White House Seeks to Contain Damage From Personal Data in Kennedy Files

The Trump administration scrambled to minimize fallout on Thursday after exposing personal information, including Social Security numbers, of hundreds of congressional staff members, intelligence researchers and even an ambassador when releasing files pertaining to the death of President John F. Kennedy.

The exposure of personal details, as well as long-guarded secrets about Cold War spycraft, came as a result of the National Archives uploading 64,000 pages of documents related — some very tangentially — to Kennedy’s 1963 assassination.

White House officials acknowledged on Thursday that it was only after the papers were made public that they began combing through them for exposed details.

On Wednesday, the White House ordered that the pages be combed for exposed Social Security numbers, and officials directed the Social Security Administration to issue new numbers to the affected people, according to a senior administration official, in an extraordinary response to mitigate the potential harm of the leaks. They will also be offered free credit monitoring.

Normally, personal information like names, Social Security numbers and home addresses are scrubbed from declassified files.

In fact, the exposure could have violated U.S. privacy law, according to Mark S. Zaid, a national security lawyer and outspoken critic of Mr. Trump who has also pushed for the release of the Kennedy documents. But whether the people affected could sue for damages depended on several technicalities, he said, including the storage systems used for the data.

Administration officials knew before the documents went out that releasing them without redactions would expose some personal information, according to one person with knowledge of the effort who was granted anonymity to discuss the deliberations.

Tulsi Gabbard, the director of National Intelligence, championed the untouched pages. “President Trump is ushering in a new era of maximum transparency,” she wrote in an X post on Tuesday, adding, “Promises made, promises kept.”

Despite the limited number of redactions, nothing found in the papers so far has pointed to a second gunman or other conspiracy theories about Kennedy’s 1963 assassination. Any new information was largely related to the C.I.A.’s clandestine Cold War operations, including spying on erstwhile allies.