The open letter, the court record and the unanswered questions behind the FBI’s latest move
An explosive open letter from Stockholm has put FBI Director Kash Patel at the centre of a fresh transparency controversy over long-sought US law-enforcement records concerning Nigerian President Bola Ahmed Tinubu.
Written by Kio Amachree, founder and president of Worldview International, the letter challenges Patel over the FBI’s latest attempt to justify, privately and under seal, the withholding of portions of records sought under the US Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
But beneath the rhetoric lies a more consequential story.
A federal judge has already ruled that the FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration could not continue using broad “Glomar” responses to refuse even to confirm or deny the existence of records concerning Tinubu’s alleged connection to a historic investigation. Judge Beryl Howell held in April 2025 that the agencies’ position had become “neither logical nor plausible” because the government itself had already publicly acknowledged investigative activity involving Tinubu.
Now, more than a year later, the dispute has entered another extraordinary phase.
On 20 August 2026, the FBI asked the US District Court for the District of Columbia for permission to submit confidential declarations ex parte and in camera to explain why certain information remains withheld. The Bureau says the disputed material implicates FOIA Exemptions 7(E) and 7(F), concerning law-enforcement techniques and information whose disclosure could reasonably be expected to endanger a person’s life or physical safety.
The FBI said it could not put its full explanation on the public record without undermining the very protections it was asserting.
“The FBI has determined that it cannot provide on the public record the full basis for the application of Exemptions 7(E) and 7(F) to certain withholdings and that, therefore, an ex parte, under seal declaration is necessary,” the agency said in its motion.
That is the development which triggered Amachree’s new letter to Patel.
And it raises a difficult question that goes well beyond Tinubu: how much secrecy can a democratic government legitimately demand when a court has already found that an agency’s earlier attempt to keep the existence of an investigation secret could no longer stand?
What the FBI is actually being asked to release
The underlying case is Aaron Greenspan v. Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys et al., Civil Action No. 23-1816 (BAH).
Greenspan, an American transparency activist and founder of PlainSite, filed multiple FOIA requests with US agencies seeking records connected to a Chicago-area narcotics investigation dating to the late 1980s and early 1990s. Judge Howell’s 2025 opinion records that Greenspan filed 12 FOIA requests with six federal agencies, including the FBI, DEA, CIA, IRS, Executive Office for US Attorneys and Department of State.
Two FBI requests are especially important.
One sought:
“The entire FBI file for Bola Ahmed Tinubu, DOB 3/29/1952, President-Elect of Nigeria as of February 2023.”
The second sought:
“FBI 302 interviews with Bola Tinubu from FBI Case No. 245-IP-71386-UUUUUU during the timeframe 1992-1993.”
The FBI initially responded with Glomar refusals, declining to confirm or deny whether the records existed. Judge Howell later rejected that position as to the FBI and DEA, while allowing the CIA’s separate Glomar response to stand.
That distinction matters.
The 2025 ruling did not order that every page of every Tinubu-related record be placed online without redactions. Rather, it required the FBI and DEA to abandon the categorical Glomar position and process responsive, non-exempt records, subject to legitimate FOIA exemptions.
In other words, the legal battle has moved from “Does the government have to admit these records exist?” to a more complicated question: “Which portions must the government actually disclose?”
That is where the latest FBI motion comes in.
Judge Howell’s 2025 ruling changed the legal landscape
The 8 April 2025 memorandum opinion is the foundation of the present controversy.
Judge Howell found that public government disclosures had already acknowledged that Tinubu had been the subject of an investigation involving the FBI and DEA. Because the existence of that investigative activity was no longer genuinely secret, the agencies could not continue pretending that merely confirming it would itself create the privacy harm required for a Glomar response.
The judge wrote that the agencies’ position had become:
“neither logical nor plausible.”
She added that the FBI and DEA had failed to establish a sufficient privacy interest in keeping secret the fact that Tinubu had been the subject of a criminal investigation.
The ruling was therefore a significant victory for transparency.
But it was not a declaration that Tinubu had committed a crime.
That distinction is essential.
The litigation concerns government records and FOIA disclosure. It does not constitute a criminal conviction, and the 2025 opinion did not find Tinubu guilty of narcotics trafficking.
The $460,000 question
The historical backdrop is the 1993 civil forfeiture proceeding that has remained one of the most controversial chapters in Tinubu’s public biography.
A US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois ordered the forfeiture of $460,000 held in an account in Tinubu’s name. The decree stated that the funds represented proceeds of narcotics trafficking or were involved in financial transactions violating US money-laundering laws.
The underlying proceeding was a civil forfeiture case, not a criminal prosecution against Tinubu. His defenders have repeatedly stressed that he was not arrested, indicted or convicted in the United States for drug trafficking, while his critics argue that the forfeiture and the investigative record warrant much greater scrutiny.
