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RWB 82 James DiEugenio: The Rise and Fall of the HSCA

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Reality with Bruce de Torres 82

James DiEugenio: The Rise and Fall of the HSCA

On Rumble and the usual audio platforms

James DiEugenio discusses his Substack series, THE RISE AND FALL OF THE HSCA, the House Select Committee on Assassinations, Congress’s 1970s’ re-investigation of the murders of President John F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Many suspected more than one shooter killed Kennedy. The Watergate scandal unearthed CIA crimes, like plots to kill foreign leaders.

Then the Zapruder film was shown on TV for the first time and the country lost its mind. We saw that we had been lied to since 1963. We saw Kennedy shot from the front. A tsunami of outrage flooded Congress, and a new investigation was launched, the HSCA.

From Jim’s Substack:

“How it all began with such hope and optimism, and how it ended with disappointment. After all, the HSCA ended up agreeing with the Warren Commission on the Single Bullet Theory. They were so eager to do so that they ended up relying on what Blakey later admitted was junk science.

James DiEugenio is a most respected researcher about the assassinations of the 1960s. He has written or co-edited many books, including THE JFK ASSASSINATION CHOKEHOLDS That Inescapably Prove There Was a Conspiracy and the screenplays for Oliver Stone’s documentaries, JFK REVISITED: Through The Looking Glass and JFK: Destiny Betrayed.

Jim’s work can be found at KennedysandKing.com and at JamesAnthonyDiEugenio.Substack.com.

The Rise and Fall of the HSCA, Pt. 1

Amazon.com: The JFK Assassination Chokeholds: That Prove There Was a Conspiracy: 9798989393510: DiEugenio, James, Crumpton, Matt, Bleau, Paul, Iler, Andrew, Adamcyzk, Mark: Books

JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass: DiEugenio, James: 9781510772878: Amazon.com: Books

REALITY WITH BRUCE DE TORRES

On Rumble and the usual audio platforms.

See the amazing reviews for GOD, SCHOOL, 9/11 AND JFK: The Lies That Are Killing Us and The Truth That Sets Us Free at brucedetorres.com.

Subscribe to brucedetorres.substack.com.

SPEAKER_01

Welcome to reality with Bruce Tacaris. With me is James Di Eugenio, a most respected researcher about the assassinations of the 1960s. He has written or co-edited many books, including the JFK assassination Chokeholds that inescapably proved there was a conspiracy. And Jim also wrote the screenplays for Oliver Stone's documentaries, JFK Revisited, Through the Looking Glass, and JFK Destiny Betrayed. Jim has testified to Congress about the JFK documents, and his work can be found at KennedysandKing.com and at James AnthonyDiugenio.substack.com. Happy Sunday, James. How are you today?

SPEAKER_00

Nice to be here and to give you a visual. This is the JFK assassination showcalls, which I'm a contributor to. There's about four other authors. And this book came out in 2021 and it's still selling fairly decently. So this is my most recent work. All right. Now, what Bruce was talking about is my contributions to Oliver Stone. This book, JFK Revisited, has both screenplays. The short version, JFK Revisited, and the longer version, Destiny Betrayed. JFK Destiny Betrayed. Plus, it has the interviews that did not make it into the film. We interviewed about over 30 people. A lot of it didn't get in because it was just too long, all the interviews we did. This will show you people like Jeff Morley, the late Henry Lee, etc. Those kinds of things. So those are those are two pretty interesting books, I think.

SPEAKER_01

They are fantastic. I saw the movies and I read Chokeholds. I haven't gotten the book with the screenplays yet. I will. A couple of months ago, you reminded me how often uh about the ugly American. I I own it. I haven't read it yet. I'm building my uh your contributions to the understanding of the JFK assassination in particular. Uh we'll go down in history. And we're going to talk about your latest Substack series, The Rise and Fall of the HSCA, the House Select Committee on Assassinations in the late 1970s. And I just I read all three parts. The latest one just dropped, the third part dropped today. So I'm gonna hand it over to you to walk through. And the the the only thing I can tell you is how much I admired how you started with the context of what led up to the formation of the of the committee, and hope that you you know explain that because it's just so uh satisfying to those uh concerned with what the heck really happened in 1963 and then with this uh reinvestigation in the 1970s. So please talk to me about your uh this this series and why you wrote it.

SPEAKER_00

Let me let me explain the actual real life circumstances that provoked me to write this. A few weeks ago, I wrote a Substack column called Remembering Gayton Fonsey. All right, and the reason I did that is because his wife, his widow, sent me a working file of cards that Gayton had while he was working for the House Select Committee on Assassinations.

