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Aaron Greenspan
So I didn't really want to do this, but the United States Department of Justice isn't being very cooperative, and circumstances have shifted a bit.
In my FOIA lawsuit over records involving Bola Tinubu, who supposedly won the Nigerian presidential election, the IRS previously responded by stating that records were exempt from disclosure because they might be considered tax information. That sounded kind of ridiculous because in the 1990s, one of the many federal crimes that Mr. Tinubu committed was failure to file a tax return. So I pressed the matter.
After I filed my lawsuit, it turns out the IRS conducted a pretty thorough search for records and didn't turn up anything because the agency has record retention policies to prevent the entire country from drowning in paperwork. (The IRS's computer systems are very old; much is still handled on paper. Long story.) I had a phone call with the IRS attorney and USDOJ attorney about this earlier in the month, and the IRS attorney e-mailed me a declaration from another IRS attorney explaining how the search was conducted. That looked fine to me, but it was kind of strange because the declaration wasn't signed, it was a draft, and it was being provided in an e-mail to me that wasn't filed with the court.
I asked the lawyers to please file a signed version with the court. They hemmed and hawed and said they weren't sure how to do that properly—even though it seems fairly obvious—and in any event, didn't follow through.
Then the Nigerian Supreme Court moved up the date of the election hearing to *Monday*, October 23rd, three days from now (!), very likely to front-run the release of any FOIA documents.
We still don't have any FOIA documents from the federal agencies, but we do have this random IRS declaration about the documents they *don't* have. So I think in the interest of transparency, even though it's not officially on the docket like I asked for it to be, it should be out there. It at least reiterates that Mr. Tinubu was under investigation.
So here it is:  IRS Bola Tinubu FOIA Records Search E-Mail and Unsigned Declaration
If a signed version gets filed on the court docket later on, everyone can just disregard this document, and I may actually delete it. I don't want a draft declaration posted due to government sloppiness to confuse anyone. |
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October 20, 2023 at 10:41 PM EDT •  Reply |
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