Greenspan Asks US Court To Make Tinubu Answer Whether He Or His Agents Were Behind Cyberattacks On His Website

Reported by: Ijeoma G | Edited by: Oravbiere Osayomore Promise.

Aaron Greenspan, the American plaintiff seeking the release of U.S. government records relating to President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, has asked a federal court in Washington, D.C., for permission to put four direct questions to Tinubu over a series of denial-of-service attacks on his website, PlainSite. In a reply filed on September 28, 2026, in Greenspan v. Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys (Case No. 1:23-cv-01816-BAH), Greenspan said Tinubu, who has intervened in the case, had not denied that he, his government or anyone acting on his behalf, including DCI Group AZ, L.L.C., was involved in the attacks. "If that is so, the four requests for admission can be answered in minutes," Greenspan wrote. The filings, however, do not allege that Tinubu or DCI Group carried out the attacks, and they contain no evidence identifying who was responsible for them.

The dispute is the latest chapter in a long-running Freedom of Information Act case that Greenspan filed in 2023 seeking the release of FBI and DEA records connected to Tinubu, including documents from a 1990s Chicago heroin trafficking investigation. Tinubu joined the case as an intervenor to oppose the release of the records, arguing that they concern his private life before he entered politics and are protected by privacy laws. The case has already produced significant rulings, including a 2025 decision by Judge Beryl Howell ordering the FBI and DEA to search for and process non-exempt documents. But the cyberattack dispute is a separate, though related, front in the litigation.

The attacks on PlainSite began in April 2025, three days after the court granted Greenspan partial summary judgment and directed the production of documents. Since then, Greenspan says, the attacks have recurred within days of nearly every significant docket event. At their peak, his hosting provider's mitigation system recorded roughly one gigabit per second and 1.8 million packets per second of hostile traffic, dropped from more than 110,000 source hosts simultaneously distributed across the globe. The attacks have cost Greenspan mitigation services, engineering time, money, and, on the days they succeeded, the ability to use his own site, which he uses to prepare filings in the case. "These attacks are not ordinary internet background noise," Greenspan stated in his motion. "They began three days after this Court's April 8, 2025 order granting Plaintiff partial summary judgment and directing production. They have recurred within days of nearly every significant docket event since."

Greenspan's request for limited discovery seeks permission to serve Tinubu with four requests for admission concerning whether he, the Nigerian government or people acting on his behalf directed, funded, authorised or facilitated attacks on PlainSite. He also wants to serve a subpoena on DCI Group AZ, L.L.C., a public relations and lobbying firm described in the filing as a registered agent of the Government of Nigeria, seeking documents related to the attacks. DCI Group has previously been linked to lobbying efforts on behalf of the Nigerian government. Greenspan is seeking the information to determine whether Tinubu or his agents had any role in the attacks, a question he says Tinubu has not addressed.

Tinubu's legal team, led by Christopher W. Carmichael of Henderson Parks, LLC, has opposed the discovery request in a response filed on September 23. They argued that Greenspan is attempting to use the federal discovery process to investigate private individuals and organisations over alleged denial-of-service attacks on his website, and that such discovery is outside the jurisdiction of a limited-scope FOIA action. "Discovery is generally unavailable in FOIA actions," the lawyers said, adding that Greenspan had not sought discovery from the government agencies or demonstrated bad faith in their handling of his FOIA requests. They further argued that Greenspan had failed to establish that the proposed discovery was relevant to the issues before the court. According to the filing, Greenspan himself admitted that he did not know who carried out the alleged attacks and that the use of botnets made identification of the perpetrators difficult. The lawyers also pointed to Greenspan's admission that PlainSite had been attacked at other times and that the website's server had been under attack for extended periods when there were no court filings. "The relationship that Plaintiff draws between the website issues and this case remains wholly speculative," they said.

Tinubu's lawyers also opposed Greenspan's request for expedited discovery. They said there was no imminent event requiring such action because, according to Greenspan's own filing, the attacks had stopped at the end of August 2026. His suggestion that the attacks could resume, they argued, was merely theoretical and did not justify expedited discovery. The lawyers further rejected Greenspan's reliance on the court's inherent authority, arguing that such authority could not override the relevance and proportionality requirements of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure or the restrictions governing discovery in FOIA cases.

Greenspan, however, rejected Tinubu's claim that there was "no independent verification" of the alleged attacks. He pointed to a mitigation report attached to his earlier motion and generated on May 29, 2025, by PlainSite's internet service provider from its own mitigation system. According to Greenspan's filing, the report recorded traffic of 941.9 megabits per second and 1.8 million packets per second at PlainSite's protected address. About half of the traffic was identified and dropped as hostile, while 110,700 source hosts were blocked. Greenspan said Tinubu's opposition did not address the report, challenge its authenticity or provide contrary technical evidence. He also told the court that the attacks resumed after he filed his motion on September 9. In a supplemental declaration made under penalty of perjury, he said the number of individual addresses blocked by PlainSite's firewall had fallen to about 69,000 by September 7, after the acute attacks stopped in late August. He said the number began rising sharply around September 18, reached approximately 500,000 on September 23, and stood at 390,957 on the morning of September 24. Greenspan noted that September 18 was the original deadline for the government's reply to his summary-judgment cross-motion before the deadline was extended to September 23, the same day Tinubu's side and the Justice Department filed their respective submissions.

The timing of the attacks is central to Greenspan's argument. He is asking the court to infer a connection between the attacks and the litigation, noting that they began days after a major court order and have recurred around key deadlines. Tinubu's lawyers say the correlation is coincidental and speculative. The court will have to decide whether Greenspan has presented enough evidence to justify limited discovery from Tinubu and DCI Group. If the court grants the request, Tinubu could be compelled to answer, under oath, whether he or his agents were involved in the attacks. If the court denies it, Greenspan will have to rely on the technical evidence he has already presented, which he says is sufficient to warrant further inquiry.

The case has drawn significant attention in Nigeria, where it is being closely followed as part of the broader legal and political battle surrounding Tinubu's records. The outcome of the discovery dispute will determine whether the cyberattack allegations become a formal part of the litigation or remain a side issue. For now, the court has yet to rule on Greenspan's request. Tinubu has not publicly commented on the allegations. DCI Group has also not responded to the filings. The next step is for the court to decide whether the four questions Greenspan wants to ask are ones Tinubu must answer. As Greenspan himself put it, if Tinubu had nothing to do with the attacks, the answers could be provided in minutes. The question is whether the court will give him the opportunity to prove it.

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