The Presidency has clarified that the investigative records on President Bola Ahmed Tinubu which a United States court ordered the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to release are not new.
Presidential Adviser on Information and Strategy Bayo Onanuga said there is nothing revealing in the 30-year-old reports.
Also, one of the President’s counsel during the 2023 electoral litigation, Babatunde Ogala (SAN), said there is no restriction on the President’s trips to the United States.
He said: “The President has travelled to the United States of America several times since 1994 and he has been granted the rights of ingress and egress into the country.
“There’s nothing new in this case that has not already been put in the public domain.”
In a brief response via his verified X (formerly Twitter) handle, Onanuga (@aonanuga1956), dismissed the media buzz surrounding the development.
He stated that the documents in question have long been in public, adding that it contains no indictment of the Nigerian leader.
“There is nothing new to be revealed. The report by Agent Moss of the FBI and the DEA report have been in the public space for more than 30 years. The reports did not indict the Nigerian leader,” Onanuga wrote.
He said the President’s legal team was reviewing the implications of the U.S. court ruling.
His reaction comes in the wake of widespread media coverage of a judgment delivered last Tuesday by Judge Beryl Howell of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
The judge ordered the FBI and DEA to release documents connected to a 1990s drug trafficking investigation that allegedly involved President Tinubu and others.
According to media reports, Judge Howell rejected the agencies’ use of the so-called “Glomar response”a legal provision allowing them to neither confirm nor deny the existence of certain records.
The court found the justification for the non-disclosure lacking in merit.
“The claim that the Glomar responses were necessary to protect this information from public disclosure is at this point neither logical nor plausible,” Judge Howell ruled.
The lawsuit prompting the release order was filed in June 2023 by Aaron Greenspan, a U.S. transparency advocate and founder of PlainSite.org.
