WASHINGTON — A federal magistrate judge threw out charges against two former FBI intelligence officials accused of lying to Congress on Monday, saying that prosecutors had failed in one of their most basic responsibilities: They had not shown there was any probable cause that crimes had been committed in the first place.
In an emotional, hourlong address from the bench in U.S. District Court in Washington, Magistrate Zia Faruqui said the case against the former officials — Nikki Floris and Bradley Benavides — was a rushed, political prosecution ordered by the White House and intended to affect the upcoming midterm elections. Two weeks ago, the administration charged the former officials with falsely minimizing their work on investigations involving Hunter Biden, the son of the former president.
Faruqui excoriated the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington for how it handled the case, admonishing prosecutors for trying to avoid some of the fundamental checks and balances of the criminal justice system. At the same time, he apologized directly to Floris and Benavides for having been “dragged through the process” of being charged by the same federal government they had admirably served for decades.
“I am deeply troubled by what happened here in the case,” Faruqui said. “What has transpired here cannot be described as anything other than weaponization.”
The dismissal of the charges was the Justice Department’s latest failure to follow through on President Donald Trump’s relentless demands to take revenge against a long list of people who have run afoul of him. In recent months, both judges and grand juries have repeatedly rejected the department’s attempts to prosecute the president’s enemies in a growing — and humiliating — series of legal defeats.
From the outset, the case against Floris and Benavides was a particularly bitter one, embodying a battle that has raged for nearly two years between the FBI’s current leadership and the scores of agents who have been purged from the bureau because of their supposed disloyalty to Trump.
That rancor was on full display in court Monday as several former FBI agents fired by the bureau’s director, Kash Patel, showed up to cheer the dismissal of the case. Among those in the gallery were Brian Driscoll, the former acting director of the FBI; Dave Sundberg, the former agent in charge of the bureau’s Washington field office; and Steven Jensen, another longtime FBI leader.
Floris and Benavides were charged in a complaint last month with making false statements during testimony they gave in 2023 to the House Judiciary Committee about the roles they played in the FBI’s contentious investigations of Hunter Biden, the former president’s son, and a laptop that belonged to him.
But during his speech, Faruqui dismantled almost every aspect of the government’s case. He pointed out that most of the false statements the two defendants were charged with making were not actually false, that none of the false statements were made knowingly, and that none of them had any material effect on the congressional investigation which they were called upon to assist.
Both Floris and Benavides served on the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, a group created after Russia interfered in the 2016 election. The task force was designed to help intelligence agencies monitor clandestine efforts by foreign governments to manipulate American politics, and in the weeks before the 2020 election it raised concerns that reports about Hunter Biden — especially those concerning a laptop that he left behind at a computer repair shop — may have been influenced by a Russian disinformation campaign.
Faruqui was allowed to weigh in on the viability of the case because prosecutors chose to charge Floris and Benavides through a criminal complaint, not an indictment. Complaints require a judge to make a finding of probable cause, whereas indictments require only a majority vote by a panel of grand jurors and do not require a judge’s approval.
But federal prosecutors in Washington have failed so often over the past two years to secure indictments from grand juries that they have grown wary of the panels — especially in politicized cases involving Trump’s opponents. While their complaint against Floris and Benavides is dead, prosecutors could try to resuscitate the charges by asking a grand jury to approve them.
This article originally appeared in the New York Times.