions swirled around what her portfolio would include. Harris ended up doing a little bit of everything, contributing to the sense of ambiguity and that her tenure suffered from a lack of focus. She asked for one specific priority (voting rights) and received another more nebulous task (addressing root causes of migration).

The first priority was easy to define: securing the passage of the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. She reportedly made the decision to focus on this task after spending time talking to other Black leaders in the Democratic Party, including those focused on ballot access and voting rights, such as Stacey Abrams.

That’s when she made a departure from the pragmatism that had previously defined her, despite the grim odds of the legislation passing in a tied Senate, let alone breaking a filibuster with 60 votes. She saw voter access as an issue that could unite various factions of the Democratic Party, and on which she could carry on the party’s legacy of fighting for civil rights — meaningful given her own historic place as the first Black woman vice president.

She was warned about the low chances of this kind of legislation passing, but still, she tried, meeting with various activist groups and advocates to build popular support. Her work on Capitol Hill was more limited as the president himself tried to lobby senators. Despite an emotional last-minute push, the chance of abolishing the filibuster was essentially zero, killing the effort.

Her second priority, pegged to immigration, came as an assignment she did not ask for: leading diplomatic efforts and engagement with the countries of Mexico and the Northern Triangle to address the root causes of migration. It was essentially the same assignment Biden had received from Barack Obama eight years before, but it quickly spun into a greater political mess, one that will continue to be a vulnerability for Harris in the general election.

The task was diplomatic, neither focused on border security nor the immediate response to the influx of migrants and people seeking asylum. But that distinction was muddled by the press, Republicans and the right, and even the White House.

Things changed for Harris when the Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade and eliminated the constitutional right to abortion. The vice president quickly seized on the issue, talking naturally and practically about the decision’s real-world implications — in large part because it dealt with two constituencies she has always prioritized: mothers and children, a former Harris adviser said.

She traveled to battleground and Republican-run states, explained the ties between abortion rights and other reproductive and individual rights, and became the administration’s point person on the issue. Harris’s thinking and strategizing on how to talk about reproductive rights in the aftermath of the Dobbs decision also fit the larger theme of how she thinks about policies and initiatives: considering who is affected, and how long it will take to achieve justice. And it will be a centerpiece of the campaign she runs now.

Harris has already shown signs of this focus, saying in a campaign address on Monday that she believes “in a future where no child has to grow up in poverty; where every person can buy a home, start a family, and build wealth; and where every person has access to paid family leave and affordable child care.” All of these stances are essentially what Biden has pitched before.

The fact that Harris has shown she’s not a hardened ideologue means that she can be swayed by political headwinds, giving social movements an opportunity to push various agendas.

Some of the country’s most transformational legislation, for example, didn’t come directly from presidents who were ideological hardliners, but rather from presidents who were willing to listen to social movements and public sentiment — as was the case during the Civil Rights Era.

In 2020, Biden was largely viewed as a centrist who campaigned on defending democracy and a return to normalcy after the rise of Trumpism and the devastating effects of a pandemic, specifically touting his vested interest in pursuing bipartisanship.

Harris, however, is starting a campaign essentially from scratch, without having gone through a primary process. As a result, voters haven’t been properly introduced to her as a candidate for the presidency.

Her lack of a clearly defined ideological position up to this point in her career might now prove an asset: She has a unique opportunity to reintroduce herself to the country and offer a new vision for the future.

What Harris does over the next few weeks will help to shape voters’ opinions of her. That doesn’t mean she can entirely evade her past — her record as a prosecutor will likely keep coming up — or that she won’t be haunted by past policy positions. For now, though, she’s likely to focus on Trump’s baggage and the danger he poses to democracy.

“The script writes itself: the prosecutor against the convicted felon,” California Sen. Alex Padilla said. “That’s what this race has become.”

Question: Is America still able to play the role of world power that it played in World War Two, and in the Cold War?

