Tinubu's Lawyers Just Told A US Court His 1993 Records Are Private Business

President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has asked a federal court in Washington to reject Aaron Greenspan's bid for more FBI and DEA records about him, and the filing is dated August 28, 2026. His lawyers want the court to deny Greenspan's motion for summary judgment and leave the redactions and withholdings exactly where they are.

Their central argument is timing. In the brief they state plainly, "Regardless, Intervenor should retain his full privacy interests because he was not a public official in 1993," adding that the requests "seek three decades old records pertaining to events that occurred when Intervenor was a student." They lean on FOIA Exemption 7(C) and the Privacy Act, and they cite the D.C. Circuit for the proposition that public officials do not "forfeit their personal privacy for FOIA purposes" simply because they now hold office.

What caught me is the public interest argument. The filing says "the Nigerian public's general interest" in Tinubu's background, and any interest in "influencing politics in a foreign nation," are not the kinds of interests FOIA was built to serve. That is a Nigerian president telling an American court that Nigerian curiosity about his own record does not count as a legitimate public interest. The case itself traces back to a Chicago-area heroin trafficking investigation in the early 1990s, and the court has not ruled on whether any of the historical allegations are true. So here is my question: if the man was a private student in 1993, fine, but does the Nigerian public have any standing to ask what is inside those files, or do we just wait for a court in Washington to decide for us?