Record in focus — ECF No. 48, Memorandum Opinion (April 8, 2025). This volume examines that opinion; subsequent developments require separate records.
The FBI could not answer for the DEA. U.S. District Judge Beryl A. Howell drew that line in Aaron Greenspan’s FOIA suit before holding that the Justice Department’s own filing could bind both components. The request concerning Abiodun Agbele put the agency-specific rule squarely before the court: an FBI record bearing Agbele’s name did not show that the DEA kept the DEA case file Greenspan had asked for. (ECF No. 48, pp. 13–14.) [Documented]
Where one component’s file was offered to speak for another, the argument failed. A filing made by the Department itself stood on different footing, and Howell treated the identity of the official speaker as decisive; the political prominence of the subject had no bearing on the analysis. [Inference]
Reader’s Brief — What This Part Establishes
• The issue — Could an FBI disclosure establish that the DEA had investigated Agbele or maintained the DEA case file Greenspan requested?
• The court’s answer — No. The FBI record did not supply the DEA’s official acknowledgment. The DOJ’s own public filing, incorporating the Moss affidavit, presented a different attribution question.
• What the ruling did not establish — The FBI record alone did not show that the DEA possessed the requested case file. Search and processing remained necessary.
• Consequence — Official acknowledgment is agency-specific. The identity of the government speaker can determine the legal effect of a prior disclosure.
Plate 13 — FBI disclosure versus DEA acknowledgment. Source: ECF No. 48, printed pp. 5–6, 12–14.
Greenspan’s request to the DEA was narrow. On December 5, 2023, he asked for the DEA case file on Agbele held in either the Northern District of Indiana or the Northern District of Illinois, covering January 1, 1990 through December 31, 1995. The DEA answered with a Glomar response under Exemptions 6 and 7(C), declining to confirm or deny that responsive records existed on the ground that acknowledgment could tie an individual to a law-enforcement investigation. (ECF No. 48, pp. 5–6.) [Documented]
A second source was already in the litigation. Both sides accepted that Agbele’s name appeared in documents the FBI produced to Greenspan on June 10, 2024, and Greenspan relied on that production to argue that investigative activity concerning Agbele had already been publicly acknowledged. (ECF No. 48, p. 12.) [Documented]
Howell assumed, for purposes of the argument, that the FBI disclosure showed Agbele’s involvement in an FBI investigation, and then identified the gap in Greenspan’s theory. He had asked the DEA for the DEA’s case file. A document in the FBI’s hands bearing Agbele’s name left open whether the DEA had investigated him, whether the DEA had opened a file of its own, and whether anything responsive to the DEA request existed. The FBI and the DEA are both law-enforcement components of the Justice Department, yet each holds its own records and takes its own investigative steps; proof that one possesses a record does not, without more, establish that the other holds a counterpart. (ECF No. 48, pp. 13–14.) [Documented]
Greenspan sought to close that distance by pointing to the working relationship between the two agencies: the FBI and the DEA, he argued, had cooperated in the investigation in which Agbele surfaced. Howell held the argument insufficient. Official-acknowledgment doctrine demands a specific disclosure by the agency itself, and a conclusion drawn from how closely two agencies probably worked together cannot supply one. (ECF No. 48, p. 14.) [Inference]
Precedent supplied the governing rule in a single line: logical deductions are not official acknowledgments. An inference may be perfectly reasonable and still fail the legal test when the agency has not itself made the specific disclosure. (ECF No. 48, pp. 13–14.) [Documented]
Howell therefore rejected the FBI production as a basis for overcoming the DEA’s Glomar response. The Justice Department’s Office of Information Policy reads the ruling the same way in its published summary: the FBI’s disclosure did not confirm whether the DEA held records responsive to Greenspan’s request, and an FBI record carrying Agbele’s name was no acknowledgment that the DEA had investigated him or kept a case file on him. The DEA nonetheless lost on Glomar, by another evidentiary route. (ECF No. 48, pp. 13–18; OIP summary, TR-004.) [Inference]
Greenspan had a second exhibit: the verified forfeiture complaint filed in the Northern District of Illinois in 1993, together with the affidavit of Kevin Moss, the IRS agent whose sworn account the complaint incorporated. Howell found that the affidavit, read as part of the complaint, disclosed DEA investigative activity concerning Agbele in several passages. Here was what the FBI production lacked: specific reference to the DEA itself. (ECF No. 48, pp. 14–15.) [Documented]
Moss attributed information about Agbele to DEA investigators. His affidavit described a DEA-assisted undercover purchase of white heroin from Agbele, recorded that Agbele was arrested after the transaction and agreed to cooperate, and later referred to further DEA investigation connected with a lease application. Howell pinned these disclosures to specific paragraphs of the affidavit, 10, 11, 12 and 16, with paragraph 11 describing the DEA-assisted purchase, paragraph 12 the arrest and cooperation, and paragraph 16 the further inquiry. Once the affidavit’s incorporation into the Justice Department’s complaint was taken into account, she treated those passages as official disclosure of DEA investigative activity. A citation at that level of precision carries more weight than any general claim that every federal investigator on the case must have known the same facts. (ECF No. 48, p. 15.) [Documented]
