WASHINGTON — House Oversight Committee chair James Comer, R-Ky., and Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., announced a new task force on the “declassification of federal secrets” in response to President Donald Trump’s order commanding federal agencies to declassify files on the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, his brother Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
The task force will also look into unidentified aerial phenomena, “unidentified submerged objects,” serial pedophile and billionaire Jeffrey Epstein, the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Luna, who is set to lead the panel. The task force is set to hold its first hearing in March, Luna said, adding she has already communicated with federal agencies and plans to work with Attorney General Pam Bondi and Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
“This will be a relentless pursuit of truth and transparency, and we will not stop until the American people have the answers they deserve,” Luna said at a press conference on Tuesday. “We will cut through the bureaucracy, challenge the stonewalling and ensure that the American people finally get the truth that they have been denied for too long.”
She later added she did not believe the official narrative that President Kennedy’s assassination was carried out by a lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, and instead said she believed there “were two shooters.” She said she hoped to bring in physicians who worked on Kennedy’s body and other witnesses for hearings.
Separately on Tuesday, the FBI said it discovered 2,400 previously unreleased records connected to Kennedy’s assassination and will work to declassify them. While the vast majority of federal records — over 5 million records — have been made public in the decades since the 1963 assassination, researchers estimate that 3,000 files haven’t been released, either in whole or in part.
The congressional “federal secrets” effort will be bipartisan, Luna said, but she named no Democrats who have agreed to be part of the task force. Republican members of the task force include South Carolina Rep. Nancy Mace, Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert, Tennessee Rep. Tim Burchett, Missouri Rep. Eric Burlison, Arizona Rep. Eli Crane and Texas Rep. Brandon Gill, though Luna said she expects more House Republicans will participate. It will not have subpoena power, Comer said, but he said he would be willing to issue subpoenas through the Oversight Committee if necessary.
“This is not a conspiracy theory investigating committee,” Luna said.
Luna has a history of promoting conspiracy theories in her time in Congress. In 2023, she baselessly claimed the FBI was fearful an informant on President Joe Biden's family’s alleged criminal activities would be killed if he was identified.
That informant eventually pleaded guilty to federal charges in December 2024 for making false claims to the FBI about the Bidens.
All of the Republican members of the task force have a history of publicly supporting baseless conspiracy theories. Boebert has promoted QAnon conspiracies, spread false claims about Trump’s 2020 election loss and embraced Christian nationalist politics. Gill — a freshman House member and son-in-law of arch conspiracy theorist Dinesh D’Souza — pushed false claims about the 2020 election, boosted the lie that Haitian migrants were eating Ohio suburbanites' pets and echoed far-right, white supremacist memes.
Burchett has promoted conspiracy theories about the 2020 elections, mass shootings and billionaire George Soros. He’s also accused his Republican colleagues of being blackmailed with illegally recorded sex tapes and said last month he believes aliens from other galaxies live beneath the Earth’s oceans.
And Crane, a former Navy Seal, spread 2020 election lies and made false claims about the assassination attempts on Trump’s life last year, including that one of them was an “inside job.”
Mace accused Biden and his family of being involved in a “prostitution ring” in 2023 and speculated drones being spotted on the East Coast late last year could be from “outer space” or “from outside the universe.” (Both the Biden and Trump administrations have insisted the drones were lawful commercial, law enforcement and civilian hobbyist drones, or other aircraft or even stars that were mistaken for drones.)
Burlison also boosted false claims alleging the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, misleadingly claimed that “conspiracy theorists” were right about the false claim the FBI provoked the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, and said on a UFO-centric podcast last month that his born-again Christian faith informed his openness “to the idea of aliens from another planet or extra dimensions.”
On that podcast, Burlison said he urged Comer and House Speaker Mike Johnson to form a committee to probe claims about UFOs and aliens.