SPEAKER_01

Did you say cards? Cards.

SPEAKER_00

Cards. A card file.

SPEAKER_01

Thank you.

SPEAKER_00

In other words, sources that he was gonna look up. Okay, yep. It's a pretty impressive roster considering that it's back in 1976. And so I wrote a column remembering Gay and Fonsey. Well, what happened was that both Robert Tannenbaum and Robert Blakey died within four months of each other. Okay. Uh Blakey just passed away a few weeks ago. I think it was May 1st or something like that. All right, and Bob had passed away in January. And I thought, well, here you have the deputy chief counsel, Canonbaum, and then the guy who took over the House Select Committee, Blakey, both passing away within four months of each other. Well, this would be a good time to do a little memoir of their work in trying to solve the JFK case. That was my immediate motivation to do this series of columns. We're up to part three now. Part three went up this morning. I'll probably end up doing a part four also. Okay. Now, back in 1975, there was an explosion of investigations into the crimes of the CIA and the FBI. Sounds really crazy today, okay, but that that's the kind of temper of the times it was back then. And one motivating factor for this was Watergate. Because some people, like Howard Baker, who was on the Watergate committee, did not think that the role of CIA in Watergate had been fully explored by either Senator Sam Irvine's committee or by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in their work for the Washington Post. There was one committee in the Senate and one committee in the House. The one in the Senate was called the Church Committee after the chairman Frank Church, and the other committee in the House was called the Pike Committee after its chairman Otis Pike. To say that they created a lot of controversy, and some rather gripping television doesn't even begin to memorialize what they actually did.

SPEAKER_01

And they were studying the the malfeasance of the intelligence community, particularly the CIA and the FBI, right?

SPEAKER_00

Right. The big headline was when they discovered that the CIA had hired the mafia to kill Fidel Castro. All right.

SPEAKER_01

Attempt.

SPEAKER_00

Right. And so when that hit the fan, everything went haywire. Okay. They were bringing out poison guns, okay. They were bringing out things like exploding seashells, all right, to plant at a beach that Castro would frequent.

SPEAKER_01

I want to add that poison gun was also a gun to induce what looked like a heart attack. So you wouldn't know the person was poisoned. So every time someone of interest dies of a heart attack, Jim, ever since continue.

SPEAKER_00

Right. And so this went on for week after week after week. It just completely mesmerized the American public of what the CIA and the FBI were doing. On the FBI side, of course, you had the exposure of COINTEL pro operations, the attempts by Hoover to infiltrate, destabilize, and pretty much eliminate leftist groups like the Black Panthers. All right. And so what happened is that finally Gerald Ford sent in George Bush to be the new CIA director, replacing Bill Colby, all right, and a CIA officer living abroad in Greece died. Okay? And Ford and Kissinger used this, and David Phillips, I should add, to accuse somehow the church committee by calling all these witnesses as being part of the motivation for this guy's death.

SPEAKER_01

Right. David Phillips is with the CIA, and as part is part of uh you know creating uh the messaging out there, like, oh, the CIA is so bad, it would justify the assassination of the uh of a CIA person in Greece.

SPEAKER_00

Right. He was he was running an alumni association at that time. Okay. I think it was called uh retired intelligence officers.

SPEAKER_01

Dave Phillips.

SPEAKER_00

Right, yeah.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

He was all over the news. Okay. And so that more or less eliminated the church, the Pike Committee could not even get their report published in the United States. I believe it had to be published abroad first, and then a reporter smuggled it to the village voice, and the village voice devoted a whole issue publishing the Pike Report. Okay? That's how hot, that's how hot these things were. All right. In fact, I think it was Daniel Shore, who worked for CBS at the time. Daniel Shore star really in a way he started the whole thing off because when the church committee was starting up, Ford appointed a competing committee run by Nelson Rockefeller. Except all the people that Rockefeller appointed that committee were kind of conservative, like Ronald Reagan was one, Lyman Lemnitzer was one. And so they were having a lunch with the media, and somebody asked them, why did you appoint all these conservative people on this committee? And Ford said words of the effect, well, there's certain things that have to be concealed. And the guy goes, like what? And Ford blurts out, like assassinations. Okay? And so Daniel Shore ran with this, okay? And what happened is Colby, who at that time was still director of the CIA, he tried to spin this by saying, well, Dan, it's foreign assassinations, all right, not domestic assassinations. And so that's how the church committee got on to things like Lumumba, like Castro, like Sicarno, et cetera, things like that. And so Colby had not done a nice job diverting attention away from the domestic assassinations and to the foreign assassinations. All right. Now, while the church committee was doing a job, Geraldo Rivera, who had a late-night TV show, I think it was called Goodnight America, yeah, had Bob Groden and Dick Gregory on his program one night.

