President Bola Tinubu is in yet another scramble to block records relating to him from being disclosed by the United States (US) Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Central Intelligence Agency, (CIA) and other agencies.
According to court filings, Tinubu’s lawyers in the U.S. have filed Motions to appear in an ongoing Freedom of Information (FoI) action brought against the U.S. organisations, where records that may help answer questions about the President’s real identity and decades-long endeavours are domiciled.
One of the lawyers who represented Tinubu in the recent Chicago records case, Christopher Carmichael, filed the Motion, dated October 18, stating that he was a lawyer in good standing to appear in the FOIA lawsuit underway in Washington D.C., the filings stated.
Tinubu’s move came two weeks after he lost a fierce battle to block a federal court in Chicago from releasing his academic records to his main political rival, Atiku Abubakar. The school ultimately released the records, which showed that a certain Bola Tinubu was admitted into the school in 1977.
Still, the school said it only assumed so based on a cursory look at records, that its former student was the Nigerian President, but also said under oath that it could not authenticate the certificate he used to run for office in Nigeria in June 2022.
Carmichael did not immediately return a request seeking comments; however, the President’s lead lawyer in the U.S., Oluwole Afolabi, told newsmen he could not comment on the case until it has officially commenced.
According to reports, the lawyers would work to file a full argument soonest, in order to stand a chance of being able to argue any reliefs before the October 31 deadline.
The report also said the FBI said it was planning to release the records before the end of October to Aaron Greenspan, the proprietor of PlainSite, a website that pushes anti-corruption and transparency in public service.
Several other U.S. institutions, including the U.S. State Department, Internal Revenue Service, and Drug Enforcement Administration, have all indicated readiness to turn over thousands of pages of Bola Tinubu-related records.
