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The FBI Wants to Explain, in Secret, Why a Presidential Drug File Stays Sealed

The FBI Wants to Explain, in Secret, Why a Presidential Drug File Stays Sealed

On August 20, the FBI asked a federal judge for something unusual: permission to argue, in secret, why records about a sitting head of state should stay hidden from the public that requested them. The judge said yes. The head of state is Bola Tinubu, president of Nigeria. The records concern a 1993 case in which $460,000 tied to his name was forfeited to the U.S. government following a Chicago heroin-trafficking investigation. He was never criminally charged. He has spent the better part of three years, through multiple federal agencies, making sure nobody outside a courtroom gets to read the file that explains why.

A Small Case File, a Large Amount of Effort

The origin of this fight is almost mundane by Washington standards. In 2022 and 2023, Aaron Greenspan — an SEC-registered gadfly who runs the transparency site PlainSite and has made a career of filing FOIA requests that other people don't bother with — asked six federal agencies for records tied to a Chicago narcotics investigation from the late 1980s and early 1990s. Among the names on his requests: Bola Tinubu, then a private businessman, now the president of Africa's most populous country.

The underlying facts aren't seriously disputed. Federal investigators linked more than $2 million across several bank accounts to heroin proceeds from a ring run by Adegboyega Mueez Akande and Abiodun Agbele. In October 1993, a U.S. District Court in Illinois ordered $460,000 held in an account under Tinubu's name forfeited. No indictment followed. Tinubu has always described it as a civil matter, settled and closed. Greenspan wanted the underlying FBI file — the 302 interview records, the case notes, the paper trail — made public.

The Government Tried to Pretend the File Didn't Exist

What happened next is the part that belongs in this publication. Rather than process the requests, five federal agencies — the FBI, DEA, IRS, EOUSA, and State Department — issued what's known as a Glomar response: the formal refusal to confirm or deny that records exist at all. It's the same maneuver agencies use to stonewall requests about black sites and surveillance programs. Greenspan sued in June 2023.

In April 2025, Judge Beryl Howell of the U.S. District Court for D.C. ruled against the government in blunt terms. Because officials had already publicly acknowledged Tinubu was a target of the investigation, she wrote, the claim that a Glomar response was necessary to protect that fact from disclosure was "neither logical nor plausible." She ordered the agencies to actually search for and process the records. It was, on paper, a win for the public's right to know exactly the kind of file a foreign head of state would rather not have circulating.

Round Two: Keep the Secrecy, Just Do It Quieter

Losing the Glomar argument didn't end the government's resistance — it just changed its shape. Tinubu, granted intervenor status in the case, has pushed for delays. And on August 20, 2026, the FBI filed a motion asking to submit its justification for continued withholding ex parte and in camera — meaning the bureau's arguments, and by extension a description of what's actually in the file, would go to the judge alone, with neither Greenspan nor the public allowed to see or contest them. The stated reason: disclosure could expose law-enforcement techniques and "endanger the life or physical safety of individuals."

Judge Howell granted the request. She gave the FBI, DEA, DOJ, and Tinubu himself until August 28 to file their opposition to release. That deadline has now passed, with reporting indicating the FBI has submitted its records to the court under seal. The public is left exactly where it was three years ago: aware a file exists, aware it concerns a president, and told nothing further because saying more, the government argues, would be dangerous.

What "Endanger Lives" Is Doing Here

There's a version of this justification that's entirely legitimate — FOIA exemptions for ongoing techniques and source safety exist for real reasons, and courts grant in camera review in plenty of cases with no political valence at all. But it's worth sitting with what's actually being weighed here: a 33-year-old civil forfeiture, involving a person who was never charged, is being treated by the world's most resourced law enforcement agency as sensitive enough that even a federal judge's review of the government's reasoning has to happen behind closed doors, on behalf of the current president of a nation of over 220 million people, at his own legal team's urging.

Greenspan has been blunt about what he thinks this is: political accommodation dressed up as national security procedure, timed to a presidency that didn't exist when the FOIA requests were filed. Nigerian outlets have covered the case aggressively — the Nigerian press has treated every deadline extension and every court filing as front-page news — while American coverage has stayed mostly confined to legal trade press and international desks. That asymmetry is its own small data point about whose transparency gets treated as urgent.

The file exists. A judge has now read it, or will. The rest of us get to wait and watch which arguments a sitting head of state's lawyers make to keep it that way — filed under seal, reviewed in a room the public isn't in, about a case the public was told, for two years, didn't exist at all.

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