Hunter Biden laptop issue resurfaces
Judge scolds DOJ prosecutors over case against ex-FBI officials
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A federal judge on Tuesday scolded 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 knowledge of a laptop the Justice Department says belonged to Hunter Biden, the son of former President Joe Biden.
U.S. Magistrate Zia Faruqui struck from the record an amended criminal complaint filed overnight by the Justice Department that added a new obstruction charge against the two former officials, Nikki Floris and Bradley Benavides, after concluding that it was improperly submitted. Such charging documents require sign-off from a judge that probable cause exists to believe a crime was committed by a defendant, but this complaint was filed straight to the docket with no court approval.
The ruling came during a dramatic, hours-long hearing in which an agent who worked the case conceded under defense lawyer questioning that the investigation into the former officials was launched after a July speech from President Donald Trump on election interference and that the inquiry was mandated by FBI Director Kash Patel. The Kansas City-based agent, Bryan Witt, said he had been assigned to the investigation and regarded it as a "huge distraction" from other casework.
"I had concerns that this would be political," he said.
The developments were setbacks for a Justice Department that has employed unusual maneuvers during a series of splashy and politically charged investigative actions before next week's midterm elections. Newly unsealed documents in a separate case, for instance, revealed that prosecutors are attempting to again prosecute former FBI Director James Comey, an outspoken Trump critic, in a manner that Comey's lawyers say is legally invalid.
Faruqui said he had never before seen a prosecutor file an unsigned criminal complaint, describing it as "inappropriate" given defendants' presumption of innocence. He ticked off several atypical aspects of the case, including the decision to file charges via criminal complaint, which the judge noted is more often used when the government has disrupted an active crime or needs to take a defendant into custody immediately because of a potential danger to society.
"Everything is a little sideshow on top of a sideshow," the judge said, saying prosecutors appeared to be throwing "gas" on defendants' assertions that there is nothing typical about this case.
The case, announced Friday, accuses the former officials of falsely playing down their knowledge about a laptop the Justice Department says Hunter Biden abandoned at a computer repair shop in 2019.
Prosecutors say they claimed to have no independent insight into the FBI's recovery of the laptop while being interviewed in 2023 in a separate congressional Republican investigation into the Biden family. In reality, according to the criminal complaint, the two participated in numerous discussions about the laptop in their capacity as leaders of the since-disbanded FBI Foreign Influence Task Force that was set up to monitor foreign influence.