President Bola Tinubu, on Monday, pleaded with a United States District Judge, Nancy Maldonado, to order Chicago State University to protect his privileged information such as admission records, transcripts and gender and release only his certificate to the legal team of former Vice President Atiku Abubakar.
The motion was filed by the president’s lawyer, Christopher Carmichael, who stressed that ‘the most critical fact has already been clearly and unequivocally established’ by Tinubu’s alma mater.
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Atiku had earlier secured an order from a US magistrate, Jeffrey Gilbert, for CSU to make Tinubu’s academic records available to his legal team.
The documents sought by Atiku, through his counsel, Angela Liu, include the record of Tinubu’s admission and acceptance at CSU, dates of attendance, degrees, awards and honours attained by the former governor of Lagos State at the university, among others.
As the deadline given by Gilbert drew nearer last Thursday, Tinubu’s lawyers approached Maldonado, arguing that the earlier decision by Gilbert needed to be reviewed by a district judge.
The request for a review and delay of the order till Monday 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 motion filed by the lawyer partly read, “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.”
