Fresh US court filings move the long-running FOIA battle into a narrower question: what can the public legally see inside records the FBI and DEA have acknowledged exist?
The latest turn in the long-running United States records battle involving President Bola Ahmed Tinubu is not a new criminal charge.
It is a fight over what the American government can keep hidden.
In a September 23, 2026 filing before the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, the US government defended the Drug Enforcement Administration’s decision to withhold parts of investigative records connected to a historical criminal investigation involving Tinubu.
The government said disclosure could expose confidential sources, reveal non-public investigative techniques and compromise law-enforcement information.
That is crucial because the legal battle has moved far beyond the question of whether US agencies possessed records connected to Tinubu.
A 2025 ruling by District Judge Beryl A. Howell forced the FBI and DEA to abandon their earlier “Glomar” responses, under which they had refused to confirm or deny the existence of responsive records. Howell ruled that the agencies could not use that mechanism in circumstances where the existence of the relevant investigation had already been officially acknowledged.
Now the dispute is more precise.
The records exist.
The government has acknowledged their existence.
Hundreds of pages have been processed.
The fight is over what remains behind the black ink.
That distinction is central to understanding the latest filing.
What The DEA Is Actually Defending
The September 23 filing concerns the legal basis for withholding portions of DEA records sought by Aaron Greenspan in his Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, Greenspan v. Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys et al., Civil Action No. 1:23-cv-01816.
The litigation began after Greenspan made multiple FOIA requests to US government agencies for records concerning Tinubu, Abiodun Agbele and other individuals connected, according to the litigation record, to a drug-trafficking and money-laundering investigation from the late 1980s and early 1990s. The case is before Judge Howell in Washington, DC.
The DEA’s latest defence relies partly on a declaration by an agency official, identified in the litigation as the Davis Declaration, and a Vaughn Index.
A Vaughn Index is essentially the government’s roadmap for explaining why particular information has been withheld under FOIA. It does not necessarily reveal the withheld information itself.
Greenspan challenged the DEA’s presentation, arguing that some of the explanations repeated the same language across different entries.
The government’s response was that the records themselves are similar types of investigative documents.
The filing identifies DEA-6, DEA-292 and DEA-210 reports among the material at issue. According to the government’s position, similar categories of investigative records can naturally attract similar explanations when the same statutory exemptions apply.
That seemingly technical dispute carries significance.
It suggests that the records are not simply administrative correspondence generated around the case. They include formal investigative material.
But the filing does not tell the public what those reports say about Tinubu.
That gap is where much of the political debate around the case has outrun the documentary evidence.
The Confidential-Source Question
One of the clearest arguments in the government’s filing concerns confidential sources.
The government quoted the Davis Declaration as saying that information related to confidential sources “could reasonably be expected to disclose the identity of a confidential source.”
The DEA’s position is straightforward.
Information that could identify a confidential source receives strong protection under the law because disclosure may expose people who assisted an investigation and weaken the ability of law-enforcement agencies to obtain confidential information in future cases.
The agency said the importance of protecting such information outweighed what it characterised as a comparatively limited public interest in disclosure of the specific material.
That is an important distinction.
The DEA is not saying publicly that a confidential source made a particular allegation against Tinubu.
It is saying that information in the records is of a kind that could reveal the identity of a confidential source.
Those are not the same thing.
The latest filing therefore does not establish what any confidential source said about Tinubu, whether any source implicated him, or whether the agency considered such information reliable.
Those questions remain inside the sealed or redacted portions of the record.
The Investigative-Techniques Barrier
The second major issue concerns FOIA Exemption 7(E), which protects certain law-enforcement techniques and procedures when disclosure could create specified risks.
The government’s filing says the dispute includes non-public details of investigative techniques used in the criminal investigation.
Greenspan, according to the filing, accepted that genuinely non-public techniques could qualify for protection but sought greater disclosure, including access to a redacted declaration that had been submitted to the court under seal.
The government argued that the sealed declaration contains information whose disclosure could undermine the protection provided by the exemption.
Again, the significance is narrower than some of the public commentary around the case.
The filing does not reveal the technique.
It does not say whether investigators used surveillance, undercover operations, financial tracing, wiretaps or another specific method in relation to Tinubu.
It says only that some non-public investigative material falls within the government’s claimed legal protection.
What The 2025 Court Ruling Changed
The legal context is important.
In April 2025, Judge Howell ruled on the government’s earlier attempt to use Glomar responses.
Under that doctrine, an agency can in some circumstances refuse even to confirm whether responsive records exist if acknowledging their existence would itself create a harm recognised by FOIA.
Howell rejected that approach as to the FBI and DEA.
Her ruling stated that Greenspan had established official acknowledgement sufficient to prevent those agencies from continuing to use Glomar for the relevant requests. She therefore directed the FBI and DEA to search for and process non-exempt records. The CIA, by contrast, was allowed to maintain its Glomar response.
That ruling did not order every record to be released.
This is one of the most important points in the case.
Howell did not find that all records relating to Tinubu were public.
She did not rule that every redaction was unlawful.
She ruled that the FBI and DEA could no longer use a blanket refusal to confirm or deny the existence of the records.
That opened the door to the much more detailed dispute now playing out over individual exemptions.
From “Do Files Exist?” To “What Is Inside Them?”
