US court rejects bid to question Tinubu over alleged cyberattacks

A United States federal court has rejected an application by Aaron Greenspan, an American transparency activist, seeking to question President Bola Tinubu and obtain documents from a lobbying firm, DCI Group, over alleged cyberattacks on his website.

The US District Court for the District of Columbia ruled on October 30 that the proposed discovery was irrelevant to the substantive issues in Greenspan’s ongoing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against US federal agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).

Greenspan had sought the court’s permission to serve six interrogatories, four requests for admission and one request for production of documents on Tinubu, who is participating in the case as an intervenor-defendant. He also sought permission to subpoena documents from DCI Group AZ LLC, a lobbying firm identified in court filings as a registered agent of the Nigerian government.

The application followed allegations by Greenspan that his website, PlainSite, had suffered repeated and large-scale distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. Such attacks involve overwhelming a website with internet traffic to disrupt its normal operations.

According to court records, Greenspan said the attacks had cost him money, engineering time and expenditure on mitigation services, while sometimes preventing access to the website, which he uses to publish documents relating to the litigation and generate income.

Although he did not directly accuse Tinubu of orchestrating the attacks, Greenspan argued that they suggested someone was closely monitoring the lawsuit and had an interest in preventing public access to its records.

He consequently sought to establish the source of the attacks through questions to the Nigerian president and a subpoena for documents from DCI Group.

However, Tinubu opposed the application, arguing that there was no independent verification of the alleged cyberattacks.

In her ruling, Justice Beryl Howell held that the proposed discovery did not meet the legal requirements for relevance and proportionality because it had no bearing on the central questions in the FOIA litigation.

The judge explained that the lawsuit concerned whether US government agencies had conducted adequate searches for records and lawfully withheld some information requested by Greenspan.

She noted that determining who was responsible for the alleged attacks on his website could not assist the court in resolving those issues.

The judge consequently dismissed the discovery application, as well as Greenspan’s separate request for judicial notice of documents submitted in support of the application.

The court also rejected a request by Karl Von Batten, a non-party to the litigation, for permission to submit an amicus curiae brief, commonly referred to as a friend-of-the-court submission.

Bar & Bench Watch reports that the discovery dispute is part of a wider legal battle dating back to 2022, when Greenspan began submitting requests under the US Freedom of Information Act to federal agencies for records relating to a joint investigation of a Chicago-based heroin-trafficking and money-laundering operation in the early 1990s.

The investigation involved the FBI, DEA, Internal Revenue Service and US attorneys’ offices in Illinois and Indiana.

Among the individuals named in the requests were Tinubu and Abiodun Agbele, alongside Lee Andrew Edwards and Mueez Akande.

Greenspan sought investigative records concerning the individuals and the activities of the alleged drug-trafficking network.

The agencies initially issued what is known as a Glomar response, a legal position that allows government authorities to neither confirm nor deny the existence of requested records where disclosure could compromise protected information.

After challenging the responses through the US Department of Justice’s Office of Information Policy, Greenspan instituted the lawsuit on June 12, 2023, seeking to compel disclosure of the records.

The litigation initially involved several federal agencies, but the issues were subsequently narrowed, leaving the FBI and DEA as the principal government defendants in the outstanding dispute.

Tinubu was also allowed to participate as an intervenor-defendant to protect his interests in the requested records.

In an earlier ruling in April 2025, the court rejected the agencies’ reliance on their initial Glomar responses, partly because public court records from the 1990s had already disclosed that Tinubu and Agbele were investigated in connection with the drug-trafficking operation.

Following that decision, the agencies processed hundreds of pages of responsive records, although substantial portions were withheld or redacted under exemptions provided by the FOIA.

The FBI and DEA have produced 399 pages of records, but Greenspan has continued to challenge the extent of the redactions and withholding of information.

Court leaves substantive disclosure dispute unresolved

In its latest decision, the court also rejected Greenspan’s motion for summary judgment while granting the federal agencies’ counter-motion in part and denying it in part.

The judge found that the FBI had conducted an adequate search for the requested records and upheld some of its claims for withholding information.

However, she also faulted the agencies’ explanations for withholding certain information, particularly material that had previously entered the public domain.

The court directed the agencies to provide more detailed explanations justifying any continued withholding of the records and to demonstrate why additional information could not reasonably be disclosed.

The decision therefore leaves important aspects of the FOIA dispute unresolved, with further submissions expected from the agencies.

Reacting to the ruling, Tinubu’s attorney, Christopher W. Carmichael, said it reinforced the need to confine the proceedings to issues directly relevant to the litigation.

“The Court’s decision makes clear that this Freedom of Information Act proceeding cannot be used to pursue discovery unrelated to the legal questions before it,” Carmichael said.

Another member of Tinubu’s legal team, Oluwole Afolabi, said the decisions established procedural boundaries for the ongoing proceedings.

He noted that the substantive FOIA issues remained before the court.

The ruling did not establish who was responsible for the alleged cyberattacks on Greenspan’s website, nor did it bring the underlying dispute over the disclosure of the historical investigative records to a final conclusion.