The JFK files are out. Here’s what experts are looking for.

Historians, politicians and journalists have been waiting for decades to view the federal government’s complete records on President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, and Tuesday night, the National Archives released about 1,100 files.

“You’ve got a lot of reading. I don’t believe we’re going to redact anything,” President Donald Trump said during an appearance Monday at the Kennedy Center in Washington, where he promised “80,000 pages” worth of documents.

An early analysis by The Washington Post indicated that the documents released Tuesday had all been previously released but appeared to have redactions removed. It was not immediately clear how many pages they contained, or whether more were forthcoming.

Congress mandated in 1992 that all the records be released within 25 years. But that mandate was met with delays, redactions and withholding as agencies including the FBI and CIA argued that a full declassification of the documents would pose a significant national security threat. Trump and former president Joe Biden have released batches of thousands of the records, though some were heavily redacted. Others remained withheld entirely.

Here’s what Kennedy experts told us they expect to see.

The newly revealed and released records probably won’t dramatically alter our understanding of the assassination but it’s “not impossible,” said Fredrik Logevall, Harvard University history professor and JFK biographer.

But, Logevall added, they could shed light on assassin Lee Harvey Oswald’s whereabouts in the lead-up to the Nov. 22, 1963, shooting, and what U.S. intelligence agencies knew and did not know about his movements.

Larry Schnapf, an attorney who’s been trying to get the government to release records about the JFK assassination since 2017, said he doesn’t expect a “smoking gun saying ‘here’s how we’re going to kill the president.’” Instead, he will be looking for details such as dates and the names of individuals and organizations that could connect more dots about what led up to the assassination.

Still, Schnapf wasn’t willing to rule out the notion that a bombshell revelation could be lurking in the records.

“We have no idea where they were or what they cover,” he added.

Weeks before the assassination, Oswald visited the Cuban consulate and Soviet embassy in Mexico City, according to National Archives files released in 2017. Experts have held that the CIA or others may have kept secret files related to Oswald’s movements in Mexico City.

“There has always been the assumption that when it came to the final release of documents, that the last batch that would be released would be the ones pertaining to the intelligence community,” said John Shaw, director of Southern Illinois University’s Paul Simon Public Policy Institute, who has written books about Kennedy.

Shaw will be looking at whether the newly released files show the CIA or other intelligence agencies had information on phone calls or any other correspondence between Oswald and Cuban or Soviet officials.

The Warren Commission, established by President Lyndon B. Johnson to investigate Kennedy’s assassination, concluded that Oswald acted alone. But for years, those fascinated by the event were unsatisfied, fueling theories that other forces were at play in the killing.

What the world is likely to never know is Oswald’s exact motivation to kill Kennedy, several experts told The Washington Post. Two days after the assassination, on Nov. 24, 1963, Oswald was shot by nightclub owner Jack Ruby at Dallas police headquarters.

Oswald had not confessed to police before he died, and there are no recordings of his interviews with police, according to the National Archives.

“The notion of a clear, unchallengeable admission by Oswald that he did it is almost certainly not going to happen,” Shaw said.

Larry J. Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, also cautioned that major bombshells in the release are unlikely.

“We’ll never see many of the best documents,” he said. “You can be sure they were destroyed long before they were required to be turned over.”

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