The US District Court for the District of Columbia has ordered top law enforcement agencies to make information about President Bola Tinubu public.
Beryl Howell, the judge, made the order on Tuesday.
Responding to a motion by Aaron Greenspan, an American who is seeking a reconsideration of an earlier ruling, Howell said protecting the information from public disclosure is “neither logical nor plausible.”
Greenspan had accused the law enforcement agencies of violating the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by failing to release within the statutory time “documents relating to purported federal investigations into” President Tinubu and one Abiodun Agbele.
Tinubu was said to have forfeited $460,000 to the American government in 1993 after authorities linked the funds to proceeds of narcotics trafficking.
At the Presidential Election Petition Court, the issue of Tinubu’s forfeiture of the funds featured prominently when his opponents – Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi – challenged the president’s eligibility to contest Nigeria’s presidency.
But in a unanimous decision, the election court dismissed the suits, affirming Tinubu’s election.
However, on Tuesday, Judge Howell ruled partly in favour of Greenspan.
The judge noted that the ‘Glomar’ responses asserted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation(FBI) and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) are “improper and must be lifted.”
He said the FBI and DEA failed to show that they properly invoked the FOIA.
According to Howell, since it was acknowledged that Tinubu was a subject of an investigation involving both the FBI and DEA, “the claim that the Glomar responses were necessary to protect this information from public disclosure is at this point neither logical nor plausible.”
Explaining further, the judge established that a FOIA requester may challenge the propriety of an agency’s Glomar response in two ways: first, by “challenging the agency’s assertion that confirming or denying the existence of any records would result in a cognisable harm under a FOIA exemption,” and, second, showing that the agency “has ‘officially acknowledged otherwise exempt information through prior disclosure,” meaning that the agency “has ‘waived its right to claim an exemption with respect to that information.”
In this case, the judge said Mr Greenspan asserts both types of challenges to defendants’ Glomar responses: “The plaintiffs’ argument that (1) DEA has officially confirmed investigations of Agbele’s involvement in the drug trafficking ring, (2) the FBI and DEA have both officially confirmed investigations of Tinubu relating to the drug trafficking ring, (3) any privacy interests implicated by the FOIA requests to the FBI and DEA for records about Tinubu are overcome by the public interest in release of such information, and (4) the CIA has officially acknowledged records responsive to plaintiff’s FOIA request about Tinubu.”