Opening Statement For The Prosecution
The Trial Of Lyndon B. Johnson
by David Marks
republished by Malone.News at the request of the author
On November 22nd, 1963, the actions and orders of the defendant in this matter, Lyndon B. Johnson, culminated in the assassination of John F. Kennedy, ensuring Johnson would become the President of the United States.
We are confident you will return a guilty verdict at the conclusion of this historic case after you have heard all of the evidence.
Vice President Johnson’s motives could not be any more apparent. He had been sidelined by John Kennedy and humiliated by his brother and Attorney General, Robert Kennedy. About to be ejected from the administration because of previous nefarious activities, including larceny and murder, Johnson knew his presidential aspirations were about to be crushed. His political career was doomed as he faced probable jail time.
The death of his nemesis meant he would immediately attain the highest office in the land. Johnson knew that with his ascent to the presidency, all ongoing investigations revealing his corrupt activities would cease, both by Congress and the press. Indeed, the public execution of John F. Kennedy solved all of Johnson’s immediate problems.
We will make absolutely clear that Johnson not only had the motivation, means, and opportunity to organize this deadly crime but also demonstrate how he used his influence and immense power to ensure that no thorough investigation would ever reveal the truth. His insistence from the day of the murder that a lone crazed killer was responsible for shooting Kennedy, was the foundation for obfuscating his central role in the crime.
This fabricated cover story is far from the truth of what unfolded. You will see clearly that Johnson’s involvement was neither tangential nor theoretical. The prosecution will present a chronology demonstrating that Lyndon Johnson was the ringleader of a most despicable conspiracy.
The trial of Lyndon Johnson will uncover key relationships kept from scrutiny by most Americans for decades. When an initial attempt to eliminate the alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, failed, Johnson called on his co-conspirators in organized crime to kill him while in custody. There is undeniable evidence that Johnson had close relationships with top mob figures and also that he knew Oswald’s murderer personally.
When former President Nixon saw the news that Jack Ruby had killed Lee Harvey Oswald, he immediately recognized Ruby as a man who Lyndon Johnson had identified as a reliable asset within organized crime. In startling defiance of the falsified narrative about a loner who killed Kennedy, other witnesses had seen Ruby and Oswald together in the days prior to the assassination.
The prosecution will reveal details of the plot that clarify the actual roles of these two men.
We will present incontrovertible proof that Johnson was in charge of every detail of the assassination and its cover-up. Oswald, after being shot by Ruby while in police custody, was bleeding internally and unconscious in a Dallas hospital. In a revelatory moment during the first days of his presidency, Johnson phoned the operating room demanding that the supervising physician extract a confession of guilt from the dying, alleged assassin. Within the context of his other actions, you must consider that the new President was relentless in his intervention, revealing a desperate effort to end any inquiry into the details of Kennedy’s murder.
Contradicting the facade erected by Johnson to distance himself and his collaborators from the assassination, the prosecution will shed a bright light on a cabal of disaffected U.S. government operatives and agencies, powerful members of organized crime, and corrupt businessmen who conspired along with him to kill the President and forever hide the truth.
The evidence of government collusion is overwhelming. Violations of Secret Service protocol on the day of the assassination are indicative of an omnipotent master manipulating events that allowed Kennedy to be killed.
Only one person was capable of initiating, leading, and stopping an investigation into the crime of the century.
Though he should be the most likely suspect, Lyndon Johnson ensured that a Presidential Panel he selected, dubbed the Warren Commission rather than the Johnson Commission, was the only body he allowed to investigate the crime. Compromised cronies were chosen and leveraged to create a massive cover-up, limiting the investigation within strict boundaries.
Most strikingly, the group included Allan Dulles, who Kennedy had fired as CIA director. Dulles considered Kennedy a despicable enemy and was Johnson’s most loyal ally in manipulating the outcome of the report which simply confirmed the guilt of a lone assassin. Dulles guaranteed the success of the true mandate of the commission — ensuring that the public never learned the truth.
The prosecution will demonstrate how anyone who might have provided first-hand observations or testimony leading to an uncontestable conclusion that a high-level conspiracy was responsible for Kennedy’s murder, was marginalized or defamed. A statistically impossible number of witnesses were eliminated under the pretense of a sudden deadly illness or suicide.
You will wonder how local or federal law enforcement could be compromised so deeply that they would tolerate the killing of a President and its consequences. We will expose how the Texas oil magnates and agricultural barons who supported Johnson had deep ties and control over the Dallas Police Department. The prosecution will also present details of the collaboration of Johnson and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover in quashing any inquiries that defied the Warren Commission. Additionally, accounts of CIA officers confirm a segment of the agency was directly involved in the murder.
In subsequent investigations over the next decades, including a Congressional inquiry, the executive branch feigned cooperation while continuing to limit any information that might implicate Johnson’s complicity in the killing of the President. In the months leading up to the hearings of the House Select Committee on Assassination in 1977, witnesses disappeared or died under overtly suspicious circumstances, including several organized crime informants who knew of Jack Ruby’s relationships and true motives and six high-level FBI executives with knowledge of Hoover’s participation in Johnson’s tremendous efforts to hide the details of the Director’s criminality.
