James H. Lesar, Esq.

James H. Lesar, Esq. is a Washington, D.C. attorney specializing in Freedom of Information Act ("FOIA") litigation, and co-founder and president of the Assassination Archives and Research Center, a non-profit organization established in 1984 to provide a permanent organization to acquire, preserve and disseminate information on political assassinations. Perhaps the only attorney in private practice to devote virtually all of his practice to FOIA litigation, Lesar has litigated more than 200 FOIA cases in federal courts, resulting in at least 74 published decisions and setting important precedents. His work to secure the release of records pertaining to the assassination of President Kennedy in particular has resulted in the release of over 1 million pages of records, including pages processed under the provisions of the John F. Kennedy Records Collection Act of 1992. In one of the earliest FOIA lawsuits, Lesar co-represented researcher Harold Weisberg in his quest for records pertaining to the spectrographic analysis of the bullet and bullet fragments alleged to have struck President Kennedy and Governor John Connolly, items of their clothing and other physical objects. More recently, he was consulted by Congressional staffers in 1992 regarding the disclosure provisions of the JFK Act, and was one of seven "experts" brought in to advise the Assassination Records Review Board in 1995 about what records it should try to obtain and how and where they might be located. Lesar is a graduate of the University of Illinois and the University of Wisconsin School of Law.