Nigeria’s President Bola Tinubu has filed a motion at a United States court asking for the non-release of “privileged documents” to his political rival, former Vice President Atiku Abubakar, as the battle over the disputed presidential election of February 25 continues.
In the motion he filed on Monday at the court of a United States District Judge, Nancy Maldonado, Tinubu sought an order mandating Chicago State University to protect his privileged information such as admission records, transcripts and gender, and release only his certificate to Atiku’s legal team.
The motion, which was filed by Tinubu’s US lawyer, Christopher Carmichael, emphasized that “the most critical fact has already been clearly and unequivocally established” by the University and there was no reason other information should be released.
The motion was in response to an earlier ruling secured by Atiku from Justice Jeffrey Gilbert which mandated the institution to release Tinubu’s academic records available to his legal team.
The documents which Atiku sought included a record of Tinubu’s admission and acceptance at CSU, as well as dates of attendance, degrees, awards and honours attained by him, which would form part of his appeal against the victory of the former Lagos State governor at the poll.
But with the deadline of last Thursday given by Judge Gilbert for the release of the documents, Tinubu’s lawyers approached Maldonado with the argument that the earlier decision by Gilbert needed to be reviewed by a district judge.
The request for a review and delay of the order was eventually granted by the US district judge. But on Monday, the President’s legal team pleaded with Maldonado to release only the certificate and preclude Tinubu’s other privileged records.
“The most critical fact has already been clearly and unequivocally established by Chicago State University: Intervenor was awarded the degree as he stated. This point is irrelevant to the applicant because he is not seeking anything more than opposition research on a political opponent,” the motion said.
“The magistrate judge clearly erred in granting the application for discovery and concluding that Chicago State University must respond to the document and deposition subpoenas.
“That conclusion should be set aside and the application should be denied because the information sought cannot be used and therefore is not ‘for use’ in the foreign proceedings.
“Even if a narrow subset of information can be considered ‘for use’ in the foreign proceeding, that is limited to the diploma submitted to INEC. Fishing expeditions into other documents and more document productions must be precluded,” it added.