President Bola Tinubu’s lawyers have told a United States federal court that public curiosity in Nigeria about his background is not, by itself, a reason to release FBI and DEA records about him.
The argument appears in an amended response filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia in a Freedom of Information Act case brought by American transparency activist Aaron Greenspan.
Tinubu’s lawyers asked the court to reject Greenspan’s motion for summary judgment and to leave in place redactions and withholdings already applied by the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration.
At issue is what counts as a public interest under FOIA. Greenspan has said the records matter because Tinubu is Nigeria’s president and his past is relevant to Nigerians. Tinubu’s lawyers dispute that framing. They said Greenspan had described his interest as the Nigerian public’s general concern with Tinubu’s background and fitness for office, and argued that a person’s prominence does not automatically create the kind of public interest FOIA was written to serve.
“Plaintiff’s interest in an individual or that individual’s activities is not a ‘public interest’ that FOIA recognizes,” the lawyers wrote. Citing U.S. Supreme Court decisions, they said the statute is meant mainly to show what government agencies were doing, not to open personal information held in government files. In their account, Greenspan’s requests are aimed at Tinubu rather than at how the FBI or DEA carried out their duties, including a request he described as seeking Tinubu’s “entire FBI file.”
The agencies have already released thousands of documents, the lawyers said, with some material redacted or withheld. Removing those redactions, they argued, would not necessarily reveal more about how the agencies performed their work. “The redaction of some individual names does not alter the fact that what the ‘government was up to’ is apparent from the records,” they said.
They also drew a distinction between Greenspan’s stated interest in Tinubu’s background and fitness for office and the government-transparency interest FOIA protects. “Plaintiff is admittedly attempting using FOIA to try to implicate private individuals in criminal investigations and possible indictments,” the filing said. They added that neither an interest in possible criminal records of an individual nor an effort to influence a foreign country is a public interest FOIA recognizes. That characterization is the lawyers’ account of Greenspan’s purpose, not a finding by the court.
The lawyers rejected the idea that earlier public disclosures settle the privacy question. They said 1993 forfeiture proceedings did not reveal the details or outcome of any possible criminal investigation involving Tinubu, and that he retains a privacy interest in information that has never been disclosed. “An individual retains a privacy interest in the details that remain undisclosed,” they argued. They also said his current office does not erase privacy rights over records tied to events from about 1988 to 1991, years before he became president.
Greenspan, a researcher, IT specialist and founder of the legal transparency site PlainSite, has asked the Washington court to order the FBI, the DEA and the Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys to release, without redaction, records related to a 1990s narcotics investigation that he says identified Tinubu as a subject. The case also covers records from a 1993 U.S. civil forfeiture proceeding involving about $460,000 linked to Tinubu.
Tinubu has denied any wrongdoing.
The lawyers asked the court to find that Greenspan has not shown a FOIA-recognized public interest strong enough to outweigh those privacy claims, and to allow the agencies’ redactions and withholdings to stand.
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