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By Myke Agunwa
The Department of State, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Internal Revenue Service (IRS), Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) will release the investigative dossier on President Bola Ahmed Tinubu on Friday May 2nd.
Parties involved in the investigation of the alleged drug-related case involving President Bola Ahmed Tinubu in the 1990s are expected to release investigation reports on Friday, May 2 as ordered by a U.S. District Court ruling.
A United States District Court in Columbia had earlier ordered the FBI and the DEA to release records relating to the criminal investigation of President Bola Tinubu over alleged drug trafficking.
Judge Beryl Howell, in a ruling dated April 8, directed both agencies to search for and process non-exempt records tied to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests filed by American researcher Aaron Aaron Greenspan following a Freedom of Information request filed by a Nigerian Investigative Journalist David Hundeyin and Greenspan, founder of legal transparency platform PlainSite between 2022 and 2023.
The judge ordered all agencies involved—except the CIA—to jointly produce a status report and divulge relevant records by May 2.
In his April judgment, Judge Howell invalidated the agencies’ grounds for suppressing the information, adding that doing so was “neither logical nor plausible.”
Documents from claimed federal investigations into President Tinubu and others allegedly connected to a cocaine trafficking network in the 1990s are sought in the case.
Between 2022 and 2023, Greenspan and Hundeyin submitted 12 FOIA requests to six different U.S. agencies, requesting documents pertaining to Abiodun Agbele, Mueez Abegboyega Akande, Lee Andrew Edwards, and Bola Ahmed Tinubu.
The agencies named in the suit include the FBI, IRS, DEA, and the U.S. Attorneys’ Offices for the Northern Districts of Illinois and Indiana.
The Nigerian Presidency had earlier responded to the court proceedings by stating that there is nothing new in the requested documents and that President Tinubu is not involved in any wrongdoing.