Judge reprimands DOJ for case against former FBI officials accused of false statements on Hunter Biden’s laptop

WASHINGTON — A federal judge on Tuesday chastised 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 participation in and knowledge of investigations involving Hunter Biden, the son of former President Joe Biden.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui said he was distressed that prosecutors overnight filed an amended criminal complaint against Nikki Floris and Bradley Benavides that included a new charge of obstruction — even though such charging documents require a judge’s approval that probable cause exists.

“It is not the practice of our court, and I think it is not our practice, rightly so, for unsigned complaints to be filed on the docket,” Faruqui said.

The judge was considering a request from defense attorneys to drop the complaint, but if that were to happen, the Justice Department could still try to seek a felony indictment to move the case forward.

The prosecution is the latest in a series of dramatic and politically charged investigations the Justice Department has undertaken in the run-up to next week’s midterm elections.

Case says officials falsely downplayed what they knew

The case accuses the former officials of falsely downplaying their knowledge about a laptop that the Justice Department says was abandoned at a computer repair shop in 2019.

But beyond that, it represents an attack by the Trump administration on a since-disbanded FBI task force created to monitor foreign influence. Congressional Republicans have long criticized the task force, saying it tried to discredit their own investigations into the Biden family.

Defense attorneys were expected to challenge the case during a preliminary hearing Tuesday in federal court in Washington, including highlighting the unusual fact that the former FBI officials were charged via a criminal complaint signed by a magistrate judge rather than an indictment passed by a grand jury. The Justice Department has repeatedly struggled in high-profile cases to convince grand juries in the nation’s capital to return indictments.

Hours before the hearing, the Justice Department added a new obstruction charge that alleged false statements by the former officials allowed them to avoid being questioned about their knowledge of Hunter Biden and obstructed an investigation House lawmakers were conducting into the Bidens.

“What’s going on at the DCUS Attorney’s Office? Floris’ lawyers asked in a statement Tuesday morning. “In the middle of the night, the government filed an unsigned and unsworn complaint, attempting to resolve issues with the original accusation against Ms. Floris and adding a new accusation just as baseless as the first.”

“In our combined decades of service at the DOJ,” the attorneys said, “we have never seen or even heard of a filing like this.”

It’s a very complex saga

The charge, 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 that it said had been dropped off by the younger Biden at a Delaware computer repair shop about a year earlier.

The Post said it obtained a hard drive of the laptop from Rudy Giuliani, a close ally of President Donald Trump, and reported on some of the computer’s contents, including emails that appeared to show some of Hunter Biden’s overseas business dealings.

LEARN MORE: 2 former FBI officials accused of making false statements about Hunter Biden’s laptop

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 believed that Moscow was trying to undermine the candidacy of Democratic candidate Joe Biden, who defeated Trump in 2020, and that Giuliani had traveled abroad looking for dirt on the Bidens.

But John Ratcliffe, Trump’s then-director of national intelligence, quickly sought to quell speculation about the laptop’s provenance by saying there was no sign 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-related charges, which later resulted in felony convictions. President Joe Biden pardoned his son at the end of 2024.

Defendant headed foreign influence task force

The FBI officials examined, Floris and Benavides, were leaders of the Foreign Influence Task Force, which was created during the first Trump administration to monitor influence campaigns organized by Russia and other countries aimed at sowing discord, undermining democracy and spreading disinformation.

As such, FBI officials briefed Republican Senators Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson in August 2020 as lawmakers conducted their own investigation into Hunter Biden’s work in Ukraine. News of the briefing leaked and senators lashed out at the FBI, saying their efforts to examine the Biden family had been discredited and falsely linked to Russian disinformation.

The criminal complaint accuses them of lying to lawmakers in 2023 by denying knowledge of Biden’s laptop or participating in internal FBI conversations about it. Their lawyers have denied any allegations of wrongdoing.

The task force was disbanded in February 2025 by then-Attorney General Pam Bondi.