A federal magistrate judge criticized the Justice Department on Tuesday for its unconventional handling of a criminal case against two former FBI officials accused of lying to Congress about a laptop the department says belonged to Hunter Biden, the son of former President Joe Biden.
U.S. Magistrate Zia Faruqui rejected an amended criminal complaint that prosecutors filed overnight. It added an obstruction charge against Nikki Floris and Bradley Benavides. Charging documents of that kind need a judge's finding that probable cause exists, but this one went straight onto the court docket without approval. The judge said he had never seen a prosecutor file an unsigned criminal complaint and called it "inappropriate" given the presumption of innocence.
Faruqui also pointed to other unusual features of the case. He noted that a criminal complaint is more commonly used when the government has stopped an active crime or must take someone into custody quickly because of a danger to society. "Everything is a little sideshow on top of a sideshow," he said, adding that prosecutors seemed to be throwing "gas" on the defendants' claims that nothing about the case was typical.
During the hourslong hearing, FBI agent Bryan Witt, who works in Kansas City, Missouri, told defense lawyers that the investigation began after a July primetime speech by President Donald Trump on election interference. He said FBI Director Kash Patel directed that the inquiry be opened and assigned it to his office. Witt said he viewed the work as a "huge distraction" from other cases and added, "I had concerns that this would be political."
Witt said he was told to investigate Floris and other officials believed to have been involved in recalling an FBI intelligence memo. The document concerned an alleged Chinese effort to influence the 2020 election through fraudulent driver's licenses. Trump and some allies have cited it as proof of a plot to favor Joe Biden, but senior FBI officials ordered it recalled over doubts about the intelligence. According to Witt, the investigation rested on administration suspicions that the FBI suppressed intelligence in 2020 that could have harmed the Bidens. He said Patel and FBI leadership took a keen interest and "wanted us to investigate aggressively."
Defense lawyers elicited the testimony to support their argument that the prosecution is politically motivated. Mary Dohrmann, a lawyer for Floris, said "evidence is mounting that this prosecution is about some political football, and not the law or the facts." The ruling is a setback for a Justice Department that has used unusual tactics in high-profile actions ahead of next week's midterm elections. Newly unsealed documents in a separate case show prosecutors trying again to prosecute former FBI Director James Comey, a vocal Trump critic, in a way his lawyers call legally invalid.
The case, announced Friday, accuses Floris and Benavides of downplaying their knowledge of the laptop, which the Justice Department says Hunter Biden left at a computer repair shop in 2019. Prosecutors say that in 2023 interviews for a congressional investigation tied to the Biden family, the two claimed no independent insight into the FBI's possession of the laptop. The criminal complaint says they in fact took part in numerous discussions about it as leaders of the since-disbanded FBI Foreign Influence Task Force. Prosecutors argue the claimed lack of knowledge let them avoid further questions and impeded Congress.
Ron Safer, a lawyer for Benavides, challenged that theory. He suggested his client had no motive to lie and noted that Benavides was questioned in 2023, long after leaving the task force, about events from years earlier. "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 Witt.
The case revisits a tangled episode from the final weeks of the 2020 campaign, when the New York Post reported on a laptop it said Hunter Biden had dropped off at a Delaware repair shop about a year earlier. The Post said it got a hard drive from Rudy Giuliani, a close Trump ally, and reported on emails that appeared to show Biden's foreign business dealings. Democrats and former intelligence officials raised concerns about possible Russian involvement, but Trump's then-national intelligence director, John Ratcliffe, said there were no signs of it. Hunter Biden was later convicted on gun and tax charges, and President Joe Biden pardoned him in late 2024.