That distinction should not be buried beneath political rhetoric.
Civil forfeiture is legally different from a criminal conviction.
But neither does a civil forfeiture decree make the underlying investigative history irrelevant.
It is precisely because the FBI, DEA and other agencies generated records concerning the historical investigation that Greenspan sought access to them under FOIA.
And it is precisely because Judge Howell determined that the existence of investigative activity had already been officially acknowledged that the government’s earlier Glomar strategy failed.
What has changed this week?
The latest development is arguably the most intriguing.
The FBI says that, for some withheld material, it cannot publicly explain the full basis for invoking Exemptions 7(E) and 7(F). It therefore asked Judge Howell to permit confidential declarations to be submitted under seal and reviewed privately by the court.
The FBI said it contemplated two ex parte, in-camera declarations, with one attached as an exhibit to the other. It expected to submit them by 28 August if permission was granted.
The FBI also confirmed that Greenspan opposed the request.
That fact is important because the private-review application is not a routine disclosure.
It represents an attempt to persuade the judge that at least some of the material is sufficiently sensitive that the government’s complete reasoning cannot be aired publicly without causing the very harm the exemptions were designed to prevent.
As of 22 August, reporting from the International Centre for Investigative Reporting said the latest step had moved forward, while also making clear that some aspects of the development were being reported from the account of Washington lobbying firm Von Batten-Montague-York rather than from a publicly accessible docket entry.
A separate report noted that the underlying order allowing the private submission had not yet appeared publicly on the docket at the time it published its account.
That caveat matters.
In an investigation of government secrecy, the difference between a filed motion, a proposed order, a signed judicial order and a publicly docketed order is not a technicality. It is the difference between what a government lawyer requests, what a judge permits and what the public can independently verify.
Amachree’s challenge to Patel
Against that legal backdrop, Amachree’s letter is deliberately confrontational.
He accuses the FBI of applying a different standard to Tinubu than to powerful Americans caught up in the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.
“Why is Bola Tinubu’s file more sacred to your Bureau than the Epstein files?”
The question is politically potent, but the comparison needs context.
The US Department of Justice did in fact undertake a major Epstein disclosure programme. In January 2026, the department said it had published nearly 3.5 million pages responsive to the Epstein Files Transparency Act, alongside more than 2,000 videos and 180,000 images.
The department nevertheless withheld material under statutory exceptions, including privilege and other legally protected categories, while critics in Congress continued to challenge the scope of the redactions.
So Amachree is strongest when he asks why the FBI is invoking secrecy after a court has already forced it away from a categorical refusal.
He is on weaker factual ground if his argument is read to mean that the US government simply released the Epstein material without exemptions or disputes.
The test now is not whether he can produce another promise of transparency.
It did not.
Indeed, Patel himself said in congressional testimony in 2025 that the FBI would release what it was “legally permitted” to release.
The tension is therefore not simply Epstein versus Tinubu.
It is a larger question of whether the legal standard being applied to Tinubu’s historical records is sufficiently specific, evidence-based and transparent to withstand judicial scrutiny.
The “33-year-old techniques” argument
One of the sharpest passages in Amachree’s letter attacks the FBI’s reliance on law-enforcement techniques dating to 1992 and 1993.
He writes:
“Techniques from 1993, Director. Thirty-three years old. The rotary telephone was still in service.”
It is a memorable line.
But it does not, by itself, defeat Exemption 7(E).
The relevant legal question is not simply whether a technique is old. It is whether releasing information about law-enforcement techniques or procedures could reveal information protected by FOIA.
Nor does the age of a record automatically erase the possibility that disclosure could expose confidential sources, investigative methods or identifying details about people who may still be living.
That is precisely why Judge Howell, rather than Amachree, Greenspan or the FBI, must ultimately decide whether the government’s explanation is sufficiently convincing.
The significance of the private review is therefore that the judge gets to test the government’s assertion rather than simply accept it.
What about the claim that “lives” could be endangered?
The most sensational phrase in the FBI motion is the reference to information whose disclosure could:
“reasonably be expected to endanger the life or physical safety of any individual.”
That language has inevitably generated speculation.
But the available filing does not say that Tinubu himself is the person whose life could be endangered.
The ICIR specifically noted that the FBI filing does not identify the individual referred to in its Exemption 7(F) argument.
That is a critical journalistic distinction.
It would be irresponsible to convert a generic statutory protection into an assertion that the FBI is secretly warning of a threat to the Nigerian president.
The filing does not establish that.
Nor does a request for in-camera review prove that the withheld records contain evidence of criminal wrongdoing.
It proves only that the FBI says at least some information requires a confidential explanation to the judge.
Tinubu’s decision to join the extension request
The latest records dispute also acquired a political dimension after Tinubu’s legal team joined the US government’s request for additional time.
