President Bola Ahmed Tinubu's lawyers have acknowledged errors in an earlier filing before a United States federal court and asked permission to replace it with an amended version. The request was contained in a motion filed on October 1, 2026, in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. The case concerns American transparency activist Aaron Greenspan's efforts to obtain records from U.S. government agencies concerning Tinubu and others.
The motion, titled “Motion to Amend Response Brief [DE 98],” asked the court to allow Tinubu's lawyers to file an amended response to Greenspan's motion for summary judgment. The corrections were needed specifically in Part 1.c of their earlier response. The lawyers said the point had been expressed “inadequately and incorrectly” regarding public office and 1993.
The errors concerned incorrect references to the year 1993, Tinubu's public office, and a comparison involving student enrolment. The lawyers acknowledged that the comparison was incorrect because the student-enrolment event occurred even before the decades-old events being discussed. They said both issues occurred during the drafting and revising process and were not found and edited prior to filing.
Despite the corrections, Tinubu's lawyers stressed that they were not changing the substance of their legal argument. The amended argument maintains that Tinubu's privacy interests in records relating to events from decades ago should not disappear simply because he later became President of Nigeria. The lawyers also said they had discussed the proposed correction with Greenspan and his lawyers before filing the motion.
Greenspan has asked a federal court in Washington, D.C., to order the FBI, DEA, and Executive Office for US Attorneys to release without redaction records relating to a 1990s narcotics investigation that he says identified Nigeria's President Tinubu as a subject. The case also involves records from a 1993 U.S. civil forfeiture proceeding concerning about $460,000 linked to Tinubu.
Tinubu has denied any wrongdoing. Greenspan, an American researcher, IT expert, and founder of the legal transparency platform PlainSite, made the request in a series of filings in his Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the US agencies. The correction motion does not amount to an admission of wrongdoing by Tinubu but rather an acknowledgment by his lawyers that portions of their earlier legal filing contained drafting or factual errors.
The amended filing itself contains Tinubu's substantive arguments against Greenspan's request for additional FBI and DEA records. Among other things, the lawyers argue that the disputed information is protected by FOIA's law-enforcement privacy exemption and the Privacy Act. They also argue that the records concern events that occurred before Tinubu became president and that his current office does not remove his privacy rights.
Key points
- President Bola Ahmed Tinubu's lawyers have acknowledged errors in a US court filing regarding records of a 1990s drug probe.
- The errors concerned incorrect references to the year 1993, Tinubu's public office, and a comparison involving student enrolment.
- The correction motion does not amount to an admission of wrongdoing by Tinubu.