Those passages remain historical government assertions recorded in a sworn affidavit, and their status has to be stated exactly. They mattered to Howell’s FOIA analysis because they showed that the Justice Department had publicly disclosed the DEA’s investigation of Agbele. ECF No. 48 was no new criminal trial of the conduct the affidavit attributes to him, and no fresh adjudication of it. [Documented]
Defendants did not contest the affidavit’s authenticity. Their objection went to institutional attribution: Moss was an IRS agent, and they argued that his affidavit could not become the DEA’s or the FBI’s official acknowledgment simply because it had been filed in court. Howell answered by returning to the complaint the Justice Department had filed and to its express incorporation of the affidavit. A public filing by the DOJ was the official act she found sufficient to bind a DOJ component. (ECF No. 48, pp. 15–17.) [Documented]
One question survived. The prior disclosure acknowledged DEA investigative activity, but Greenspan had asked for a DEA case file, and nothing in the public filing said such a file existed. Howell had to decide whether an acknowledged investigation could defeat Glomar when the DEA’s stated reason for refusing confirmation was the secrecy of that very investigative association. [Inference]
She held that it could, and the reason lay in the DEA’s own justification. The DEA’s asserted harm was that acknowledging responsive records would reveal whether the person had been associated with a DEA investigation. The Justice Department had already disclosed that investigation officially. With the association on the public record, the agency could not hold to categorical silence for the sole purpose of protecting a fact already disclosed. (ECF No. 48, pp. 17–18.) [Documented]
ACLU v. CIA supplied the next step. Where the only harm claimed is disclosure of an agency interest already officially acknowledged, the prior acknowledgment need not contain the literal statement that the agency holds responsive documents. The Agbele ruling thus turned on sequence and source: the FBI’s production could not defeat the DEA’s Glomar response, and the DOJ’s incorporated filing could, because it officially disclosed the very DEA investigation whose secrecy the DEA had offered as the reason for silence. (ECF No. 48, pp. 17–18.) [Documented]
Plate 14 — Agency identity changes the result. Source: ECF No. 48, printed pp. 13–18. Editorial diagram, not an original court document.Nothing in the record supports the claim that federal records had already shown the DEA possessed the requested file, and Howell made no such finding. In lifting the Agbele response, her disposition names the December 5, 2023 request, which confines the holding to the request actually before the court. Her order required the DEA to abandon Glomar, search for responsive records and process non-exempt material; the search would establish what the DEA reported locating in the systems searched, subject to any later challenge to the adequacy of that search. (ECF No. 48, pp. 5–6, 26.) [Documented]
The opinion uses Agbele as a control case. Howell turned away an official-acknowledgment theory when the cited source belonged to the wrong agency, then accepted a different theory once an official DOJ disclosure supplied the institutional link. [Inference]
Howell then applied the doctrine separately to the Tinubu-related requests. She conceded that the Moss affidavit spoke less explicitly about Tinubu than about Agbele, and she traced a different documentary chain to reach the official-acknowledgment finding. (ECF No. 48, pp. 19–20.) [Documented]
THE RECORD SPEAKS. EVERY CLAIM ANSWERS TO THE EVIDENCE.
Read the record behind this installment
Primary records and authorities used in this installment:
• TR-001 — ECF No. 48, pp. 5–6, 12–18, 26: Agbele request, FBI disclosure, DEA acknowledgment and remedy. VIEW SOURCE →
• TR-002 — Verified Complaint for Forfeiture, PDF pp. 1–3. VIEW SOURCE →
• TR-003 — Kevin Moss Affidavit, relevant DEA passages within PDF pp. 4–17. VIEW SOURCE →
• TR-004 — DOJ Office of Information Policy case summary. VIEW ON DOJ.GOV →
Evidence docket
TR-001 — ECF No. 48, pp. 5–6, 12–18, 26: Agbele request, FBI disclosure, DEA acknowledgment and remedy.
TR-002 — Verified Complaint for Forfeiture, PDF pp. 1–3.
TR-003 — Kevin Moss Affidavit, relevant DEA passages within PDF pp. 4–17.
TR-004 — DOJ Office of Information Policy case summary.
References (APA 7th)
American Civil Liberties Union v. Central Intelligence Agency, 710 F.3d 422 (D.C. Cir. 2013).
Greenspan v. Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys, No. 23-1816 (BAH), 2025 WL 1040834 (D.D.C. Apr. 8, 2025).
Moss, K. (1993, July 26). Affidavit [Sworn affidavit]. United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, No. 93 C 4483.
U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Information Policy. (2025, April 8). Greenspan v. EOUSA, No. 23-1816, 2025 WL 1040834 (D.D.C. Apr. 8, 2025) (Howell, J.). https://www.justice.gov/oip/greenspan-v-eousa-no-23-1816-2025-wl-1040834-ddc-apr-8-2025-howell-j
United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. (1993, July 26). Verified complaint for forfeiture, United States v. Funds in Account 263226700 Held by First Heritage Bank in the Name of Bola Tinubu, et al., No. 93 C 4483.
Standing Right of Reply
A standing Right of Reply remains open to Bola Ahmed Tinubu and his counsel, Aaron Greenspan, the Department of Justice, the FBI, DEA, CIA, IRS, Department of State, EOUSA, the responsible United States Attorneys’ Offices, and every other person or institution named in this installment. Documented responses may be sent to [email protected], identifying the passage disputed and the supporting record. Substantive replies will be assessed promptly and published fairly, subject to relevance, legality, privacy, safety and reasonable length; demonstrated factual errors will be corrected with a dated notice.
This is a post-publication channel, not a claim that advance requests for comment were dispatched. Silence or refusal to respond will not be treated as admission or guilt. No subject receives approval rights, and the published record will not be silently altered.
