Either they're hiding something or they're so slipshod that they've inadvertently created the perfect system of unaccountability and incompetency for hiding something.

The FBI just discovered about 2,400 records tied to President Kennedy's assassination that were never provided to a board tasked with reviewing and disclosing the documents, Axios has learned.

The still-secret records are contained in 14,000 pages of documents the FBI found in a review triggered by President Trump's Jan. 23 executive order demanding the release of all JFK assassination records.

Why it matters: The discovery -- 61 years after Kennedy was killed in Dallas -- follows decades of government reluctance to release all documents related to the assassination, which fueled a mountain of conspiracy theories.

The existence of the new documents was disclosed Friday to the White House, when the Office of the Director of National Intelligence submitted its plan to disclose the assassination records under Trump's order.

Zoom in: The contents of the newly found records are closely held secrets. The three sources who relayed their existence to Axios said they hadn't seen the documents.

But the discovery of thousands of records on one of the most scrutinized events in U.S. history is likely to raise questions about the procedures for vetting and releasing information across the entire government.
"This is huge. It shows the FBI is taking this seriously," said Jefferson Morley, an expert on the assassination and vice president of the nonpartisan Mary Ferrell Foundation, the nation's largest source of online records of Kennedy's killing. He sued the U.S. government for more records.
"The FBI is finally saying, 'Let's respond to the president's order,' instead of keeping the secrecy going," Morley said.

Here are the four possibilities that I see, ranked from least damaging to most damaging.

I'm at the point where I'm hoping for "most damaging."

4. Nothing important is disclosed -- there is no there there.

I think there's a good chance that we find out that the Warren Report was basically accurate.

I was into JFK assassination stuff in high school. A lot of the case for conspiracy is built on questions of irregularities in procedures or paperwork. For example, the emergency room doctor who treated Kennedy put in his notes that there was a bullet wound in his high upper back. But the Warren Report said that the "Magic Bullet" went through his neck, not his back.

The implication -- or explicit claim -- was that the ER doctor's notes were accurate, but the Warren Commission needed to lie about the Magic Bullet passing through Kennedy's neck, so they just moved the wound.

My last belief in the assassination conspiracy theory was ended by the OJ Simpson trial. I watched as the defense alleged a Conspiracy So Vast, and built their case on various claims of irregularities or unanswered questions -- why was there some kind of blood preservative found in the vials of blood recovered from the crime scene? (Or whatever it was -- I'm hazy on it now.)

So the OJ Simpson trial convinced me that in any investigation, if you ask questions about every single bit of paperwork or evidence, you can manufacture doubt where there's really, absolutely no doubt at all. It made me re-evaluate how suspicious -- or non-suspicious -- it is to find tiny discrepancies in paperwork or witness accounts.

They're always going to be there. Always.

I rate this is as pretty likely. I think most people assume this (at the very least). This is the least-damaging version of the conspiracy theory. The CIA recruits a mentally-ill angry young man and loser with a messiah complex, and that mentally-ill angry young man then tries to change history.

We hear about "blowback" from covert operations. Wikipedia:

Blowback is the unintended consequences and unwanted side-effects of a covert operation. To the civilians suffering the blowback of covert operations, the effect typically manifests itself as "random" acts of political violence without a discernible, direct cause; because the public--in whose name the intelligence agency acted--are unaware of the effected secret attacks that provoked revenge (counter-attack) against them.

So, if this turns out to be true, the CIA's covert op against anti-Castro groups winds up producing a CIA-connected-and-protected asset killing the CIA's boss. Obviously, these "patriots' then cover up any connection they have with Oswald.

This builds off the last one. "I'm just a patsy," Lee Harvey Oswald said on camera as he was moved through the Dallas police building. The CIA, realizing that Oswald would talk up his connections to the CIA, even if fairly insubstantial, recruited strip-joint owner Jack Ruby to kill Oswald to silence him.

Ruby was later diagnosed with lung cancer, which he died from in 1967. Did he already know he was dying? Conspiracists think he knew he had lung cancer and that's why the CIA was able to convince him to kill Oswald and take the fall -- he was dying anyway, and the CIA would pay a lot of money to his family members.

I don't know about this one. It always seemed strange that this dirtbag just decided to execute Lee Harvey Oswald because, as he claimed, he wanted to spare Jacqueline Onasis of the heartache of Oswald's trial.

1. Oswald was part of a team of assassins the CIA hired to kill Kennedy, and was the only one caught. (Or the designated "patsy.")

This is obviously the one that JFK assassination buffs really want to prove.

I've always doubted this one. To kill Kennedy, the plotters wouldn't have to just kill Kennedy. They'd have also have had to secure permission to kill him from the man who'd replace Kennedy, LBJ, and RFK the Attorney General. You can't get away with killing a president if you don't have the government pre-corrupted to do a slipshod job of investigating and guarantee you they will throw the case and let you get away with it.

This last part is why I've doubted these claims since I first got interested in them in high school. Can it really be that most of the top echelon of government, the DOJ, the FBI, the CIA, etc., were all on-board with killing him? Could you really have a Conspiracy So Vast that it would make Hillary Clinton blush?

What do you think?