Answer: Yes, we're planning even more. We are, we are the world power. And what I inherited, as a consequence of the mistake that we made in Afghanistan is a—was not a loss in Afghanistan, excuse my cold. But I think that, look, I believe, I have a fundamentally different view than Mr. Trump has on a range of things. Number one: I really believe that we have a values-based as well as practical-based alliances around the world. And he, Trump, wanted to just abandon them. He says he's practical, one-on-one things he's doing.

Well, he didn't get much done. And so we end up in a situation where, when I came into, when I got sworn in, we were in a position where we didn't have—for example, there's a quote from Macron at the time saying that, in 2019, that Trump wants to eviscerate NATO. He thinks NATO is useless. And we have to rethink our entire relationship with the United States, they no longer lead the world.

I have that exact quote here. And they no longer lead the world and the transatlantic alliance has to be reexamined. And the interesting piece of that is you now have his former adviser John Bolton saying, he’s certain that the first thing Trump would do if he got reelected is get out of NATO completely.

And so I've always believed that there are two elements to American security, and the biggest element and, and our normative example, is our alliances, our alliances. We are—we have, compared to the rest of the world, we have put together the strongest alliance in the history of the world, number one. Number two, we're in a situation where we are able to move in a way that recognizes how much the world has changed and still lead the world. And it's our security. For example, the idea that if when Putin decided to go into Russia—I mean, he's gonna go from Russia into Ukraine—the reason why I cleared the intelligence so we can release the information we knew that he was going to attack, was to let the world know we were still in charge. We still know what's going on.

This, by the way is, if you haven't read it, you should. It's the address to the Russian people on the Donbass problem on February 21, when Moscow was going in. And it lays out why I believe Trump—what he never understood—which is that Russia, he wasn’t just going into Moscow, I mean from Russia into Ukraine, for purposes of keeping them from having weapons, etc. He believes it is an essential part of Russia, from the beginning.

He has just laid out, straight out. He said, he said, ‘I would like to emphasize again, Ukraine is not a neighboring country of us. It is an inalienable part of our own history, culture and spiritual space…Since time immemorial, the people living in the south-west of what has historically been Russia, Russian land have called themselves Russians and Orthodox Christians.’ And he goes on. He makes this whole speech about why it is part of reestablishing the Soviet Union.

Q: Is Russia's proposal for, to end the war in Ukraine, the best that Ukraine can hope for at this point?

A: No, it's not. And by the way, I don't know why you skip over all that’s happened in the meantime. The Russian military has been decimated. You don’t write about that. It’s been freaking decimated. Number one.

Number two, NATO is considerably stronger than it was when I took office. I put it together. Not only did I reestablish the fact that it was the strongest alliance in the history of the world, I was able to expand it. While I was in one of the G7 meetings in Europe. when I got back I called on the President of Finland because when I had met earlier in the year with Putin, he said he wanted to see the Finlandization of NATO. I told him, he's gonna get not the Finlandization, the Natoization of Finland. And everybody thought, including you guys, thought I was crazy.

And guess what? I did it. I did it. And we're now the strongest nation. We have the strongest alliance in all of America, all of history. In the meantime, what we keep skipping over is what the consequence of the success of Russia in Ukraine would be. That's why I brought this along. You probably haven't read it. Most people haven't read it. He says this is part of reestablishing the Soviet Union. That's what this is all about. It wasn't just about taking part of—He wanted, he wanted to go back to the, to the days when there was NATO and there was that other outfit that Poland, everybody belonged to. So that’s what it was about. And in the meantime, what happened was, we were able to—and by the way, we spent a lot of money in Ukraine, but Europe has spent more money than the United States has, collectively. Europe has spent more money in taking on Russia.

Q: So what is the endgame though in Ukraine and what does peace look like there?

A: Peace looks like making sure Russia never, never, never, never occupies Ukraine. That's what peace looks like. And it doesn't mean NATO, they are part of NATO, it means we have a relationship with them like we do with other countries, where we supply weapons so they can defend themselves in the future. But it is not, if you notice, I was the one when—and you guys did report it at TIME—the one that I was saying that I am not prepared to support the NATOization of Ukraine.

