A federal judge in Washington has thrown out a criminal case against two former senior FBI officials accused of lying to Congress about investigations into Hunter Biden, delivering a sharp rebuke to the Justice Department on the eve of the US midterm elections.
US Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui dismissed the complaint against Nikki Floris and Bradley Benavides on Monday, after a preliminary hearing in which he weighed the allegations against each defendant in turn. He found that prosecutors had not shown sufficient evidence that either official had knowingly made a false statement, and said the case could not be seen as anything other than weaponization.
Floris and Benavides, formerly senior intelligence specialists with the FBI’s now-defunct Foreign Influence Task Force, were each charged with one count of making a false statement. The charges related to interviews they gave to the House Judiciary Committee in 2023, when Republican lawmakers were questioning the task force’s role in investigations touching on Hunter Biden, the son of former President Joe Biden.
At the heart of the case was a laptop that the Justice Department says Hunter Biden left at a Delaware computer repair shop in 2019. Prosecutors accused the two officials of playing down what they knew about the bureau’s investigations into the laptop and related allegations of Biden family corruption. One of the claims examined in court was Benavides’s account that he had learned particulars of the matter from Wikipedia.
Faruqui was unsparing about how the case had been brought. He noted that the investigation was opened shortly after a primetime speech by President Donald Trump revisiting his grievances over the 2020 election, and that it was mandated and closely tracked by FBI Director Kash Patel. He also pointed out that although the statements at issue dated from 2023, the Justice Department chose to bring the case only about two weeks ago, in the run-up to Tuesday’s voting.
“I will not bury my head in the sand and pretend that I cannot read a calendar,” Faruqui said, according to reports of the hearing.
The judge’s concerns had been visible for days. He questioned why prosecutors had proceeded by criminal complaint, a route more typically used when there is a pressing need to take a defendant into custody, rather than seeking an indictment from a grand jury. He also criticised the filing of an amended complaint overnight, adding a further charge, without first clearing it with the court — a step he said he had never seen before. An FBI agent who worked on the case testified that he had been concerned the investigation would be seen as political.
The ruling is a setback for the Justice Department, which has struggled to persuade grand juries in Washington to return indictments in politically charged cases. It does not necessarily end the matter: reports note that prosecutors may still have an opportunity to seek a grand jury indictment against Floris and Benavides, whose lawyers had pressed for dismissal.
The case also revived longstanding grievances from Trump and his allies that the FBI sought to suppress potentially damaging information about the Biden family during the 2020 presidential campaign, which Joe Biden ultimately won. The judge’s ruling, however, turned on the evidence before him — and on whether the prosecution should have been brought in this form, at this moment, at all.
Sources: Reuters, “US judge tosses case against ex-FBI officials accused of lying about Hunter Biden probes”, https://www.reuters.com/world/us-judge-tosses-case-against-ex-fbi-officials-accused-lying-about-hunter-biden-2026-11-02/ ; Associated Press, “Judge cites ‘weaponization’ in tossing charges for ex-FBI agents accused of lying about Hunter Biden”, https://www.reflector.com/news/national/judge-cites-weaponization-in-tossing-charges-for-ex-fbi-agents-accused-of-lying-about-hunter/article_16fca309-bac6-59eb-825b-24b291079c7a.html
