WASHINGTON — A federal judge on Tuesday scolded the Justice Department for its unorthodox handling of a criminal case against two former FBI officials accused of making false statements to Congress about their knowledge of a laptop the Justice Department says belonged to Hunter Biden, the son of former President Joe Biden.
U.S. Magistrate Zia Faruqui struck from the record an amended criminal complaint filed overnight by the Justice Department that added a new obstruction charge against the two former officials, Nikki Floris and Bradley Benavides, after concluding that it was improperly submitted. Such charging documents require sign-off from a judge that probable cause exists to believe a crime was committed by a defendant, but this complaint was filed straight to the docket with no court approval.
The ruling came during a dramatic, hours-long hearing in which an agent who worked the case conceded under defense lawyer questioning that the investigation into the former officials was launched after a July speech from President Donald Trump on election interference and that the inquiry was mandated by FBI Director Kash Patel. The Kansas City-based agent, Bryan Witt, said he had been assigned to the investigation and regarded it as a “huge distraction” from other casework.
“I had concerns that this would be political,” he said.
The developments were setbacks for a Justice Department that has employed unusual maneuvers during a series of splashy and politically charged investigative actions before next week's midterm elections. Newly unsealed documents in a separate case, for instance, revealed that prosecutors are attempting to again prosecute former FBI Director James Comey, an outspoken Trump critic, in a manner that Comey's lawyers say is legally invalid.
Faruqui said he had never before seen a prosecutor file an unsigned criminal complaint, describing it as “inappropriate” given defendants’ presumption of innocence. He ticked off several atypical aspects of the case, including the decision to file charges via criminal complaint, which the judge noted is more often used when the government has disrupted an active crime or needs to take a defendant into custody immediately because of a potential danger to society.
“Everything is a little sideshow on top of a sideshow,” the judge said, saying prosecutors appeared to be throwing “gas” on defendants’ assertions that there is nothing typical about this case.
The case has political undertones
Witt testified under questioning from Margaret Donovan, a lawyer for Floris, that Patel had mandated the investigation immediately after a Trump primetime address in July in which he amplified debunked theories about the 2020 election he lost and elevated his yearslong push to raise doubts about the legitimacy of U.S. elections.
Among the grievances the White House raised at the time was a disputed FBI memo about a potential effort by China to influence the election through manufactured fraudulent drivers' licenses.
Floris, then a senior official based at FBI headquarters, has long been a magnet for congressional Republican criticism for her role in having ordered the document to be recalled because of concerns about the reliability of the memo.
Trump and some allies have cited that memo to support their narrative that China sought to interfere on behalf of his Democratic challenger, Joe Biden, during the 2020 election — even though that perspective was the minority viewpoint within the U.S. intelligence community.
Witt said the basis for the investigation was Trump administration concerns that the FBI had suppressed in the heat of the 2020 campaign information that could have been harmful to the Bidens. He said he understood that the timing of the investigation and the direct ties to the White House would be regarded as inherently political.
Even before that testimony was elicited, Mary Dohrmann, another lawyer for Floris, broached what she called the “elephant in the room,” saying "evidence is mounting that this prosecution is about some political football.”
Defense lawyers disputed the crux of the allegations
The case, announced Friday, accuses the former officials of falsely playing down their knowledge about a laptop the Justice Department says Hunter Biden abandoned at a computer repair shop in 2019.
Prosecutors say they claimed to have no independent insight into the FBI's recovery of the laptop while being interviewed in 2023 in a separate congressional Republican investigation into the Biden family. In reality, according to the criminal complaint, the two participated in numerous discussions about the laptop in their capacity as leaders of the since-disbanded FBI Foreign Influence Task Force that was set up to monitor foreign influence.
The Justice Department contends that the defendants' professed lack of knowledge misled the congressional investigation and impeded their efforts to scrutinize Biden family business dealings.
But Ronald Safer, a lawyer for Benavides, challenged that assertion during the hearing Tuesday as he questioned an FBI agent who investigated the case against the former officials. He also pointed out that Benavides, in 2023, was asked about events that occurred several years earlier, casting doubt on whether anything his client said was intentionally false.
“What evidence have you uncovered that in September of 2023, Mr. Benavides remembered the correct answers, in your view, to the questions asked about Hunter Biden but gave knowingly incorrect answers?” Safer asked.
It is a very intricate saga
The prosecution, a rare Justice Department criminal case against a former employee, revisits a tangled saga that roiled the final weeks of the 2020 race after the New York Post revealed the existence of a laptop it said had been dropped off by the younger Biden at a Delaware computer repair shop about a year earlier.
The Post said it had obtained a hard drive of the laptop from Rudy Giuliani, a close ally of President Donald Trump, and reported on some of the contents of the computer, including emails that appeared to show some of Hunter Biden's foreign business dealings.
The curious circumstances of the laptop's discovery raised concerns among Democrats and former intelligence officials about the possibility of Russian involvement, particularly when the Trump administration's own intelligence community had assessed that Moscow was attempting to undermine the candidacy of Democratic nominee Joe Biden, who went on to defeat Trump in 2020, and as Giuliani had traveled abroad looking for dirt on the Bidens.
But Trump's then-national intelligence director, John Ratcliffe, quickly sought to quell speculation about the laptop's provenance by saying there were no signs it had anything to do with Russian actors. The FBI said it had nothing to add to Ratcliffe's statement and investigated the younger Biden on gun and tax charges that later resulted in felony convictions. President Joe Biden pardoned his son in late 2024.
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