It should not, it is not—I spent a month in Ukraine when I was a Senator and Vice President. There was significant corruption. There was a circumstance that was really difficult. And so, the point is, though, that if we ever let Ukraine go down, mark my words: you'll see Poland go, and you'll see all those nations along the actual border of Russia, from the Balkans and Belarus, all those, they're going to make their own accommodations.

Q: What steps are you prepared to take against Israel now that Netanyahu appears to have crossed your red line in Rafah, Mr. President?

A: I'm not going to speak to that now because you're going to report this before I make, before—I'm in the process of talking with the Israelis right now. So I'm not going to… If I tell you, you’ll write it. It’s not time for you to write it.

Q: Have you spoken with Bibi?

A: spoken with Bibi since—I have not spoken with Bibi since the attack on Sunday. I have not. My team has.

Q: But has he crossed your red line?

A: I'm not going to respond to that because I'm about to make a…anyway.

Q: Have Israeli forces committed war crimes in Gaza?

A: The answer is it's uncertain and has been investigated by the Israelis themselves. The ICC is something that we don’t, we don't recognize. But one thing is certain, the people in Gaza, the Palestinians have suffered greatly, for lack of food, water, medicine, etc. And a lot of innocent people have been killed. But it is—and a lot of it has to do not just with Israelis, but what Hamas is doing in Israel as we speak. Hamas is intimidating that population. I went over right after that attack on the Israelis. What they did was—exceeded anything I've ever seen. And I've seen a lot. Tying mothers and daughters together with rope and pouring kerosene on it and burning them to death. That kind of thing, attempting to intimidate. And it is dastardly.

Q: On what Hamas has done, are the eight US hostages there in Gaza is still alive?

A: We believe there are those that are still alive. I met with all the families. But we don't have final proof on exactly who's alive and who's not alive. And by the way, I’ve been calling for—we should have a ceasefire, period. And to get those hostages. That’s the main reason why we push. Both the Israelis desperately want a ceasefire in order to get the hostages home. And it's a way to begin to break the momentum.

Q: And whose fault is it that the—that deal, the ceasefire for hostages—has not been consummated? Is it Hamas or Israel or both?

A: Hamas. Hamas could end this tomorrow. Hamas could say (unintelligible) and done period. And, but, and the last offer Israel made was very generous in terms of who they'd be willing to release, what they'd give in return, et cetera. Bibi is under enormous pressure on the hostages, on the hostages, and so he's prepared to do about anything to get the hostages back.

Q: Some have alleged that Israel is intentionally using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare. Do you think that's the case?

A: No, I don't think that. I think they've engaged in activity that is inappropriate. That is…When I went over immediately after the—Hamas’ brutal attack, I said then, and it became public, I said, don't make the same mistake we did going after bin Laden. Don't try—The idea of occupying Afghanistan, the idea that you had nuclear arsenals in Iran that were being, I mean, in Iraq, that were being generated, simply not true. And it led to endless wars. They were not true. Don't make the mistakes we made. And they're making that mistake, I think. Excuse my voice, I apologize.

Q: Some in Israel have suggested that Netanyahu is prolonging the war for his own political self-preservation. Do you believe that?

A: I'm not going to comment on that. There is every reason for people to draw that conclusion. And I would cite that as—before the war began, the blowback he was getting from the Israeli military for wanting to change the constitu—change the court. And so it's an internal domestic debate that seems to have no consequence. And whether he would change his position or not, it's hard to say, but it has not been helpful.

Q: Trump has said that Netanyahu is rightfully criticized for Oct. 7. Do you believe that he bears some responsibility for

A: I don't know how any one person has that responsibility. He was the leader of the country, so therefore, it happened. But he wasn't the only one that didn't pick it up. He wasn’t the only one that didn’t pick it up. That's why there's got to be—my major disagreement with Netanyahu is, what happens after, what happens after Gaza’s over? What, what does it go back to? Do Israeli forces go back in? I've been talking to the Egyptians and been talking to the Saudis. I’ve been talking to the Jordanians, I've been talking to the Emiratis. The answer is, if that's the case, it can't work.

