Wale Igbintade
President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has asked a United States federal court to reject a bid seeking the release of records concerning him held by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), arguing that disclosure would violate his privacy rights.
Tinubu’s legal team made the argument in a 16-page response filed before the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, urging the court to deny transparency activist Aaron Greenspan’s motion for summary judgment in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against several US government agencies.
Greenspan is seeking records concerning Tinubu, including the FBI’s entire file on him and FBI Form 302 interview records relating to the period between 1992 and 1993.
His requests also cover records connected to a 1993 civil forfeiture proceeding in the United States involving approximately $460,000 allegedly linked to Tinubu.
The latest filing by Tinubu, who intervened in the case to protect his asserted privacy interests, argues that FOIA is intended to promote transparency about government activities and is not a mechanism for obtaining private information about individuals contained in government files.
“Plaintiff’s motion should be denied because FOIA is not a tool for obtaining information the government collected about private individuals,” Tinubu’s lawyers argued.
The lawyers—Christopher W. Carmichael, Victor P. Henderson and Oluwole O. Afolabi—said Greenspan’s requests primarily seek information about a private individual rather than information that would reveal how the US government conducted its affairs.
They relied on the US Supreme Court’s decision in U.S. Department of Justice v. Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, which held that disclosure of records concerning private citizens may implicate substantial privacy interests where the information reveals little or nothing about government conduct.
Greenspan initially filed multiple FOIA requests with the US Department of Justice, FBI, Internal Revenue Service, Central Intelligence Agency and DEA, seeking records concerning Tinubu and his associates.
According to the court filing, 12 original requests were made, with eight remaining at issue after the agencies’ initial responses.
The dispute initially centred on so-called “Glomar” responses, under which an agency neither confirms nor denies whether responsive records exist when acknowledging their existence could itself implicate a protected interest.
The District Court previously upheld the CIA’s Glomar responses but rejected the FBI and DEA’s reliance on the same approach, directing both agencies to search for and process records that were not exempt from disclosure.
In that earlier ruling, the court distinguished between two separate privacy interests: Tinubu’s interest in keeping confidential the fact that he may have been the subject of an investigation, and his separate privacy interest in the contents of any investigative files.
The FBI and DEA subsequently produced thousands of pages of records, some containing redactions, together with a Vaughn index identifying the basis for withholding or redacting particular categories of information.
Greenspan was dissatisfied with the production and subsequently filed a motion for summary judgment challenging the agencies’ handling of his requests.
According to Tinubu’s response, Greenspan complained that he did not recall seeing the name “Tinubu” on any of the pages produced by the government.
Tinubu’s lawyers argued that the absence of his name from the unredacted portions did not establish that the agencies had improperly withheld records.
The legal team argued that information concerning an individual collected by federal law-enforcement agencies can be protected from disclosure under FOIA Exemption 7(C), which covers records compiled for law-enforcement purposes where disclosure could constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.
The lawyers also invoked the Privacy Act, arguing that its statutory protections further restrict disclosure of personal records maintained by federal agencies.
More details later