Caving to lobbying pressure by intelligence agencies, Trump announced he would not order the release of the full tranche of records, instead following last-minute recommendations of his national security agencies that some of those records be redacted, White House officials said. During a call with reporters, White House officials explained that while some 2,800 JFK records will be released today, the publications of the remaining records has been postponed for 180 days to give agencies more time to figure out what they want redacted. By late Thursday afternoon, the memo specifying which material the CIA, State Department and other agencies still want to keep under wraps had yet not made it to Trump's desk, intel officials told NBC News.

"There's a mad scramble going on in the executive branch to get this done," one official said.