There needs to be a two-state solution, a transition to a two-state solution. And that's my biggest disagreement with Bibi Netanyahu.

Q: Do you have agreement from all the other parties to this multi-part package of deals that would deliver that in Israel, in the region, other than Bibi? Is Bibi the only thing standing in the way of that?

A: I gotta be careful, because you're gonna print this before the article comes out and I'm in the process of negotiating a lot of that. The answer is that I think there is a clear path for a transition where the Arab states would provide security and reconstruction in Gaza in return for a longer-term commitment to a transition to a two-state solution. And that extends all the way from Saudi Arabia, who I continue to talk to—my team—to the Jordanians that are trying to work bringing in goods and certain goods now, food, medicine, etc. And the Egyptians who I've been talking with frequently about what happens in terms of access for more material to get into Gaza to prevent this catastrophe from continuing.

Q: You mentioned at the beginning value-based alliances, and you mentioned the Saudis. Do you believe we share the same values?

A: Remember, I said what the other one was: there's values-based and there's practical-based. And it's overwhelmingly in our interest. For example, you may recall a resolution I introduced at the G20 that no one thought would go anywhere and it passed by providing for a railroad and oil line—oil, excuse me, I misspoke. Railroad lines and transportation, all the way from Riyadh—to Saudi Arabia, to Jordan, to Israel, all through Europe and continuing. And the reason for that is that the economy can be used to bring people together as well. The fact of the matter is the world's changing. We are at a significant inflection point.

The Saudis are aware that oil is not going to be their ticket to the future 10 years from now. They know it. They know what's happening. The same way with the rest of these countries. So if you have mutual economic interests in mind, you’re less likely to have conflict. So that's what—and it passed, by the way, that resolution.

Q: Is it effectively American policy now to live with a nuclear or near-nuclear Iran and North Korea?

A: No, it's not. And by the way, that's been going on for some time. You could have sat here five years ago and said the same thing with regard to North Korea. So…


Q: But that situation is getting more threatening, don't you think, Mr. President?

A: No, I don't. I think it's equally as threatening as it was before. I don't think it's more threatening and North Korea has something else that it has to deal with. I did something that you would have been too cynical to think I could possibly do. I put together an Indo-Pacific strategy that is incredibly broad.

Did you ever think if I told you that Japan would be devoting 3% of its GDP to defense and make a rapprochement at Camp David with South Korea as an overwhelming threat that exists to North Korea as well as to Europe? You know, I've been able to put 50 nations together to help in Ukraine, led by us but also engaged with, with Japan's leadership.

So there is—look as long as there are nuclear weapons available, it's always going to be a problem. It's gonna—the question is how do we stop it? That's why I thought Trump was wrong in not wanting to work early on five years ago, and three years ago, when he left office—with trying to control, work out an arrangement to control access to North Korea, to nuclear weapons and/or nuclear weapons that are available to any other area. And that's why I was able to put together four or five major initiatives in Europe. I put together a quad that never existed before. I put together—I mean personally put together—worked on it, I put together AUKUS with Great Britain and Australia. I put together an agreement between Japan and the Philippines dealing with making sure that we know the international rules of the road pertaining in terms of air and water and territorial integrity.

And so the point is we've invested billions of dollars. We are much stronger in the Pacific than we ever were before. China, by the way, China is very concerned about it. They asked me—I’ve spent more time with Xi Jinping than any leader in the world, over 90 hours alone with him since I've been Vice President. And we have a very candid relationship.

You know, I don't have any (unintelligible) He wanted to know why I was doing all these things. I said the simple reason I’m doing those things: to make sure that you don’t, that you aren’t able to change the status quo any.

Q: You said on multiple occasions that you would use US forces to defend Taiwan. What does that mean? Is it boots on the ground? What, what shape would that take?