SPEAKER_01

Friday, March 6, 1975.

SPEAKER_00

I think that's correct, yeah. And Groden had a copy of the Zapruder film. Now, to understand why that's important, in the wake of the Kennedy assassination, Time Life had swooped into Dallas and purchased all rights to the Zapruder film. I believe back then it was about $150,000, which would be about $1.5 million today.

SPEAKER_01

And I think it was the day after the assassination.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, it was very close, right. Well, Time Life did a funny thing. They never showed the Zuffruder film in public the whole time they had it. All right. The only time anybody ever saw it was at the trial of Clay Shaw in New Orleans in 1969. All right. And I've since learned that the film that Jim Garrison showed at the Clay Shaw trial was not from Time Life. It was a different version that they got from France. French intelligence had gotten a copy. Alright. So, in other words, for all intents and purposes, Time Life never showed the Zapruder film. Alright? Now, Groden has a copy of the Zapruder film and he wants Geraldo Rivera to show it on his program. Well, guess what, Bruce? ABC didn't want him to show it. And so Rivera said, Alright, if you forbid me from showing this, I will resign. I will then call a press conference, explain why I resigned, and show the film at the press conference.

SPEAKER_01

Which I just learned from your Substack. I did not know that he did that. Kudos to him. I believe Rivera was trained as a lawyer. However, he's descended into popular sensational stuff ever since. His place is secure and nobility for doing that.

SPEAKER_00

Right. And so they said they relented and said, All right, you can show the film, but we want you to sign an agreement with Time Life. If they sue us, they sue you. Okay. And so Rivera signed it. Okay. And so he showed it. He showed that for the first time, the American public was seeing the Time Light version of the Zippruder film.

SPEAKER_01

Sidebar. Did you see it live when that happened? Yes. Me too. I was in eighth grade. Continue.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. And the film was absolutely horrifying. Okay. I'll never forget the night I saw it. All right. It was shocking to watch this. 26 seconds of terror, all right? You know, of watching the public execution of your president, all right, and realizing for the first time that the entire media establishment had been lying about what had really happened. Because the most shocking part of the film is near the end when the headshot hits Kennedy and Kennedy ricochets backward with such tremendous force that he literally bounces off the back seat. And then you see his wife reaching out to the trunk of the car to retrieve part of his head. A bone had gone out the back of the car. And by the way, she got it. And then she turned it into a doctor at Parkland Hospital. So this thing had an absolutely overwhelming effect on the American population. You know, it's like the scales that dropped from their eyes about what happened in D. Lee Plaza that day. Because obviously that shot came from the front, and Oswald was behind Kennedy. So he couldn't have fired, he couldn't have fired the fatal shot.

SPEAKER_01

And as you just described, all the gasoline that the committees were pouring about the CIA involved in assassinations, like you say in your sub stack, my metaphor, this was a match dropped on an ocean of gasoline.

SPEAKER_00

Right, right. Okay. And so now this really enervated the American public.

SPEAKER_01

And I think enervated means take the energy out of.

SPEAKER_00

Oh, okay. Excited. Excited the American public.

SPEAKER_01

As it does me.

SPEAKER_00

Okay. And so they went ahead and started making phone calls, sending in telegrams, writing letters, and they demanded a new investigation. Now, to get into the substory, Mark Mark Lane had always been a lightning rod for the JFK case. And when this film got shown live on TV, he again vaulted to the forefront. Okay? And so what happened was he rebirthed his committee, the CCI, Citizens Committee of Inquiry, to go ahead and start reinvestigating the case.

SPEAKER_01

Mark Lane was a private citizen, best-selling author of a book about uh the county assassination, the Russia judgment, yes. Yeah, yep.

