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.
Punch gathered that the documents sought by Atiku, through his counsel, Angela Liu, include the record of Tinubu’s admission and acceptance at Chicago State University, dates of attendance, degrees, awards and honours attained by the former governor of Lagos State at the university, among others.
Meanwhile, the president’s legal team pleaded with the court on Monday 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.”
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