A: It would depend on the circumstances. You know, by the way, I've made clear to Xi Jinping that we agree with—we signed on to previous presidents going way back—to the policy of, that, it is we are not seeking independence for Taiwan nor will we, in fact, not defend Taiwan if they if, if China unilaterally tries to change the status. And so we're continuing to supply capacity. And, and we've been in consultation with our allies in the region.

Q: So, if I might, not ruling out the possibility of deploying US troops to Taiwan in the case of an invasion?

A: Not ruling out using US military force. There’s a distinction between deploying on the ground, air power and naval power, etc.

Q: So you're maybe striking from bases in Philippines or Japan, is that…

A: I'm not going to get into that. You would then criticize me with good reason if I were to tell you.

Q: The competition in the Pacific Rim is broader than hard power and you've expanded Donald Trump's trade war with China. Mr. President, which you once criticized.

A: No, I haven’t.

Q: Most economists say tariffs raise prices?

A: They do.

Q: Cumulative inflation means that prices are up 18%, at least since you took office and wage increases have not kept pace.

A: Since who took office? Since I took office?

Q: Yeah, cumulative inflation means prices are up nearly 20% since you took office and wage increases have not kept pace.

A: Wage increases have exceeded what the cost of inflation, which you're talking about as the prices that were pre-COVID prices. Pre-COVID prices are not the same as whether or not they—you have American, corporate America ripping off the public now. You have everything from shrinkflation to what's going on in terms of the way in which they're artificially moving significantly to increase their, their, their, their, their profits. That's not the same as inflation. That's price gouging.

Q: But Mr. President, won’t your newly announced tariffs raise the prices on American consumers?

A: No, because here's the deal. There's a difference. I made it clear to Xi from the very beginning that—I'm not, we're not engaging in…For example, Trump wants a 10% tariff on everything. That will raise the price of everything in America.

What I'm talking about, I said, we're gonna play by the same rules. You tell me if I want to, if an American corporation wants to invest in China, it has to give 50% ownership, 51% ownership to a Chinese operator. And that goes on from there. And I said, so you're gonna do that to us? (unintelligible) We’re going to do the same thing if you want to invest here. We're not putting a tariff on. We’re just saying, if you want to do that, well, we're gonna do that. And you cannot change the market in a way where you flood the market by—ignore all Chinese government subsidies to undercut their ability as to deal with electric vehicles. And we're not going to put up with it. That’s the thing we talked about. And that's what we're talking about. We're not talking about tariffs across the board.

Q: Another of your first acts as President under the banner of value-based leadership was to lift various punitive Trump-era immigration measures, Mr. President, that you and others said were inhumane. In retrospect, do you think those humanitarian moves helped drive record illegal border crossing?

A: No.

Q: Were you wrong to lift any of those measures?

A: If I was wrong, it’s because I took too long.

Q: You've put some back in place. The Green Card issue, it's been reported that you're looking at reinstating Remain in Mexico. Are you looking at reinstating?

A: No.

Q: You are 81 years old, and would be 86 by the time you left office. Large majorities of Americans, including in the Democratic Party, tell pollsters they think you are too old to lead. Could you really do this job as an 85-year old man?

A: I can do it better than anybody you know. You’re looking at me, I can take you too.

Q: Did you consider not running again because of your age?

A: No, I didn't.

Q: And what do you say to Americans who are worried about it?

A: Watch me. Look, name me a president that’s gotten as much done as I've gotten done in my first three and a half years. When all of you wrote in Time magazine I couldn't get any of it done. When you told me there's no pay, no way, no way he can get a trillion-plus dollar bill done in terms of, to deal with infrastructure, where there's no way he gets $368 billion for dealing with the environment, where there's no way I could get the, the, the legislation passed on.

I remember when I was heading to Taiwan, excuse me, to South Korea, to reclaim the chips industry that we had gotten $865 billion in private-sector investment, private-sector investments since I’ve been in. Name me a president who’s done that.