SPEAKER_00

And so one of the guys working for him was a young man named Andy Purdy, all right, a law student. And Andy Purdy knew the son of Tom Downing. Tom Downing was a representative in Virginia in the House of Representatives. When Tom Downing's son saw this on TV, he told Andy, I want you to set up a private screening for my father. He's a representative. He might be actually able to do something about this. Grodner set up a private screening for Representative Tom Downing. And Tom Downing decided he was gonna take on this cause. Right? It wasn't easy. Tom Downing began to make a series of speeches on the floor of the House in which I've actually read some most of them. He actually tried to shame the House into passing a law starting up a new investigation of the JFK case. He would compare it to look, we're spending all this money on making bombs, we're spending all this money on making fertilizer, we're spending all this money on setting up parades, okay, and we can't spend a pittance on finding out. Who killed President Kennedy? Because it's pretty obvious now the Warren Commission was wrong. All right. So he went on day after day, week after week, making these speeches. Henry Gonzalez from Texas was another guy who had submitted a bill to start up an inquiry. Downing took the lead, though, okay. And so finally, in the autumn of 1976, Downing finally got his bill through Congress setting up the House Select Committee on Assassinations. And Gonzalez was going to be his assistant or deputy, whatever. One of the most ironic things that I found out about this, I actually interviewed Tom Downing at his beautiful office in Newport News, Virginia. When I interviewed Tom Downing, now we'll get to why this is so ironic. He showed me the nominating ballots by the committee for who was going to be the chief counsel. It was Gonzalez who nominated Richard Sprague. Okay? Now a couple sentences on this. Richard Sprague was a very efficient first assistant in the Philadelphia DA's office, and he worked for Arlen Specter. There's another piece of irony. Okay? All right. His famous case was the Jacques Yablonsky case, where he had become special prosecutor, the murder of Jacques Yablonsky, his wife and daughter. He was a reform union leader, United Mine Workers, and the plot to kill him was arranged by Tony Boyle. Okay, the uh guy that Yablonsky was running against. All right. Sprague set up a series of trials, I believe there were five, that pyramided up to Boyle, and he convicted Boyle. That really made a name, it was a very high profile case, and that really made a name for Sprague. Okay. And so this is one of the reasons that Gonzalez probably nominated him. So Sprague accepted the job under certain conditions. First of all, there was going to be no majority-minority thing. He was going to be the executive director by himself. He would have final word on who was going to be hired. He would have the ability to fire people also. Okay. He wanted enough money to do a truly expansive investigation, also. And he did not want time limits placed on his investigation. Because, as he said, if you set a time limit, the other side knows all they have to do is wait you out. And they will delay and delay and delay to do so. He also wanted to hire independent professionals, okay, in technical fields, like ballistics, all right. Well, when his first budget, which I believe was submitted late in 1976, when his first budget was made public, problems began. Because what a lot of people began to see is that Sprague was going to run an independent, free-willing, follow-the-evidence kind of inquiry. He was not going to rely at all on what the Warren Commission had done. And in fact, because he was hiring these independent experts, they would be used to discredit possibly what the Warren Commission had done. Because the Warren Commission relied largely on the FBI and the military for their experts. Okay. So the first stories now began to circulate about negative stories about Richard Sprague. Began in the New York Times, went over to the LA Times, went over to the Washington Post, the big three. All right. The big three who had backed the Warren Commission were now going to go after Dick Sprague. The second problem was that Tom Downing was retiring. He left in January. It was Downing who had made the arrangements with Sprague. All right. When all these negative stories started circulating around Sprague, there began to be a division between Gonzalez and Sprague. Gonzalez wanted more control of the committee. That was not the arrangement that Sprague had with Downing. So there began to be a dispute between Sprague and Gonzalez when Sprague would not do some of the things that Gonzalez requested, like cutting his budget.

SPEAKER_01

And this period, January 77, there was there was still legislation pending to authorize probably the budget, right?

SPEAKER_00

What happened was they got a two-month extension. Okay. Gonzalez applied for a two-month extension before the big continuing resolution was going to come up in March. Okay, so Sprague had a small pittance of money, like I think about $150,000 to $200,000 to start up the committee. All right. All right. Now, when Sprague does not do what Gonzalez wants him to do, Gonzalez, now let me say this before. I always liked Henry Gonzalez. Henry Gonzalez did a lot of good stuff while he was in Congress. All right. He was a real maverick who would not go along with the orthodoxy. But in this position, at this time, I don't think he handled himself very well. He began to try and take control of the committee. He cut off their phones. He cut off their franking privileges so they couldn't send out any mail. All right. He actually sent in guards, okay, to shut down the office and remove people from the offices. All right. And he wanted to fire Sprague. All right. There were 11 other people on the committee. In a really extraordinary event, one that I think is kind of unprecedented. They sided with Sprague.

