U.S. Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui threw out the case against two former FBI officials accused of lying about the Hunter Biden investigations, calling it “weaponization” of federal law enforcement.
Faruqui ruled at a court hearing Monday that prosecutors had not shown enough evidence that the two officials, Nikki Floris and Bradley Benavides, knowingly made false statements, Reuters reported.
He also accused the Justice Department of bringing a political prosecution ahead of Tuesday’s midterm elections, according to Reuters.
“What has transpired here cannot be described as anything other than weaponization” of federal law enforcement, Faruqui said.
Floris and Benavides were accused of misleading Congress in 2023 about what they knew of efforts to investigate a laptop that the Justice Department says Hunter Biden, former President Joe Biden’s son, left at a Delaware repair shop in 2019, the Associated Press reported.
Floris was a deputy assistant director of the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, and Benavides was a section chief there, according to CBS News. Their lawyers had pushed to dismiss the charges, the AP reported.
Federal investigators claimed the two “knew about, and were actively involved in” accusations against Hunter Biden, but lied about it before Congress.
“The evidence is mounting that this prosecution is about some political football, and not the law or the facts in this case,” Mary Dohrmann, an attorney for Floris, told the court last week, CBS reported.
Faruqui questioned from the start why prosecutors charged the case through a criminal complaint instead of an indictment, the AP reported. A complaint is usually used when investigators need to take someone into custody quickly, while an indictment needs a grand jury’s approval.
Then, after midnight before a hearing last week, prosecutors put an unsigned and unsworn complaint with a new charge on the public docket without a judge’s review, according to CBS. Faruqui struck it and said he had never seen that happen in his court.
“Everything you’re doing is making me more and more concerned,” Faruqui told prosecutors. “Why today, on this one case, have you changed the entire history of how you charge cases? It makes it look like the United States is afraid of me trying to find probable cause.”
“Let me address that squarely. We are not afraid of a probable cause finding,” replied John Borchert, a prosecutor with the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington.
The FBI agent who worked the case, Bryan Witt, testified at that hearing that FBI Director Kash Patel ordered the investigation and kept close watch on it, the AP reported. The FBI opened it hours after President Donald Trump gave an election security speech in July.
Witt said the case first focused on a 2020 FBI inquiry into alleged Chinese election interference, an issue Trump raised in that speech, according to CBS. It later turned to the officials’ statements about Hunter Biden, Witt said.
By Witt’s account, the case began on the FBI director’s orders and aimed at a matter the president had raised in public hours earlier.
“I had concerns that this would be viewed as political,” Witt testified.
The Justice Department could still try to indict Floris and Benavides through a grand jury, the AP reported. But it has struggled to persuade grand juries in Washington to return indictments in politically charged cases like this one.
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