A federal magistrate judge on Monday dismissed the criminal complaint against two former FBI officials accused of misleading Congress in 2023 about the bureau's work on the Hunter Biden laptop investigation. Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui said the case against Nikki Floris and Bradley Benavides "cannot be described as anything other than weaponization."
According to Faruqui, the investigation was rushed, overtly political and marked by "critical mistakes" - and was opened a day after a primetime speech by President Trump, while FBI Director Kash Patel was tracking it closely. His point? The DOJ could have brought the case at any time, but chose to do so two weeks before the midterm elections: "I will not bury my head in the sand and pretend that I cannot read a calendar."
An FBI agent who worked the case testified at a preliminary hearing that the investigation was opened right after Trump's election security speech, and that he was concerned it would be seen as "political." Faruqui also questioned why prosecutors used a criminal complaint, a tool usually reserved for cases where investigators need to take someone into custody quickly, rather than going to a grand jury.
The week before the ruling, the judge criticized prosecutors for filing an amended complaint with an extra charge directly on the docket overnight, without the court's approval, which he said he had never seen before. Floris' lawyers called the added charge as meritless as the first and, according to ABC News, described the filing as "a serious abuse of the criminal charging process."
As we reported when the charges emerged, Floris led the task force as a deputy assistant director from mid-2019 through mid-2022, while Benavides was its section chief through the 2020 election, FBI Director Kash Patel said. Both testified that the FITF was not involved in the Hunter Biden investigations. "Documentary evidence, contemporaneous communications, and witness accounts contradict their testimony," Patel wrote.
Benavides told Congress he learned about the laptop story from Wikipedia, but the Justice Department says it has evidence he discussed it with others inside the FBI, Fox News reports. Prosecutors also say Floris discussed Hunter Biden with members of the task force despite testifying otherwise. Pirro said the evidence showed "their involvement in helping shape the public narrative about Hunter Biden's laptop right before the election."
Floris' lawyers called her "a patriot" who served as an FBI intelligence officer for nearly 20 years and said the Justice Department accused her "on the say-so of politicians, not on the facts." "It's no coincidence the government is filing these nonsense charges now, years later, on the eve of an election," they said in a statement. Benavides has not publicly commented.
The dismissal does not stop the Justice Department from seeking a grand jury indictment. The ruling is nonetheless a significant setback for the department, which has had trouble getting grand juries in the nation's capital to indict in politically charged cases. Neither the Justice Department nor the FBI had commented on the ruling in the coverage available at publication.