SPEAKER_01

Instead of Gonzalez, who was their chairman of the committee.

SPEAKER_00

Right. In other words, the eleven members broke from the chairman, and they sided with Sprague. Gonzalez got ill, went back to Texas, and he resigned. All right.

SPEAKER_01

From the committee or from his seat?

SPEAKER_00

From the committee.

SPEAKER_01

Okay.

SPEAKER_00

All right. He then began to attack Sprague. All right. So in other words, first you had the media attacking Sprague, then you had Gonzalez attacking Sprague.

SPEAKER_01

And you make a great point in your Substack that a chairmanship is a most coveted position for a representative, it takes years. So to resign is a statement of dramatic proportions.

SPEAKER_00

Right. All right. And so Sprague stayed on. March was going to be his last month. But the fact that he had forced a chairman to resign, this sent a very bad signal to all the other people in Congress. Because it was kind of unprecedented. And so when the March resolution came up, which was going to be the lifeblood of the committee, the Democrats, that is Tip O'Neill and Jim Wright, the leadership, they went out and counted the votes. And they called in Sprague. And they said, The committee's not going to pass with you. You've become a lightning rod. Okay. You got a chairman that forced him to resign. This is what people in Congress live for. Become a chairman of a committee. All right. So the writing's on the wall. Either you go or the committee goes. And so I think it was the night of March 29th. Sprague wrote a two-sentence resignation letter and he left Washington. Now, to show you how hectic the last couple of days of Sprague were. Okay.

SPEAKER_01

On behalf of the committee.

SPEAKER_00

Right. Bob Tannenbaum, the deputy counsel, said we got a lead on De Morensheld. He's supposed to be in Florida. Let me give you this phone number. All right.

SPEAKER_01

Can you give a sentence or two for new people who de Morenschild was?

SPEAKER_00

George de Morenschild was an oil geologist. Family came from Russia. Well off family. Comes to the United States, is quite a ladies' man. I think he was married four times. All right. And did some work with the CIA. Now, a very odd thing that happened is that when Oswald returns from Russia, Georgia Morensheld decides to make a friend of Learvey Oswald. In other words, this white Russian gentleman, okay, is going to befriend this communist, poverty-stricken ex-marine.

SPEAKER_01

Right, and white Russian, too, young folks is a is a political identification.

SPEAKER_00

Right. The white Russians wanted to bring back the czar. Okay. So he tracks down De Morncheld. He's at a place called the Beach at Monopolon.

SPEAKER_01

Fonzi tracks him down.

SPEAKER_00

Right, Fonzi tracks him down. His daughter is staying at the house. Fonsey asks her where George is because he's being interviewed by a journalist up in Palm Beach. Fonsey leaves his card with the daughter, drives back to his apartment in Miami, gets a phone call from of all people, Bill O'Reilly. Bill O'Reilly says, I just talked to DeMoranshaw's lawyer. DeMorenchild shot himself.

SPEAKER_01

O'Reilly at the time was a local newscaster, right?

SPEAKER_00

Local TV newscaster. Fonzi is stunned. Okay. He then gets a call from the local DA, David Blouth. Bloodworth says, DeMorn shelled his dead, your card was in his shirt pocket. So now Fonzi calls up Sprague, tells him the news. Sprague is shocked. Okay. He says, I want you to go back to the crime scene and stay there. Alright, I'll send down a fleet of investigators with subpoena forms. Alright? Okay, we're going to investigate how this happened. Well, as I wrote in my Substack article, that was the last order that Richard Sprague ever issued for the House Select Committee, because he was gone in 24 hours. And there was no real House Select Committee and assassinations inquiry into de Morencheld's death. They did not even depose Epstein. Okay. Who was the journal the journalist that who was paying de Morencheld $1,000 a day for the interviews, the equivalent of $5,600 today. Bloodworth didn't believe that. This may or may not be true. But Blood found out that Epstein had shown de Morensheld a paper saying that they were going to return him to Parkland Hospital for shock treatments. DeMorencheld had become rather unstable the last few months of his life. His wife had put him in the hospital because he had been seeing this doctor Mendoza for bronchitis. His wife found out that Mendoza was giving him injections and high-level prescription drugs. And she confronted him with it. Alright? And Mendoza left Dallas with a false address as to where he was going. So if you take a look, again, I'm going to label this as speculation because I can't prove it. If you take a look at what's happening to the Morensheld the last few months of his life, you have the mysterious doctor Mendoza, you have the Dutch journalist Willem Otmans, okay, who de Morenschild said made homosexual overtones to him. Okay. And then you have Epstein. Epstein is working with James Angleton on his book, Legend.

