Tinubu begs US court not to release privileged documents to Atiku

President Bola Tinubu has pleaded with a United States District Judge, Nancy Maldonado to order Chicago State University to limit the privilege information requested by the legal team of Atiku Abubakar to only his certificate.

President Tinubu tells the court to protect other information such as admission records, transcripts and gender.

The president’s lawyer, Christopher Carmichael, filed the motion on Monday, September 25, 2023, adding that ‘the most critical fact has already been clearly and unequivocally established’ by the university.

It would be recalled that Atiku had earlier secured an order from a US magistrate, Jeffrey Gilbert, for Chicago State University to release Tinubu’s records to his legal team.

Some of the documents Atiku requested include Tinubu’s admission and acceptance records at CSU; his dates of attendance, degrees, awards and honours received at the institution.

The had court ordered CSU to release the records within 48 hours, but as the deadline drew nearer, Tinubu’s lawyer approached Maldonado to argue that the verdict by Gilbert needed to be reviewed by a district judge.

As a result, their request for a review and delay of the order till Monday, September 25, 2023, was eventually granted by Maldonado.

However, on Monday, Tinubu’s legal team approached the district judge again to plead that only Tinubu’s certificate should be released to Atiku’s legal team.

The motion filed by Tinubu’s lawyer reads, “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 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.”

This is coming two days after one Olajide Adeniji, testified in the US district court that he knows and contested against Tinubu as President of the Accounting Society Club at CSU.