A federal judge in Washington on Tuesday sharply rebuked the Justice Department over its handling of a criminal case against two former FBI officials accused of misleading Congress about what they knew of investigations involving Hunter Biden, the son of former President Joe Biden.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui refused to sign off on an amended criminal complaint that prosecutors filed in the middle of the night, hours before a scheduled preliminary hearing. That new filing added obstruction charges against the two former officials, Nikki Floris and Bradley Benavides. According to the Associated Press, the judge struck the amended complaint from the record.
“I am not going to bless it”
Criminal complaints require a judge to find probable cause before they take effect. The superseding complaint filed early Tuesday by the office of D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro carried a signature block with the judge’s name typed out, but Faruqui had not personally signed it, CNBC reported.
“I am not going to bless it as a superseding complaint,” Faruqui said at the hearing. “It is not our court’s practice, and I think it is appropriately not our practice, that unsigned complaints are filed on the docket.”
The judge told prosecutors that if they wanted to bring a superseding complaint, a judge would first have to find probable cause, rather than having the document sent to him overnight with the expectation that he would sign it. “I’m concerned with your view as to what the law is,” he told them. “Why today, on this one case, have you changed the entire history of how you charge cases?”
“This has to get to a grand jury”
Faruqui also questioned why the case was brought by criminal complaint at all. The original complaint, filed Oct. 20 and made public last Friday, concerns testimony the officials gave to the House Judiciary Committee in 2023. Cases involving conduct from years earlier are usually brought through a grand jury indictment, while complaints are typically used when prosecutors need to move quickly.
“This has to get to a grand jury,” the judge said. Under federal rules, prosecutors generally must obtain an indictment within 30 days of an arrest or risk having the case dismissed. Floris and Benavides were arrested Friday and have been released.
What the case is about
The complaint accuses the two former officials of falsely downplaying, in 2023 testimony to House lawmakers, their contemporaneous knowledge of a laptop that the Justice Department says Hunter Biden abandoned at a computer repair shop in 2019, and of internal FBI discussions about it. The new obstruction charge alleged that those statements allowed them to avoid questioning and impeded a House investigation into the Bidens.
Floris and Benavides were leaders of the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, created during President Donald Trump’s first term to counter influence operations by Russia and other countries. In August 2020 they briefed Republican Sens. Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson, who were investigating Hunter Biden’s work in Ukraine. Congressional Republicans have long accused the since-disbanded task force of trying to discredit their investigations of the Biden family.
Defense: “We have never seen” anything like it
Lawyers for Floris had asked the court to strike the new complaint, arguing it was legally deficient and filed in bad faith. “What is going on at the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office?” they said in a statement early Tuesday. “In our combined decades of DOJ service, we have never seen or even heard of something like this being filed.” Both former officials deny wrongdoing.
Even with the amended complaint rejected, the Justice Department can still seek a felony indictment from a grand jury to move the case forward. The AP noted that the department has repeatedly struggled in high-profile cases to persuade grand juries in Washington to return indictments, and that the prosecution is among several politically charged actions the department has taken in the run-up to next week’s midterm elections.
Reporting based on accounts from the Associated Press and CNBC.