Q: You pledged at the beginning to restore unity. Both Trump and top Democrats, including some of your aides, say the greatest threat to America's national security is its—and its ability to lead the free world comes not from abroad, but from within, from US politics. Do you agree with that?

A: I think it has a significantly diminishing impact on our ability to get things done internationally. Look, I tell you, I’ll just—let me give you one example. After I was elected, the first G7 I attended as President was in, in London—in England, along the beach down there. And I sat down with the seven leaders that were there. And I was sitting where you were, at this longer table.

I said, “Well, America's back.” Macron looked at me and he said, “For how long? For how long?” And then Scholz said to me, “What would you say Mr. President, if tomorrow you pick up The London Times and found out that thousands of people stormed the British Parliament, broke down the doors, killed two Bobbies to prevent the implement—the swearing in of a, of a prime minister, a choice of prime minister?”

And it made me realize just how fundamentally what he allowed to happen sitting in this room, looking at that television for three hours and didn't do a damn thing, said about America, and how much confidence people lost in America. There's not a, there’s not a…I’m gonna, say, be careful what I say…There's not a major international meeting I attend that before it’s over—and I've attended many, more than most presidents have in three and a half years—that a world leader doesn’t pull me aside as I’m leaving and say, “He can’t win. You can’t let him win.”

My democracy and their democracy is at stake. My democracy is at stake. And so name me a world leader other than Orban and Putin who think that Trump should be the world leader in the United States of America.

Q: If you do win in November, Mr. President, with a mandate to continue your approach to foreign policy, what would your goals be in the second term?

A: To finish what I started in the first term. To continue to make sure that the European continent—I'll tell you, I got a call from Kissinger about 10 days before he died. And he used the following comment. He said that not since Napoleon has Europe not looked over their shoulder at dread with what Europe—what Russia may do, until now. Until now, you can't let that change.

The point is that we have an opportunity to have the decisions we make in the last couple of years, in the next four years, are going to determine the future of Europe for a long time to come. And so that's why we can not let NATO fail, we have to build that both politically and economically. And militarily, which we're investing significantly. In addition to that, I am desperately focused on making sure that we deal with the…what they are calling the south now. There are going to be a billion people in Africa in the next several years. We have to, we have to be a catalyst for change for the benefit, for the, for the better, we have to help them build back better, we have to help them.

We, on the climate side, have come along and we've done everything that is reasonably—and three other countries are the reason we’re in the problem we’re in. But what happens if all of a sudden, on the Amazon, they're starting to clear, vast swaths of land, cut down forests, etc. Back when Dick Lugar was alive, he and I started something back in the 90s, where we said—late 80’s, excuse me—where we said to, in the Amazon, they said, look, if you, we’ll make a deal with you Brazil. You don't cut your forest, we'll pay you not to do it. We’ll pay you not to do it, We have to prevent—And that's why we're working so hard to make sure Angola can be in a position that they have more solar capacity than almost any place in the world, to help that whole continent.

That's why we want to build a railroad all the way—with others in Europe—all the way across the continent. So that you have, you have countries that have overproduction of agriculture and some that don’t have it, but no way to get a transfer. There's so much opportunity in Africa. And we have to work it.

In addition to that, we have to deal with the Indo-Pacific. I've had 15 island presidents and leaders here twice now. They know if they—if we don't do something about global warming, a couple of them are going to be underwater. I mean, literally underwater, not to—So we're putting together coalitions of people that have a similar interest. And it makes it difficult. You know, you're talking, everybody talks about how, how strong China is and how powerful they are. Name me—Would you trade places with Xi Jinping and any other country? Not a joke, I'm being deadly earnest, a rhetorical question. But would you? You’ve got a population that’s considerably older than the vast majority of the youth in Europe, that is too old to work. And they are xenophobic. Where is it coming from? Where is it going to grow? You’ve got an economy that's on the brink there. The idea that their economy is booming? Give me a break.

Q: Have you seen evidence that China are meddling with AI or in other ways in the US election?

