Nigeria’s Presidency has downplayed the significance of the U.S. court decision compelling the FBI and DEA to disclose investigative documents related to President Bola Tinubu, saying that the records are decades old and do not contain any incriminating or new evidence.
In response to the judgment made last Tuesday by Judge Beryl Howell of the United States District Court in Washington D.C., Bayo Onanuga, the Special Adviser on Information and Strategy to the President, posted on X yesterday: “There is no new information to uncover. The report by Agent Moss from the FBI and the DEA report have been publicly accessible for over 30 years. The reports did not implicate the Nigerian leader.”
This reaction came after public interest surged following the U.S. court’s partial approval of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request submitted by American transparency advocate Aaron Greenspan, which ordered the FBI and DEA to abandon their long-held “Glomar” responses, which neither confirm nor deny the existence of records about Tinubu’s purported involvement in a 1990s heroin trafficking and money laundering probe in Chicago.
In her ruling, Judge Howell said such investigative documents had previously been acknowledged in a civil forfeiture case initiated by the U.S. Department of Justice in 1993, which named Tinubu and led to the forfeiture of funds from his U.S. bank accounts. The judge concluded that this official disclosure invalidated the FBI and DEA’s basis for confidentiality.
However, Onanuga maintained that the ruling did not affect Tinubu’s legal or political status, adding that lawyers are examining the ruling.
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was permitted to maintain its Glomar response, with the court agreeing that confirming or denying the existence of CIA records related to Tinubu could jeopardise national security.