SPEAKER_01

Edward Epstein. Yeah. Just in today's context.

SPEAKER_00

I believe that you can make a case that there was a deliberate destabilization project going on with De Mornscheld that ended with him taking his own life. All right. Now, talk about getting off on the wrong foot. Okay. This is what's happening as Sprague leaves. So now two new guys come in, all right. Lewis Stokes replaces Henry Gonzalez as chairman, and G. Robert Blakey replaces Sprague as the new chief counsel. And their approach, to put it mildly, was quite different from what Richard Sprague and Bob Tannenbaum were going to do. All right. The first press conference that Blakey called, he said words of the effect, the purpose of this press conference is to announce that there will be no more press conferences. Okay. A working prosecutor cannot be a talking prosecutor. Okay. Now, this differed from Sprague's approach because he wanted to be as open as he could about running a public investigation. He believed that the American people should be aware of what's going on in this new investigation of the JFK case. All right. Well, that wasn't the approach of Stokes and Blakey, all right, to put it mildly. All right. Blakey also dis decided that unlike Sprague, he was going to abide by the single bullet theory. And in my uh, I think it's part three, I talked about how this was done. According to Eddie Lopez, who one of the guys he brought down from Cornell, he called in Michael Biden, and he told him we're going to be going with the single bullet theory. Michael Biden was going to be the head of the medical panel. He then called in Andy Purdy, who's going to be the chief investigator for the medical evidence. And he said the same thing. And Andy Purdy walks out of his office and he tells Eddie Lopez, We're going with the magic bullet. Eddie Lopez couldn't believe it. Okay. He started arguing with Andy Purdy. Said, Andy, raise up your arms. Raise them up, I'm sorry. Can you raise up your arms where your shirt collar comes up five inches? Okay. Because that's where the bullet hole is in the clothes. Okay, so on Kennedy's shirt and jacket. All right. But Eddie told me, Jim, from that moment on, Andy Purdy had religion about the single bullet theory. This is what happens in a bureaucracy when you get a radical change of leadership. It's either the people get out or they stay under the new restrictions. Well, Biden and Purdy decided to stay. All right. And so now what happened is in volume seven, page 37 of the House Lect Committee volumes, it says that unlike the witnesses at Parkland Hospital, the witnesses at Bethesda Medical Center did not see this avulsive rear skull head wound in the back of Kennedy's head. So in other words, we're supposed to believe that since the Parkland doctors only had the body for about 25 minutes or so, and they were under enormous pressure to save his life, that they made a mistake. And that the Bethesda people who had the body for three hours, we should rely on them instead.

SPEAKER_01

Right. That the Dallas doctors made a mistake in thinking there was this large gaping wound in the back of the head.

SPEAKER_00

Right. Right. They were allowed to get away with this because the House Select Committee filed away all their working papers. Okay. And what we have is what's in there, only what's in the report. Well, when the review board was set up in 1994 to declassify all these documents. This is one of the things they declassified. And Gary Aguilar, a physician up in San Francisco, went into the archives and he found something very surprising. He said, wait a minute. The doctors at Bethesda saw the same thing that the doctors at Parkland saw. This evolsive, gaping, baseball-sized hole in the back of Kennedy's head. Look, there's 21 of them. They not only testified to it, they drew illustrations of it. So we're supposed to believe that 42 eyewitnesses in two different places were all wrong? No, I don't think so. Why did the House Select Committee classify those documents? And by the way, it's even worse than that because when Gary tried to find out who wrote that sentence, guess what? Mark Flanagan said it wasn't me. Andy Purdy said it wasn't me. Robert Blakey said it wasn't me. Well then who was it? And Baden and Cyril Wecht, two of the doctors who served on the medical panel, both said, we never saw all these things. Okay? All right. So what happened was that somebody thought that this was too dangerous to actually put in the ultimate report, and they literally falsified the report. Now let me add one other thing before we we sign off that I just put in my part three. Ida Dox was the medical illustrator who was hired by the House Select Committee on Assassinations. For whatever reason, they didn't want to put the actual autopsy photos into the House Select Committee volumes. So she was a professional illustrator, and she was hired to work from the pictures and go ahead and make these illustrations of some of the autopsy photos. Her drawing of Kennedy's brain is first of all a pretty much intact brain. Okay. There's a little bit of a swirling effect, I believe, on the less the left um cerebrum, okay? But it's pretty much an intact brain. Even the cerebellum is intact at the bottom of the brain in the back. This is a problem. It's every bit of a problem, as the problem I just mentioned about the disappearing hole from the back of Kennedy's skull. Because the official weight of Kennedy's brain is 1,500 grams. But the brain was not weighed that night. When Dr. Baden found out about this, he was sideswiped. Okay. The night of the autopsy, the brain was not weighed. When they finally did get a brain weight of 1,500 grams, that should have been another puzzler. Why? The average weight of a brain is 1,340 grams. How on earth can Kennedy's brain weigh that much more than the average when in fact, from all the films and all the pictures we've seen, Kennedy's head exploded during the fuselade. Okay? I mean anybody can see that. There's this explosion that goes off with blood and tissue flying up into the air. Okay, there's the pictures in the back of the car that show blood and tissue all over the back of the car. There's Jackie Kennedy going out the back of the trunk. All right. All the blood and tissue all over Jackie Kennedy's suit. So how can Kennedy's brain weigh more than the norm?