A: There, there, there, there is evidence that meddling is going on. I'm not going to get into, I don't think I should from an intelligence standpoint, there…

Q: t sounds as if they are.

A: I think China would have an interest—let me put it this way—would have an interest in meddling. Everybody, all the bad guys are rooting for Trump, man. Not a joke. Think about it. Think about it. I mean, that line that Macron used, and it says that…I was making notes for this. It said, Macron, they know the experience of brain death unlike any time. Because lack of US leadership, we should reassess the reality of NATO in light of the lack of US leadership.

You know, we talked about what they're looking at in terms of Asia. One thing that I was able to convince the Japanese of is we're not walking away from Japan. Because Japan, collected with us, is a source of great economic strength and stability, physical stability for both of us. You're not going to have, I mean, the idea that China wants to screw with everybody is a different place.

By the way, the cost of China to build their military is multi-billions of dollars. And guess what they're, you know, they're, they’re…what they call it? Going around the world? The Belt and Road initiative? It's become a nuisance graveyard initiative. I'm serious. Think about it. I've been saying this for three years, and you guys write, “No, China’s on the right—China’s gonna break through.” Where are they, where are they breaking through? And look what's happening in Africa.

The IRS is inching forward in its efforts to modernize the system for individual tax account data, called the Individual Master File, that dates back to the 1960s.

The IRS has been trying to modernize the system — an effort the agency’s watchdog has called “one of the most complex modernization programs in the federal government” — since at least 2009.

The tax agency is currently testing a new processing engine as part of a possible replacement and that testing will inform a potential decision to switch to the new system for the next tax season. The IRS says it hasn’t made that decision yet, but the testing represents a big deal for a big system at the agency, given that internal projections target 2028 as an optimistic deadline for retiring the IMF system.

Modernizing the IMF is necessary for the IRS to accomplish its broader goal of becoming a digital government agency due to fact the IMF touches hundreds of other IRS applications because of the complicated tax code, and it has evolved over decades.

IMF is the heart of the tax season and it’s the famous ‘fix your plane while in flight"...

Funding has been an issue for the effort as well, but in 2022, the IRS received $80 billion in multi-year funding from Congress in the Inflation Reduction Act, although $20 billion of that has since been taken back as part of a debt ceiling agreement last year.

The testing of the new system follows IRS progress in converting the IMF from Assembly Language Code and COBOL — legacy computer languages that increasingly fewer programmers are proficient in — into Java. That newly converted code is called the Individual Tax Processing Engine, and the next generation IMF is called the Tax Account Management-Individual, or TAMI-I.

The hardware and software of IMF have been modernized already, and the data in the system has also been standardized. The IRS had to sort through discrepancies, like whether or not there are dashes between Social Security numbers.

Whenever the IRS does move to the modernized version as the system of record, the tax agency will be looking at moving the still on-premises IMF to the cloud, although the pace and timeline of that move is still being sorted out, said the commissioner.

The IRS will first want to have a successful period of time where we’re running on the modern IMF and the agency also won’t be turning off the old system right away. The IRS’ Strategic Operating Plan lists fiscal 2028 as a target date for IMF retirement.

The IRS also has to modernize the business account counterpoint to the IMF — called the Business Master File — and the tax agency will be taking lessons learned on agile development to that effort, which is already ongoing, the IRS commissioner said. Once the new IMF is completed, the IRS will be making public commitments on BMF modernization.

Moving away from the old IMF system will simplify how taxpayer account data is shared across the IRS and make it easier for the agency to accommodate changes Congress makes to tax law.

Inside the IRS, a modernized IMF could also enable positive changes for employees, who might currently have to log into several different systems to fix issues for a single taxpayer.

Taxpayers will see the impact with more accurate information about their situations, the Treasury document states. Modernizing the IMF will streamline the connection of individual account data with IRS online web applications. That connects the effort to one of the IRS’ core modernization goals — to become a digital government agency where taxpayers can get things done online, if they so choose.

IRS is looking forward to the day when the tax agency can retire its 1960s-era technology.