The transformation in the case can be traced through the chronology.
The FBI and DEA initially refused to confirm or deny the existence of responsive records.
Judge Howell rejected that position in 2025.
The agencies then had to process the records.
By September 2026, the Presidency said the FBI and DEA had produced 399 pages, although significant portions remained redacted under various FOIA exemptions. The Presidency said the withheld material included information relating to grand-jury proceedings, attorney-client and work-product privileges, personal privacy, confidential sources and investigative techniques.
The FBI also submitted records to Judge Howell under seal in August 2026 for private review, according to reporting on the proceedings. The material was submitted ex parte and in camera, meaning it was presented to the judge privately rather than made available to the plaintiff or the public.
The present controversy is therefore no longer about an invisible file that government agencies say may or may not exist.
It is about a partly visible file.
That is a different legal fight.
What The Tinubu Presidency Says
The Nigerian Presidency has consistently drawn a line between the records case and a criminal prosecution.
In a September 3 statement, Special Adviser to the President on Information and Strategy Bayo Onanuga said:
“For clarity, the matter is a civil records-disclosure dispute under the United States Freedom of Information Act. It is not a criminal case against President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, nor has the court found him guilty of any criminal wrongdoing.”
That statement accurately describes the nature of the current litigation.
The case before Judge Howell is a FOIA lawsuit.
It is not an indictment charging Tinubu with a crime.
It is not a criminal trial.
No court in this FOIA proceeding has convicted Tinubu of drug trafficking or money laundering.
The Presidency has also pointed to a February 4, 2003 letter from the American Consulate in Lagos which, according to Onanuga, said an FBI records check found no criminal arrest records, wants or warrants for Tinubu at that time.
That document and the historical investigative records concern different questions and different moments in time.
A later background check cannot, by itself, answer what US investigators were examining in the early 1990s.
Likewise, the existence of investigative files does not by itself establish that the subject of an investigation committed the alleged offence.
The $460,000 Question Still Hovers Over The Case
The FOIA fight also sits against the backdrop of a 1993 civil forfeiture proceeding involving approximately $460,000 held in an account in Tinubu’s name.
That proceeding was a civil forfeiture action, not a criminal conviction.
Historical court reporting and Nigerian legal records describe the matter as involving a US government claim that the funds represented proceeds of narcotics trafficking or were involved in transactions prohibited by US law. The case was resolved through a settlement and forfeiture order.
The distinction matters because the terms “forfeiture”, “investigation”, “indictment” and “conviction” describe different legal events.
The public record establishes a forfeiture proceeding.
It establishes that US agencies investigated matters involving Tinubu.
It does not establish a criminal conviction of Tinubu for narcotics trafficking.
Nor does the latest DEA filing change that.
Instead, it deepens a different question: what did American investigators collect, document and retain, and which parts of that historical record can legally be released today?
What The Latest Filing Does Not Prove
The September 23 submission does not disclose how many DEA records refer to Tinubu.
It does not reveal the identity of any confidential source.
It does not state what any confidential source told investigators.
It does not disclose the investigative conclusions reached by DEA agents.
It does not establish that investigators found criminal wrongdoing by Tinubu.
It does not disclose whether any withheld record contains evidence that could support or undermine a criminal allegation.
It does not establish the existence of a previously secret criminal indictment against Tinubu.
And it does not amount to a criminal finding against the Nigerian President.
Those limits are not technical footnotes.
They are the line separating documentary evidence from inference.
Why The Redactions Matter
The real significance of the latest filing lies in the stage of the litigation.
The government has moved from defending secrecy over the existence of the records to defending secrecy over particular categories of information inside those records.
That means the court is now being asked to examine the government’s reasons more closely.
FOIA requires agencies to justify exemptions.
Judge Howell’s 2025 ruling noted that agencies generally must provide specific, non-conclusory reasons for withholding material and that courts can rely on agency affidavits when those explanations are sufficiently detailed and logically tied to the exemptions claimed.
That creates a difficult balance.
The government has to explain enough to justify a withholding.
But in sensitive law-enforcement cases, explaining too much can itself disclose the secret the exemption is intended to protect.
That is precisely why the latest filing matters.
The DEA is effectively arguing that some of the explanation cannot safely be turned into public evidence.
The Unanswered Question
The most important question is now narrower than the one dominating much of the political argument.
It is not simply whether Tinubu was investigated.
The court record has already established that the FBI and DEA had responsive records and that the earlier Glomar approach could not be maintained.
The harder question is what remains hidden after the government’s disclosures.
Do the remaining redactions contain facts about the investigation?
Do they primarily protect investigative methods, source identities and private information?
Do they contain material that is old but still legally protected?
Or do they contain information capable of materially changing the public understanding of a decades-old episode?
The September 23 filing does not answer those questions.
Nor does it need to.
Its purpose is to persuade the court that some answers cannot lawfully be made public.
That leaves Judge Howell with the task of deciding where the line between transparency and protected law-enforcement information should be drawn.
And that is where the Tinubu records battle now stands.
Not at a criminal conviction.
Not at a fresh indictment.
Not even at a dispute over whether the files exist.
The fight has become a much narrower and more revealing one:
How much of the American government’s historical record about the investigation can the public lawfully see?
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