President Bola Tinubu has opposed a fresh attempt to obtain unredacted records about him from the United States government, asking a federal court to uphold the withholding of documents held by the FBI and DEA.
Newsonspot gathered that the President’s position was contained in filings by his lawyers before the US District Court for the District of Columbia following a Freedom of Information Act request by American transparency activist Aaron Greenspan.
Greenspan is seeking extensive records relating to Tinubu, including the FBI’s file on him and interview records known as Form 302s covering the period between 1992 and 1993.
However, Tinubu’s legal team argued that the documents should remain protected, relying largely on privacy provisions contained in US law.
The lawyers said the FOIA request could not be justified simply by pointing to Nigerians’ interest in the President’s past.
According to them, FOIA is designed to provide information about government activities and not to expose private information about individuals contained in government files.
They further argued that Tinubu’s position as Nigeria’s President did not create an automatic right for the public to access otherwise protected law-enforcement records.
Greenspan had argued that the case was different because the person at the centre of the request is the sitting President of Nigeria, whose decisions affect more than 230 million people.
Tinubu’s lawyers rejected that reasoning, saying the claimed public interest in the President’s “fitness for office” was not the kind of interest recognised under FOIA.
They also said the requested information was covered by FOIA Exemption 7(C), which protects personal information contained in law-enforcement records.
Another major argument advanced by the President’s lawyers was that Greenspan’s request appeared to be focused specifically on obtaining documents bearing Tinubu’s name.
They described the request as an attempt to use FOIA to obtain private information for political purposes in Nigeria.
The legal team also questioned claims that the records might expose an alleged secret prosecution or an agreement by US authorities not to prosecute Tinubu.
Such claims, they said, were unsupported by evidence and could not justify the release of protected law-enforcement records.
The lawyers further maintained that the fact that some information about the historical investigation had previously become public did not mean Tinubu had lost his privacy interest in information that had never been disclosed.
The dispute has its roots in events that have been discussed publicly since the 1990s.
In 1993, a US District Court in Illinois ordered the forfeiture of $460,000 held in an account in Tinubu’s name after American authorities alleged that the money was connected to narcotics trafficking or prohibited financial transactions.
The matter resurfaced prominently during Nigeria’s 2023 presidential election litigation.
While the APC argued that the forfeiture was a civil proceeding and did not amount to a criminal conviction, the Labour Party and Peter Obi argued that it had implications for Tinubu’s eligibility to contest the presidency.
The Presidential Election Petition Court eventually ruled that the petitioners had not established that Tinubu had been arrested, arraigned, convicted or sentenced in a criminal case in the United States.
The search for additional official records, however, did not end there.
In April 2025, Judge Beryl Howell ordered the FBI and DEA to stop relying on “Glomar” responses that allowed them to neither confirm nor deny the existence of responsive records.
The agencies were instead directed to process the records while applying any relevant exemptions.
The FBI subsequently sought to withhold some of the material, citing concerns involving law-enforcement information, individual privacy, investigative methods and personal safety.
The latest filings from Tinubu’s lawyers are therefore part of an ongoing legal dispute over whether those records should ultimately be made public.
Opposition politicians in Nigeria have nevertheless criticised the President’s attempt to keep the documents from being released.
ADC spokesperson Bolaji Abdullahi said Tinubu should allow the records to come out so that the controversy surrounding his past could be settled.
He argued that if the documents contained nothing damaging, their release would provide an opportunity for the President to clear his name and protect the image of the country.
Osa Director, National Publicity Secretary of the Nigeria Democratic Congress, similarly said Nigerians deserved to know the truth.
He argued that describing the request as politically motivated was not enough to resolve the matter, stressing that the controversy had remained unresolved for many years.
Despite the political arguments surrounding the case, the US court proceedings remain focused on access to government records under FOIA. The case itself does not amount to a criminal prosecution of Tinubu or establish that he committed a drug-trafficking offence.
