Judge Beryl Howell of the US District Court for the District of Columbia has ordered top law enforcement agencies to release the records of President Bola Tinubu to the public.
According to Howell, protecting the information from public disclosure is “neither logical nor plausible.”
He gave the order in response to a motion by one Aaron Greenspan who had accused the law enforcement agencies of violating the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
Greenspan said the agencies failed to release within the statutory time “documents relating to purported federal investigations into” President Tinubu and one Abiodun Agbele.
His enquiry may not be unconnected to the $460,000 Tinubu is said to have forfeited to the US government in 1993 after it was linked to narcotics trafficking.
Granting his request, Howell said the Glomer responses by the Federal Bureau of Investigation(FBI) and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) were “improper and must be lifted.”
He said, “The claim that the Glomar responses were necessary to protect this information from public disclosure is at this point neither logical nor plausible.”
Howell established that a FOIA requester may challenge the propriety of an agency’s Glomar response in two ways: first, by “challenging the agency’s assertion that confirming or denying the existence of any records would result in a cognisable harm under a FOIA exemption.”
Secondly, he said it has to be shown that the agency “has ‘officially acknowledged otherwise exempt information through prior disclosure,” meaning that the agency “has ‘waived its right to claim an exemption with respect to that information.”
In this case, the judge said Greenspan asserts both types of challenges to defendants’ Glomar responses: “The plaintiffs’ argument that (1) DEA has officially confirmed investigations of Agbele’s involvement in the drug trafficking ring, (2) the FBI and DEA have both officially confirmed investigations of Tinubu relating to the drug trafficking ring, (3) any privacy interests implicated by the FOIA requests to the FBI and DEA for records about Tinubu are overcome by the public interest in release of such information, and (4) the CIA has officially acknowledged records responsive to plaintiff’s FOIA request about Tinubu.”
The $460,000 forfeiture by Tinubu formed parts of discussions during the 2023 presidential election which Tinubu won by defeating former presidential candidates, Peter Obi and Atiku Abubakar.
The victory was challenged by Obi and Atiku at the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal but their suit was dismissed by the court which affirmed Tinubu’s election as President.
