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WASHINGTON / ABUJA (September 11, 2026) — Von Batten-Montague-York, L.C., a Washington-based policy advisory and lobbying firm that has spent months campaigning over decades-old drug-trafficking allegations against Nigerian President Bola Tinubu, says it briefed members of the U.S. Congress and senior state officials at the Republican National Midterm Convention on FBI and DEA allegations that Tinubu was part of a criminal organization that smuggled heroin from Nigeria into the United States during the 1980s and 1990s.
In a statement posted to its verified X account, the firm named Virginia Rep. John McGuire and Indiana Secretary of State Diego Morales among those briefed, saying the pair had particular interest because the alleged smuggling operation moved heroin into Chicago and Indiana, and that Tinubu allegedly laundered drug proceeds through several banks, including institutions in Virginia. The firm’s statement closed with a pointed warning: “We are coming for you,” it said, addressing Tinubu directly and invoking the pursuit of the 9/11 hijackers’ enablers to argue that “time is irrelevant” and that “the war against Nigerian narco-terrorists has no expiration date.”
The Underlying Case
The allegations trace back to a 1993 U.S. civil forfeiture proceeding in which approximately $460,000 in funds tied to accounts associated with Tinubu was forfeited to the U.S. government. That case was civil, not criminal — Tinubu was not charged, indicted, or convicted of any drug-trafficking offense, and he and his representatives have consistently maintained that the matter was a civil settlement unrelated to any admission of wrongdoing.
An affidavit from that era, by then-IRS Special Agent Kevin Moss, detailed the drug-trafficking activity of a man named Abiodun Agbele, who was arrested selling heroin to an undercover officer in Indiana and subsequently cooperated with investigators. The affidavit stated that Agbele identified another individual, Akande — described as also linked to Tinubu — as having provided him housing in Hammond, Indiana, and said DEA investigators found Agbele made multiple heroin sales. Moss’s affidavit concluded there was probable cause to believe funds in bank accounts controlled by Tinubu were connected to financial transactions involving proceeds of drug trafficking, which formed the legal basis for the 1993 forfeiture.
That decades-old record has become the subject of a renewed U.S. federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, which Von Batten-Montague-York says it has been tracking, seeking the release of related FBI and DEA files. The firm has reported a series of developments in that case in recent weeks, including a judge granting the FBI permission to submit disputed documents for private, in-camera review, and an assertion — not confirmed by the FBI, DEA, or any U.S. court — that Tinubu “ratted out his alleged co-drug traffickers in exchange for immunity.” The firm has also claimed, without independent verification, that it was offered $3 million by an individual it said was linked to Tinubu to drop its campaign, an offer it says it rejected.
Political Context
Public filings show Von Batten-Montague-York was retained in March 2026 by ADC presidential candidate and former Vice President Atiku Abubakar’s camp to work on matters described as protecting and strengthening Nigeria’s democracy — a relationship that places the firm’s campaign against a sitting president squarely within the context of Nigeria’s 2027 election contest, in which Atiku is Tinubu’s principal opponent. The Nigerian Presidency has pushed back on the firm’s characterizations of the FOIA case, describing it as a civil records-disclosure dispute rather than a criminal matter, and stating that several U.S. agencies invoked the “Glomar” defense — a legal mechanism allowing agencies to decline to confirm or deny the existence of certain records — with a court subsequently granting summary judgment in favor of several of the agencies involved. Von Batten-Montague-York has rejected the Presidency’s framing as misleading.
Neither the FBI nor the DEA has publicly confirmed the specific claims made in Wednesday’s statement — that Tinubu was part of a criminal organization, that congressional briefings on the matter took place as described, or that laundering occurred through Virginia banks. Reps for the Nigerian Presidency have not yet responded to this latest statement.
This is a developing story, and the central allegations remain unproven in any criminal proceeding.
