President Bola Tinubu has asked a U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., to enforce its earlier ruling shielding the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) from releasing certain documents he described as private.
In a motion filed on September 4, 2025, Mr. Tinubu, through his lead counsel Wole Afolabi and other attorneys, urged the court to uphold exemptions under the U.S. Privacy Act and Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Exemption 7(C), which protects law enforcement records from disclosure if such release would constitute an unwarranted invasion of privacy.
The move is angainst ongoing FOIA requests by U.S. transparency activist Aaron Greenspan, who is seeking access to the FBI’s entire file on Mr. Tinubu and records from the DEA. Tinubu’s lawyers argued that the activist’s requests were aimed at exposing private details and fueling political disputes in Nigeria, rather than scrutinising U.S. government activity.
“The Nigerian public’s interest in an individual is not a basis for a FOIA request,” the filing stated, stressing that Mr. Tinubu was not a public official at the time of the alleged events.
Mr. Greenspan, however, asked the court to dismiss the plea, insisting Tinubu was leveraging his office to target opponents and critics.
Tinubu’s legal team countered that U.S. precedents uphold the privacy rights of public officials, noting that even government leaders do not forfeit all personal privacy protections. They also argued that Greenspan’s pursuit of decades-old files from the early 1990s lacked legitimate public interest and merely served the activist’s website, PlainSite.org.
Meanwhile, the court has yet to rule on the motion.
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