SPEAKER_01

And also the testimony of those at the autopsy that said a third, some said a third of his brain was missing, some said a half of his brain was missing.

SPEAKER_00

Right. There's about 13 witnesses who are on record as saying that a significant part of Kennedy's brain was gone. It was blown off. So A, how can it look as it does in those illustrations as being intact? Okay. And B, how can it weigh above the norm? Now, when we get to the third peg of this story, which is John Stringer. Stringer was a witness for the House Select Committee. Let me say that again. John Stringer was a witness for the House Select Committee. He was the official autopsy photographer. They could have asked him the questions that Jeremy Gunn and Doug Horn asked him for the ARB. Gunn and Horn asked him, how many pictures do you recall taking? What did the brain look like, etc.? They then walked him into a room that had his pictures up on an easel. And they said, please look at these pictures. And tell us if these are the pictures you took. Stringer walks up to the easel, examines the pictures very closely, and he's very puzzled. He says, This is AnSCO. This is AnSCO film. I didn't use ANSCO. I use Codachrome. And you see these numbers here at the bottom? This means they were taken in series. It's a called a press pack. I didn't do that. I took individual pictures. And so they asked him, Are you are you denying you took these pictures? And he says, if that's Ansko and this is a press pack, I didn't take these pictures. So then the question becomes who took the pictures and why did somebody else have to take them? All right. And another guy that the House Select Committee interviewed, White House photographer Robert Newsom, had told a select few people that he had taken autopsy pictures. So they had a perfect opportunity to ask him about this. Okay. And they never really got to the bottom of this mystery. All right. Credit Jeremy Gunn and Doug Horn for actually getting this on the record. So here you have a brain that is way too much volume to be Kennedy's brain. B, it's way too intact to be Kennedy's brain. And you have John Stringer denying he took the official pictures. Something is really rotten in Denmark about this. And I'm very proud to say that this was one of the highlights of JFK revisited. We got a lot of the doctors, like Gary Aguilar and a neurologist, Mike Chesser, to go on record saying what they believe really happened, and they believe it really happened, is that this is not Kennedy's brain in these pictures, that there was too much damage done to Kennedy's brain, and the powers of B did not want to show all that damage because it would have indicated shots from more than one direction. And here is the capper. Listen very closely. Whenever there is a murder by gunshot wound, and one of the shots is to the skull, you do what's called a dissection of the brain. Okay? That is you put the brain in a solution for a day or two. So it's in a much harder form, okay, than it was originally. Now why do you do this? Because you want to find out if there's any bullet particles still in there, and you want to try and find directionality. Guess what? I shouldn't even have to tell you. That wasn't done in the Kennedy case. All right. All right, lead to the question is this just negligence or was there some kind of subterfuge going on? Okay. I believe that once you get to the point where you just pile on, pile on, and pile on these very serious anomalies, that somewhere along the line, you have to believe this is not coincidence, this is not incompetence. There was a design going on here. Okay? I don't believe that these people can be that incompetent. All right. So that brings us up to the end of part three.

SPEAKER_01

So much that's in this conversation would prompt an honest investigator or investigative body to say this this is enough to warrant a whole investigation into all the questions and anomalies that you just described. And it's the cause of so much fascination by so many who dig into the Kennedy assassination to realize the size of the subterfuge and the con and the lies by those we pay to tell us the truth and to and to not kill our presidents. Jim, I could say tons about the value of your work and the importance of the Kennedy assassination. What final thoughts would you give to us about everything that you've discussed so far today?

