THE coordinated media blitz orchestrated around a Washington, D.C. advisory firm is not an intelligence breakthrough; it is a clinical demonstration of desperation.
The bankruptcy of Atiku’s 2027 political agenda is writ-large in the unmasking of the lobby firm he hired. Strip away the hyperbolic prose, the counterfeit urgency, and the grandiose invocations of classified espionage, and what remains is a textbook transactional hit job.
At its core, the theatrical dispatches issued by Dr. Karl-Marx Edward Okeke-Von Batten—a commercial lobbyist operating under a lavish, multi-million-dollar retainer funded by former Vice President Atiku Abubakar. Findings under Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) expose the intellectual and political bankruptcy of an Atiku l-led opposition desperately seeking foreign validation for local irrelevance.
The Nigerian connection is exposed directly from the names found on the lobby documents. The incendiary press releases being carefully churned out from Washington are public relations propaganda sheets passed off as the view of the U.S. Government. They are not.
Sane minds must categorically dismiss these reports as fabricated, politically motivated, and entirely unsupported by evidence. The report presents no intelligence document, no named Western official, and no evidence of any exchange involving Nigeria’s secrets or resources.
It is nothing more than political speculation packaged as classified information. We demand that they produce the so-called “highly classified intelligence report,” identify their unnamed sources, and provide tangible evidence for their wild allegations.
To evaluate these claims with legal rigor and logical integrity requires examining the architecture of this political stunt. Publicly verifiable United States Department of Justice FARA filings confirm that Atiku Abubakar contracted the Washington-based firm Von Batten-Montague-York, L.C. on a lucrative $1.2 million, 12-month retainer.
The explicit scope of this agreement is not to offer objective governance advisory, but to execute a targeted, partisan campaign designed to “counterbalance” Nigerian government narratives and weaponize historical, legally resolved judicial archives for domestic political leverage ahead of the 2027 general elections.
Okeke-Von Batten must have conned a desperate Alhaji Abubakar Atiku into believing that he has access to everyone in the Trump administration, including President Trump himself, by falsely representing that he had reached out to President Trump to release the so-called FBI files.
He has absolute zero to do with what is playing out in the U.S. court system. The case has been active since 2023, and the FBI’s main concern is simply the protection of the techniques by which it gathers information and the safety of its sources. We dare him to reach out to the judge in charge of the case—he’ll be buying himself serious charges of judicial obstruction.
The self-bestowed appellation of “Senior Government Advisor” is a linguistic sleight of hand. Fact-checking and official FARA documents reveal that Dr. Karl-Marx Edward Okeke-Von Batten—who has also gone by the aliases Ikemefuna Okeke, Karl Von Batten, and Dr. Karl-Marx Edward Okeke-Von Batten III; a US-based consultant of Nigerian origin who added the “Von Batten” surname following his marriage to Elizabeth Von Batten—is a commercial lobbyist and the founder of Von Batten-Montague-York, L.C.
Speculations that he operates as a gun-for-hire whose professional survival depends entirely on generating manufactured controversies for foreign principals who pay for volume and sensationalism are rife. Projecting a commercial lobbyist as an objective geopolitical arbiter from Nigeria is an insult to the intelligence of the Nigerian electorate.
Dr. Karl Von Batten’s comments represent solely the position of an individual associated with Atiku-linked political interests, not the U.S. government or President Trump.
This orchestrated distraction attempts to tie the President’s movements to foreign legal proceedings, but the facts are clear: President Tinubu is on a previously scheduled annual leave, and there is absolutely no connection between the President’s European trip and the ongoing U.S. FOIA proceedings.
- Dare is the Special Adviser on Media and Public Communications to President Bola Tinubu of Nigeria.