Just hours after Democrats won control of the House on Tuesday, Rep. Robert Garcia of California, who is expected to lead the Oversight Committee, issued a blunt warning to the Trump administration: get legal counsel. Garcia has outlined four priorities, including Trump family business dealings, Homeland Security and ICE, corporate corruption, and public hearings on the Epstein files. Investigations into the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy, the CIA’s MK-ULTRA program, and government secrecy around UFOs did not make the list.
That puts the House Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets in an uncertain position. Created by the Republican-led Oversight Committee, it will not automatically carry on when the new Congress begins on January 3. Democrats could renew its work, but they would have to decide to do so.
If Congress leaves without even recording how agencies obstructed its inquiries, those agencies may take away one clear message: delaying works.
At a hearing last year, Rep. Tim Burchett of Tennessee accused federal agencies of mocking investigators and trying to divert their attention. He suspected officials were simply waiting for the clock to run out. After the election, that concern feels less hypothetical.
The task force’s leading Republicans all won re-election. Chairwoman Anna Paulina Luna of Florida, Eric Burlison of Missouri, and Burchett will return in January. But they will no longer have the majority that gave the investigation its authority.
While reporting on the task force, I heard versions of Burchett’s complaint repeatedly. A congressional inquiry can be outlasted, and officials have little reason to hurry if they expect the political balance to shift.
When I spoke with Luna on July 30, I asked what work remained. She said journalist Jefferson Morley was preparing a final report on the JFK assassination. She also said Sirhan Sirhan had agreed to testify about Robert F. Kennedy’s murder, and that investigators planned ballistic tests on a gun once owned by Thane Eugene Cesar, the security guard whose possible role has long featured in theories about a second gunman.
Luna also said government insiders had been released from nondisclosure agreements so they could speak, and that the CIA had found missing MK-ULTRA files and included them in a declassification order.
So far, based on the public record, Sirhan has not testified, no new findings from the Cesar gun tests have been made public, and the MK-ULTRA documents Luna described have not surfaced. Morley has confirmed that he is working on the JFK report. The public should be able to read it.
To be fair, some Democrats on the task force treated whistleblowers’ questions seriously. A Democratic majority could continue the investigation, and if its members are committed to transparency, they should. Still, I have watched enough of Washington to know how these efforts can fade: the inquiry stops, staff move on, witnesses stop responding, and years later someone writes about how close Congress came.
Luna and her colleagues have less than two months. They should publish Morley’s report, pursue Sirhan’s testimony and the Cesar ballistics tests, and seek the release of any MK-ULTRA records that can legally be made public. For every unfinished lead, they should also leave a written account of which agency holds the records, what it agreed to provide, what it withheld, and how long Congress waited.
January 3 does not have to mark the end of the search for answers. But if Congress leaves without documenting the obstruction, agencies inclined to delay may conclude that waiting is all it takes.