SPEAKER_00

Well, I think what happened with the House Select Committee, it shows just what a mega event in history the JFK murder was. Because the House Select Committee was deliberately obstructed and it was deliberately limited. All right, and it wasn't just by every by people inside that committee. There were people outside the committee, like the major media, okay, who were determined that there was not going to be a real investigation of the John Kennedy case. And it shows you, this shows you how embedded this crime is into almost every aspect of our society, all right? The major media, the powers that be in New York and Washington, all right, how they intimidated the politicians in Washington, how they got Sprague kicked out, and then see that when Sprague got kicked out, that was a signal. Because, for one example, Archibald Cox didn't want to take the job. Okay, he was the first guy that that they asked to replace Sprague. Okay. And then there were a couple of other guys, right, that they asked, they wouldn't take the job. All right, because they figured what's the point? Arthur Arthur Goldberg was another one that they asked. Okay. And Goldberg said, I'll only take the job if the CIA agrees are going to cooperate. Well, they got Stanfield Turner on the phone, and he wouldn't answer the question.

SPEAKER_01

And Goldberg was a sitting or former Supreme Court Justice, right?

SPEAKER_00

Right.

SPEAKER_01

Stanfield Turner was the current director of the CIA.

SPEAKER_00

Right. Okay. And so nobody wanted to take the job. All right, and so they had to settle on an academic. Okay. I mean, Blakey did serve in Bobby Kennedy's Justice Department, but I think it was only like three or four years, maybe less than that, because Bobby Kennedy was only around for three years. All right. All right. But most of his career was as a college professor at Notre Dame and Cornell. All right. And his major, the thing he specialized in, was mafia investigations. So that's what he favored in the Kennedy case, rather than an open-ended kind of inquiry. And so, see, the as I tried to get across in this, the Kennedy assassination is just too radioactive. It's a reflection of our society, how the media fell in line back in 1963, how the Warren Commission was essentially a sham, and how the media fell for that sham. How the Warren Commission was controlled by the FBI and the CIA. All right. In part four, I'm going to get to Mexico City and show what a difference Eddie Lopez and Danny Hardway did there versus the piece of PAP that's in the Warren Commission about Mexico City. And it's light and day. But that report, and we can sign off with this, the legendary Lopez report about Mexico City was not included in the published volumes of the House Select Committee. And I asked Eddie Lopez, why was your report not in the volumes? Why did we have to wait 16 years to read your report? So, Jim, the day we went in to see the CIA about including the report in the volumes, it was me, Dan Hardway, and Blakey on one side, and there were three CIA guys on the other side. We started on page one, the first sentence. It took us eight hours to get through the first two pages. They objected to everything, every single sentence. And so the report's 350 pages long. So Blakey said, I'm not going to spend six months going through this report. And that's why the report is not in the published volumes. It describes in detail all the cameras they had, the CI had, and also what's called the pulse camera. Outside the Cuban embassy, there was something called a pulse camera. The pulse camera was called that because it was activated by the air pressure of the front doors. In other words, when somebody opened the door to disturb the air pressure, the camera went off. All right. This led to the mystery. Wait a minute. You've got five cameras combined outside both embassies, and one of them was pulse activated, and you cannot come up with one picture of Lee Harvey Oswald going into or out of each embassy, and he made five visits. And you don't have any. Okay, but they've never been able to produce a picture because there wasn't one. All right. Which leads to the question that I think any person would ask. Was Oswald really there? Okay. And we'll leave we'll leave that on your desk, Bruce, for the next time.

SPEAKER_01

Well, I'm very glad that there'll be another installment, and particularly about that. I just want to reflect on you saying how embedded the JFK assassination is in our media and our culture. And that's synonymous in my uh conviction with how embedded the intelligence control of such a narrative is embedded in our culture and our education and in our media. And questioning authority, I've lately been saying about many things, is the lesson of history. Question authority. And like an asteroid hitting this planet. That's what the JFK assassination was. And we've had some doozies ever since. They happen on a regular basis. And I itemize 9-11 as a similar type thing. And the whole COVID thing as well. And I don't intend to open those cans of worms with you, but except to say I haven't encountered a story as important as the JFK assassination, and your contributions to it are invaluable, so thank you very much.

SPEAKER_00

Okay, same here, Bruce. Thank you for having me on.

SPEAKER_01

Likewise, uh, I want to thank everybody for watching and listening today.