TD Dear Director Patel,
I write to you as a Nigerian of the diaspora, a Swedish citizen, and the founder of Worldview International, on behalf of millions of Nigerians at home and abroad who have watched your Bureau’s conduct before Judge Beryl Howell with growing disbelief.
On August 20, 2026, your agency filed a motion asking the United States District Court for the District of Columbia for permission to explain, in secret, ex parte and in camera, why it continues to withhold records concerning Bola Ahmed Tinubu, records dating to 1992 and 1993, records connected to a Chicago heroin trafficking investigation, records a federal judge ordered you to process more than a year ago.
You claim their release could endanger lives and reveal law enforcement techniques. Techniques from 1993, Director. Thirty-three years old. The rotary telephone was still in service.
So permit me to ask you the question every Nigerian is asking.
Why is Bola Tinubu’s file more sacred to your Bureau than the Epstein files?
Your administration promised the American people transparency on Jeffrey Epstein, files in which your own President’s name has reportedly appeared, alongside the names of some of the most powerful men in the Western world.
That promise collapsed into memos, redactions and retreat.
And yet here you are, three years into Greenspan v. Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys, deploying the full machinery of the Department of Justice, extension after extension, Glomar responses that Judge Howell ruled improper, sealed declarations, secret submissions, all to shield the file of a foreign head of state who, in 1993, forfeited 460,000 US dollars to your government in a civil action alleging the funds were proceeds of heroin trafficking.
He was never charged, you will say. Correct. He simply handed over the money and walked away.
Innocent men do not ordinarily pay the United States Treasury nearly half a million dollars to make questions disappear.
And your Bureau’s conduct since, producing not a single processed page despite a court order, despite your own promised timetables of January, March and June of this year, despite the open irritation of a federal judge who noted this case has been pending for over three years, tells its own story.
Why is this man so important to your agency, Director?
What service has Bola Tinubu rendered the United States that earns him protection your own citizens cannot obtain about their own government?
Was he a source? An asset? A cooperator? If so, say it. If not, release the file. The Freedom of Information Act does not contain an exemption for the embarrassment of foreign presidents.
Let me tell you what your lawyers in Washington may not have explained to you. Nigerians are not fools.
We are among the most educated diasporas in the United States, your own census data confirms it.
We read court filings. We know what a Glomar response is. We know what ex parte means.
We watched Judge Howell rule in April 2025 that your refusal to confirm the existence of records was, in her words, neither logical nor plausible, because your agencies had already acknowledged that Tinubu was a subject of investigation.
Playing games with our intelligence will not work.
And understand this clearly: You may have leverage over one man. You do not have leverage over 230 million Nigerians.
Nigeria is Africa’s largest democracy, a trading partner worth billions of dollars annually to American business, the anchor of West Africa.
Bola Tinubu will leave office, whether in 2027 or before. The government that follows him, and the generation that elects it, will remember precisely who shielded him, and why.
A partnership built on the concealment of one man’s past is not a partnership with Nigeria. It is a partnership against her.
There are also questions this file may finally settle that go to the heart of our 2027 presidential election.
Questions about identity, about credentials, about a biography that has never withstood scrutiny, questions currently before Nigeria’s own Federal High Court in the Atiku Abubakar suit over his eligibility.
Nigerian voters have a right to the truth before they vote, not after.
Director Patel, you built your public reputation denouncing the deep state, secret files, and two-tiered justice.
You wrote a book about government gangsters. Here is your test. The box is already open. The dots are already connected.
Every day of delay, every sealed declaration, every extension request is itself an answer, because no agency fights this hard, this long, to conceal a clean record.
Release the Tinubu files. All of them. Let Nigerians judge for themselves.
History is watching you, and so are we.
Yours faithfully,
Kio Amachree, Founder and President, Worldview International, Stockholm
