(NewsNation) — A former lawyer for the Warren Commission said a new firsthand account of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination being shared by a Secret Service agent doesn’t change his view of what happened.
“The essential facts that contradict this are completely ignored with respect to this claim of the bullet being found,” Burt Griffin, former assistant counsel for the Warren Commission, told NewsNation host Dan Abrams.
In a new interview with The New York Times, Paul Landis, one of the Secret Service agents on the scene of the assassination, called into question the “magic bullet” theory.
Landis says he found a bullet stuck in the limousine seat behind where the 35th president was sitting when he was assassinated at Dealy Plaza on Nov. 22, 1963. This goes against his own previous statements and the official account.
The 889-page Warren Commission final report on the assassination found that a single bullet struck Kennedy from behind, exiting through his throat, then hitting Texas Gov. John Connally. Landis said he thinks the bullet did not penetrate Kennedy’s back deeply and fell out before he left the car.
“The evidence is very clear that the bullet that struck the president in the back, exited his tie,” Griffin said. “And we know that because the fibers on the shirt, were actually pushed outward, in that direction, so that means that that bullet went through the entire body.”
Landis waited 60 years to give his new account of what happened.
“I just think it had been long enough that I needed to tell my story,” Landis, who is set to release a memoir, said in an interview last month.
The new account comes as the Biden administration released more than 16,000 documents related to JFK’s assassination.
NewsNation’s Kellie Meyer and Urja Sinha contributed to this report.