President Bola Tinubu has given the United States District Court for the District of Columbia four reasons why his records with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) should not be released.
Naija News reports that the president gave his reasons in filings by his lawyers, Christopher Carmichael, Victor Henderson and Oluwole Afolabi.
He argued that the US Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and Privacy Act precluded disclosure and there was no public interest in the matter.
Tinubu also said there was no public interest to balance and the plaintiff had ulterior motives for demanding documents with his name on them.
The President’s submission was in response to a request by American transparency activist Aaron Greenspan, which sought disclosure of the records under the US Freedom of Information Act.
Greenspan had argued that his requests concerned the “sitting President of Nigeria…” and “a nation of over 230 million people whose daily lives are directly affected by President Tinubu’s decisions”.
Tinubu, according to filings by his lawyer, urged the US District Court to reject the bid because it amounted to an attempt to obtain private information for political purposes in Nigeria.
The President’s lawyers noted that the request sought access to information about government activities.
They specifically rejected the argument that Nigerians’ interest in Tinubu’s background constituted a public interest recognised by US law.
The team also rejected an argument on the President’s fitness for office, stating that “the asserted ‘public interest in Tinubu’s own fitness for office’ is not an interest FOIA recognises or one that needs to be balanced.”
The lawyers further argued that the records sought were protected by privacy provisions under FOIA and the US Privacy Act.
“The redacted information sought by the plaintiff is exempt from disclosure,” they stated, citing Exemption 7(C), which protects personal information contained in law-enforcement records.
The President’s legal team relied on a 1989 US Supreme Court decision, Department of Justice v Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, to argue that FOIA was designed to allow the public to know “what the government is up to” rather than provide access to information about private citizens.
They argued that Greenspan was seeking “disclosure of information about private citizens that is accumulated in various governmental files,” which, they said, “reveals little or nothing about an agency’s own conduct.”
