President Bola Tinubu has asked a United States federal court to reject a request seeking the release of records relating to him held by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).
The President’s position was contained in legal filings submitted before the US District Court for the District of Columbia by his lawyers, Christopher Carmichael, Victor Henderson and Oluwole Afolabi.
The case followed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by American transparency activist Aaron Greenspan, who is seeking access to records containing Tinubu’s name.
Tinubu’s legal team presented four main arguments for keeping the records from public disclosure, centring their case on privacy protections, the scope of US freedom-of-information law, the absence of a legally recognised public interest and what they described as the political motive behind the request.
1. FOIA and Privacy Act protect the records
The President’s lawyers argued that the US Freedom of Information Act and Privacy Act restrict the disclosure of the information being sought.
They specifically relied on FOIA Exemption 7(C), which provides protection for personal information contained in law-enforcement records where disclosure could constitute an unwarranted invasion of privacy.
“The redacted information sought by the plaintiff is exempt from disclosure,” the lawyers stated.
According to the legal team, the fact that Tinubu is Nigeria’s sitting president does not automatically remove the privacy protections attached to information contained in US government files.
2. Nigerians’ interest does not amount to public interest under US law
Greenspan argued that his request was justified because it concerned the sitting President of Nigeria, a country with more than 230 million people whose lives are affected by Tinubu’s decisions.
Tinubu’s lawyers, however, rejected that reasoning.
They argued that an interest in learning about the President’s personal background is not the type of public interest recognised under the US FOIA framework.
The legal team also dismissed the suggestion that the records could be justified by questions surrounding Tinubu’s fitness for public office.
“The asserted ‘public interest in Tinubu’s own fitness for office’ is not an interest FOIA recognises or one that needs to be balanced,” they argued.
3. FOIA is about government conduct, not private citizens
Tinubu’s lawyers further argued that FOIA was not created to give the public unrestricted access to private information held in government files.
To support their position, they cited the 1989 US Supreme Court ruling in Department of Justice v. Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.
The decision established an important principle concerning the purpose of FOIA: allowing citizens to understand what the government is doing, rather than simply exposing information about individuals contained in government records.
Applying that principle to the case, Tinubu’s lawyers argued that Greenspan’s request was primarily seeking information about private citizens rather than information that would reveal misconduct by a US government agency.
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They described the requested material as “disclosure of information about private citizens that is accumulated in various governmental files,” arguing that such disclosure “reveals little or nothing about an agency’s own conduct.”
4. Lawyers question motive behind the request
The President’s legal team also challenged the motivation behind Greenspan’s request.
They argued that the records were being pursued primarily for political purposes in Nigeria rather than to expose wrongdoing by a US government agency.
According to the lawyers, the request should not be allowed to turn the FOIA process into a mechanism for obtaining private information simply because the individual involved is a foreign head of state.
The court is now being asked to determine whether the records sought by Greenspan fall within the exemptions cited by Tinubu’s legal team or whether the request can proceed under US transparency laws.
The dispute has attracted significant political attention in Nigeria, where questions about Tinubu’s past and records in the United States have repeatedly surfaced in political debates.
For Tinubu, the case is not simply about documents sitting in US government files. It has become another legal and political battle over how much of a president’s past can legitimately be placed under public scrutiny—and where the line between transparency and privacy should be drawn.