President Tinubu Asks US Court to Throw Out Atiku Lobbyist’s Lawsuit

By Saheed Olatunji, Reporter

Nigerian President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has urged a U.S. district court to deny a motion seeking additional law enforcement disclosures concerning a historical investigation.

Tinubu dismissed claims of a secret criminal prosecution or government cover-up as entirely unfounded.

Represented by Oluwole O. Afolabi alongside Christopher W. Carmichael and Victor P. Henderson of Henderson Parks, LLC, the President filed a response to a motion for summary judgment introduced by American transparency activist Aaron Greenspan at the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
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Carmichael signed the filing on Tinubu’s behalf.

Although Greenspan is the named plaintiff in the US proceedings, the litigation has increasingly assumed a political dimension in Nigeria, where developments in the case have been amplified by interests associated with opposition figures, including the presidential candidate of the African Democratic Congress (ADC), former Vice President Atiku Abubakar.

Tinubu, in the response filed on Friday, August 28, 2026, said the FOIA action was essentially directed at obtaining private information about him for use in Nigerian politics rather than scrutinising the activities of American government institutions. Africans& Diaspora

According to the President, Greenspan’s FOIA requests were intended to uncover possible criminal records concerning an individual and “utilize those to influence politics in a foreign nation.

“Neither the interest in possible criminal records of an individual, nor influencing a foreign nation are ‘public interests’ that FOIA recognizes”, Tinubu argued through his attorneys.

The President also took direct aim at suggestions of a concealed prosecution or official conspiracy in the United States, maintaining that Greenspan had produced no evidence to substantiate them.

Tinubu said Greenspan had previously attempted to justify the FOIA requests by speculating that there was a hidden criminal prosecution or a secret agreement not to prosecute him.

He said the plaintiff’s latest motion continued to allege a secret investigation and charges while repeatedly referring to conspiracies.

“The claim that there is some coverup conspiracy is unsubstantiated by actual evidence”, the President submitted.

“Unsubstantiated allegations are easy to assert in filings, but insufficient to justify a request for information about an individual”, he added.

Tinubu consequently urged the court to deny Greenspan’s motion for summary judgment and allow the FBI and DEA to retain their redactions and withholdings.

He argued that Greenspan had failed to produce the evidence required under US judicial precedents to justify piercing the privacy protections ordinarily accorded individuals mentioned in law-enforcement records.

According to the President, a requester alleging government impropriety must produce evidence capable of causing a reasonable person to believe that the alleged wrongdoing might have occurred.

“Plaintiff has not carried his burden to obtain law enforcement records that mention or identify a private individual”, Tinubu said.

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The President also rejected Greenspan’s argument that disclosure was justified by “the public interest in Tinubu’s own fitness for office”.

Tinubu maintained that the argument, notwithstanding his current position as President of Nigeria, does not satisfy the definition of public interest recognised under America’s Freedom of Information Act.

“The asserted ‘public interest in Tinubu’s own fitness for office’ is not an interest FOIA recognizes or one that needs to be balanced”, his response stated.

At the heart of Tinubu’s defence is the contention that FOIA exists to expose what the US government is doing, rather than provide a mechanism for extracting personal information about individuals contained in government archives.

The President said the records being sought relate to events dating back more than three decades, when he was a private individual and had not become a public official.

His eventual emergence as a political figure and President of Nigeria, he argued, could not retrospectively erase his privacy rights over records from that period.

“Intervenor should retain his full privacy interests because he was not a public official in 1993.

“Plaintiff’s FOIA requests seek three decades old records pertaining to events that occurred when Intervenor was a student. The Intervenor’s subsequent involvement in foreign politics should not diminish his privacy interests in records from before he became a public official”, Tinubu submitted.

Greenspan had originally submitted 12 FOIA requests seeking records concerning “Bola Ahmed Tinubu and associates” from US agencies, including the Department of Justice, FBI, Internal Revenue Service, Central Intelligence Agency and DEA..

Following responses from the agencies, eight requests involving the CIA, FBI and DEA remained in contention.

The court subsequently upheld the CIA’s Glomar response, under which an agency refuses to confirm or deny the existence of responsive records, but directed the FBI and DEA to search for and process non-exempt records.

The two agencies thereafter produced thousands of pages of documents, some containing redactions, alongside a Vaughn index explaining the legal grounds for withholding certain information.

Greenspan nevertheless moved for summary judgment, stating that he could not recall seeing Tinubu’s name printed on any page of the documents produced.

Tinubu said that complaint further demonstrated the real focus of the action.

His response described Greenspan’s “singular focus” as obtaining documents with the President’s “name on them,” rather than establishing what the FBI or DEA had done.

The President argued that if the court determines that FOIA cannot be used to mine government files for private information concerning an individual, Greenspan should not be permitted to obtain documents identifying him that are otherwise protected by FOIA Exemption 7(C) and the Privacy Act.

Tinubu also rejected the contention that the court’s earlier decision concerning the agencies’ Glomar responses had eliminated his privacy claims.

He recalled that the court specifically distinguished between his interest in keeping secret the fact that he may have been investigated and the separate “privacy interest in the contents of [any] investigative files”.

According to Tinubu, the court had not extinguished the second interest and had instead acknowledged US case law supporting protection of investigative records through redactions and individual withholdings.

The President similarly rejected Greenspan’s argument that information surrounding a 1993 forfeiture proceeding had already placed the relevant material in the public domain.

Tinubu maintained that neither the forfeiture proceeding nor the Moss Affidavit associated with it disclosed the details or results of any possible criminal investigation involving him.

“The purpose of Plaintiff’s motion is to obtain such information because it is not public”, he said.

Tinubu argued that scattered disclosures about an individual do not automatically destroy privacy rights over information in government files that has never been publicly disclosed.

He further contended that Greenspan’s reliance on the public-domain doctrine was misplaced because the US cases cited by the plaintiff concerned information that had already been officially released in another form.

The President also challenged Greenspan’s reliance on the interest of Nigeria’s population in his background as justification for releasing the records.

Greenspan had argued that Tinubu is President of a country of more than 230 million people whose daily lives are directly affected by his decisions.

But Tinubu maintained that public curiosity about the background or fitness for office of an individual, even a serving President, is not equivalent to the public interest contemplated by FOIA.

He argued that Greenspan’s repeated focus on his “fitness for office” and efforts to obtain records bearing his name showed that the litigation was focused on him personally and its potential ramifications in Nigerian politics, rather than accountability by US government agencies.

“The record is clear that Plaintiff’s FOIA requests are focused on the individual and are not intended to discover anything about the agency”, Tinubu submitted.

The President further argued that thousands of pages already released by the FBI and DEA provided information about the agencies’ activities and that removing personal-identification redactions would add little to public understanding of US government conduct.

Tinubu therefore asked the court to reject Greenspan’s challenges to the FBI’s searches, the DEA’s Vaughn index and other document-specific withholdings where they could lead to the disclosure of information protected by privacy law.

“For all the foregoing reasons, Intervenor requests that the Court deny Plaintiff’s motion for summary judgment and allow the redactions or withholdings made by the FBI and DEA to stand.”