The notice stated:
“Intervenor joins Defendants’ motion for a 10-day extension of time to file response to the motion for summary judgment (DE 92), inasmuch as Intervenor requests that the responses remain on the same schedule.”
Judge Howell reportedly declined to grant the full extension and instead allowed a shorter period. Current reporting says the government, FBI, DEA and Tinubu have now been given until 28 August 2026 to oppose disclosure, while the judge considers the confidential material.
That deadline could become the next pivotal moment in the case.
The judge will then have to determine whether the government’s explanations justify continued withholding, whether portions can be segregated and released, and whether the public interest and FOIA’s disclosure requirements require further production.
The 2027 political stakes
Amachree’s letter also links the FBI records battle to Nigeria’s 2027 presidential contest.
That connection is no longer hypothetical.
On 14 August 2026, former Vice-President Atiku Abubakar and the African Democratic Congress filed a Federal High Court case challenging Tinubu’s eligibility to contest the 2027 election. The action centres on allegations concerning an NYSC discharge certificate and invokes constitutional provisions relating to qualification and forged certificates.
That case is separate from the American FOIA litigation.
There is no basis to state that the outcome of the US records case will determine Tinubu’s eligibility for the Nigerian presidency.
But politically, the two controversies intersect because both concern documentary credibility and questions about information that could influence how voters evaluate a sitting president seeking re-election.
That makes the timing especially consequential.
For Nigerians heading into 2027, the issue is not merely whether an old US file contains something embarrassing.
It is whether public institutions — American or Nigerian — can be trusted to distinguish between legitimate secrecy and politically convenient secrecy.
The most revealing sentence in Amachree’s letter
Perhaps the most provocative line is also the most difficult to prove:
“No agency fights this hard, this long, to conceal a clean record.”
As political rhetoric, it lands.
As investigative reasoning, it does not.
Agencies can fight prolonged FOIA battles for reasons that have nothing to do with guilt. Privacy interests, confidential sources, investigative methods, safety concerns, classified or protected material and bureaucratic resistance can all produce years of litigation.
That is why the question for Judge Howell is not whether the FBI’s behaviour looks suspicious.
It is whether the FBI can prove, with legally adequate specificity, that each withholding falls within a lawful FOIA exemption.
And the 2025 judgment already provides a warning to the government: conclusory explanations are not enough.
What Nigerians should watch next
The 28 August deadline is now the immediate legal pressure point.
By then, the FBI and other parties are expected to set out their opposition to disclosure, while the Bureau’s confidential material is to be available for the judge’s review under the latest account of the proceedings.
Several questions will then become central.
Will the FBI identify the categories of information it says cannot safely be released?
Will Judge Howell demand further segregability and disclosure?
Will the court accept the Bureau’s 7(E) and 7(F) arguments?
Will the DEA’s records follow the same path?
And, perhaps most importantly, will the public eventually receive substantive new information about what US investigators knew about Tinubu in the early 1990s?
Those are questions that cannot be answered by an open letter alone.
They can only be answered by documents.
The Atlantic Post verdict
Kio Amachree’s letter is combustible because it asks the right democratic question in the most politically explosive way: why should the public be expected to trust an institution that insists some of its most consequential explanations must remain hidden?
But the evidence requires discipline.
There is a documented 1993 civil forfeiture of $460,000 in an account in Tinubu’s name. There is a documented federal court ruling that the FBI and DEA could no longer rely on a broad Glomar response to conceal the fact of investigative activity involving Tinubu. There is a documented August 2026 FBI request for confidential judicial review of the basis for withholding some material. And there is a newly reported 28 August deadline for the next stage of the dispute.
There is not, however, a judicial finding that Tinubu was guilty of narcotics trafficking.
There is not evidence in the public filing that the FBI’s reference to danger to “the life or physical safety of any individual” refers to Tinubu.
And there is not, at the time of this report, a publicly verified basis for the more speculative claim that Tinubu was a US intelligence “asset”, “source” or “cooperator”.
Those questions may be answered by the records.
They may not.
That is precisely why the records matter.
For Patel, the stakes are unusually high. His own FBI biography records that he became director on 20 February 2025, following a career in federal prosecution and national security.
It is whether his Bureau can persuade a federal judge that the secrecy it demands is necessary, lawful and narrowly tailored.
For Tinubu, the stakes are equally profound.
The White House in Abuja has every right to defend the President against allegations he rejects. But public confidence is not strengthened by making old controversies disappear from view. Nor is it strengthened by turning every FOIA dispute into proof of guilt.
The only sustainable answer is documentary.
Open what the law requires.
Protect only what the law genuinely protects.
And let the evidence, not the politics, carry the argument.
That is ultimately what the Stockholm letter demands.
And it is the one demand no democracy should fear.
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