The Donald Rumsfeld “Snowflake” Collection

This collection comprises of more than 60,000 pages of records often referred to as “snowflakes.” These are generally one-page memos, written by former Secretary of Defense (SecDef) Donald Rumsfeld, asking questions or issuing instructions to his staff during his tenure as SecDef.

The Black Vault filed FOIA request 13-F-0376 back in the beginning of 2013, which was later amended to only include a small time frame due to fee reasons. Since then, it remained “processing.”  During the same time, the National Security Archive, which deserves the credit for the below release, had filed a FOIA lawsuit to get the “snowflake” records released, in full, from what appears to be all timeframes.

My FOIA request has remained open for more than eight years, and only recently (July of 2021), the Department of Defense asked me to withdraw the request since the records released under this lawsuit may fulfill my request. What is unclear, is if it actually would. Although I respectfully declined to “withdraw” my request, but rather, asked that a final determination is issued since I waited this long for one; the below archive is a digital representation of what was released in the lawsuit initiated by the National Security Archive. Again, a sincere thanks to them for getting this material released.

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The DoD, although has the material digitized, does not have it clearly linked (or linked at all) on their FOIA reading room. This was acknowledged by the DoD to The Black Vault, and will be fixed some time in the future.

For ease of downloading, a .zip file was created, and is offered along with the individual downloads of all the releases.

Document Archive

.zip File of Sixteen releases linked below [60,662, 5.51GB]

 

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This post was published on August 2, 2021 4:03 pm

John Greenewald

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