We will demonstrate and explain how Johnson was central to both the murder and its concealment and reveal the methods and criminals involved. You will see how the Kennedy assassination fits into a pattern of Johnson’s machinations over decades, supported by criminal activities since he entered politics.
In this trial, you will find out that the most important pieces of physical and circumstantial evidence linking Johnson to the events of November 22nd, 1963, have been lost, minimized, or intentionally kept from the public.
Yet even with the continuing effort to deter from discovering the truth, there is sufficient evidence to convict Lyndon Johnson without any reasonable doubt.
We will show how the rifle that was allegedly used to shoot Kennedy had doubtful accuracy and was handled with an inept chain of custody. The ability of anyone to fire a minimum of four shots from the weapon has always been in doubt. The insistence that a single shooter had fired only three shots from the Dallas Book Depository came directly from the Johnson White House.
We will prove that one Malcolm Wallace had been Johnson’s hatchet man in deaths that furthered the political career of the ruthless Texas politician. Wallace had received government positions at Johnson’s behest despite being a convicted murderer who was represented by Johnson’s attorney. Some homicides that benefitted or protected Johnson have been directly tied to Wallace.
In what should have been the most revealing clue for investigators, the only latent fingerprint found on the 6th floor of the Dallas book depository claimed to be the sniper’s nest, belonged to Malcolm Wallace. This critical information has been ignored until this trial.
A key piece of evidence you will evaluate is the handling of the corpse of President Kennedy. The body was rapidly and illegally taken from Dallas without a proper autopsy. With guns drawn, the Secret Service removed the casket, bringing it to Air Force One. Johnson, knowing the importance of controlling what was revealed about the president’s wounds, had insisted the body accompany him to Washington.
An autopsy at Bethesda Naval Hospital was staged to confirm that the shots that killed President Kennedy came from the book depository. Non-medical, military authorities, demanded that pathologists conclude that the bullets entered from behind. Visual inspection of photos, first-hand witnesses, and the reports of doctors who attended him in Dallas, all confirm that the shot that killed JFK came from in front of him. Despite testimony and facts to the contrary, Johnson and his co-conspirators in Washington ensured that only shots from behind were considered by his commission and any contradictory information was deemed conspiracy theory.
Each release of law enforcement documentation from before, during, or after the events of November 22, 1963, confirms that anything supporting the truth of what occurred in Dallas has been destroyed and certainly never existed on paper. Every dump of JFK assassination records is a testament to this continuing repression, with the release of an unprecedented amount of unrelated material and bureaucratic correspondence.
As you process the huge amount of material condemning Johnson as the benefactor and engineer of this heinous crime, it is important to consider the horrific damage initiated by the JFK assassination. After his cold-hearted ascent to power, Johnson continued to ruthlessly cause unnecessary deaths and life-altering injuries sustained by hundreds of thousands in the Vietnam War, an outcome that the Kennedy administration would not have tolerated.
To keep you from considering the broad devastation caused by Johnson, the defense will continue to repeat the unsubstantiated false allegation of a lone assassin’s responsibility for the death of President Kennedy.
Despite the mountain of information and testimony confirming that co-conspirators in organized crime and the intelligence community were involved in the assassination and cover-up, Lee Harvey Oswald’s independent guilt is the bedrock of Johnson’s defense. Yet Oswald’s background and demeanor are not that of a disgruntled loner, but rather a sophisticated government asset, who given a brief opportunity to speak in detention, declared himself a patsy.
Although Oswald’s service in the Marine Corps, relationships with high-level intelligence controllers, and activities before the assassination directly contradict his depiction as a lone nut, government files released to date reflect the continued attempt to minimize and cloud his status as a key covert operative for the CIA.
The prosecution will demonstrate that Oswald was a patriot who did not fire the rifle found on the 6th floor of the Dallas Book Depository, but rather that he was manipulated into believing he was honorably protecting the president.
Lyndon Johnson’s defenders will embrace and apply his bold deflective tactics, denying any consideration of the obvious and limiting the boundaries of inquiry. They will ignore the prima facie evidence that Johnson was at the epicenter of the Kennedy assassination and distract from the immensity of effort that he applied to cover his guilt.
We ask you to recognize and reject this blatant, tired ruse in considering the facts. The plot to kill President Kennedy becomes ever more transparent as the benefactors of an assassination culture continue to thrive in an environment where threats, blackmail, and murder to attain personal wealth and power, are standard operating procedures.
Only a jury of honest open-eyed Americans can find Lyndon Johnson guilty of murdering John F. Kennedy. This verdict will give impetus to an era where unchecked criminal enterprise in the guise of ultra-nationalism and political necessity in defiance of all ethical boundaries are no longer tolerated.
This editorial opinion is based in part on newly released documents combined with previously available information, and was recently published on David Marks’ substack titled “Report from Planet Earth”, which can be found below. This has been republished at the request of the author.
THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 