- The judge, Beryl Howell, made the order on Tuesday, saying that protecting the information from public disclosure is “neither logical nor plausible.”
The United States District Court for the District of Columbia has ordered top US law enforcement agencies to release confidential information generated on President Bola Tinubu during a “purported federal investigation in the 1990s”, PREMIUM TIMES reports.
The judge, Beryl Howell, made the order on Tuesday, saying that protecting the information from public disclosure is “neither logical nor plausible.”
An American, Aaron Greenspan, had filed a suit in June 2023 under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) against the Executive Office for US Attorneys, Department of State, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Internal Revenue Service (IRS), Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
In his complaint, Mr Greenspan accused the law enforcement agencies of violating the FOIA by failing to release within the statutory time “documents relating to purported federal investigations into” President Tinubu and one Abiodun Agbele.
Between 2022 and 2023, Mr Greenspan filed 12 FOIA requests with six different US government agencies and components seeking information about a joint investigation conducted by the FBI, IRS, DEA, and the US Attorney’s Offices for the Northern District of Indiana and Northern District of Illinois.
According to Mr Greenspan, the records being requested involved charging decisions on the activities, including money laundering, of a Chicago heroin ring that operated in the early 1990s.
In each FOIA request, the American sought criminal investigative records about four named individuals “allegedly associated with the drug ring: Bola Ahmed Tinubu, Lee Andrew Edwards, Mueez Abegboyega Akande, and Abiodun Agbele.”
After the requests, all five US agencies issued “Glomar responses”, refusing to confirm or deny whether the requested records exist.
Mr Greenspan contested those responses at the Department of Justice’s Office of Information Policy (“OIP”). The OIP, however, affirmed the agencies’ refusal to confirm or deny the existence of the requested records.
The American then filed a lawsuit on 12 June 2023, naming the FBI, DEA, IRS, EOUSA, and Department of State as defendants and challenging each agency’s response to the separate FOIA requests.
Court documents show that the CIA was later added as a defendant in the First Amended Complaint, along with a challenge to that agency’s glomar response to the plaintiff’s FOIA request.
On 20 October 2023, Mr Greenspan filed an emergency motion seeking a hearing to compel the US agencies to immediately produce records responsive to his FOIA requests. He cited the Nigerian Supreme Court’s plan to begin hearing arguments in three days’ time in a litigation contesting Mr Tinubu’s 2023 election as the President of Nigeria.
Three days later, on 23 October 2023, Mr Greenspan’s emergency motion was denied for failing to “satisfy any of the requirements for emergency injunctive relief.”
Also on that same day, President Tinubu moved to intervene in the case, citing his privacy interests in his “confidential tax records” and “documents from federal law enforcement agencies that fall within the Privacy Act or exceptions to FOIA and should not be disclosed.”
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In 1993, Mr Tinubu was said to have forfeited $460,000 to the American government after authorities linked the funds to proceeds of narcotics trafficking.
The issue of Mr Tinubu’s forfeiture of the funds featured prominently at the Presidential Election Petition Court when his opponents, Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi, challenged the president’s eligibility to contest Nigeria’s presidency. But the election court, in a unanimous decision, dismissed the suits, affirming Mr Tinubu’s election.
However, on Tuesday, Judge Howell ruled partly in favour of Mr Greenspan in the US case.
The judge noted that the ‘Glomar’ responses asserted by the FBI and DEA are “improper and must be lifted.” He said the FBI and DEA failed to show that they properly invoked FOIA.
Mr Howell said since it was acknowledged that Mr Tinubu was a subject of an investigation involving both the FBI and DEA, “the claim that the Glomar responses were necessary to protect this information from public disclosure is at this point neither logical nor plausible.”
