Judge cites 'weaponization' in tossing charges for ex-FBI agents accused of lying about Hunter Biden

WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal judge on Monday dismissed a criminal complaint against two former FBI officials accused of lying to Congress about Hunter Biden, citing what he said was “weaponization” of President Donald Trump's Justice Department just before the midterm elections.

In a scathing, hourlong ruling read from the bench, U.S. Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui said the investigation that produced the charges against Nikki Floris and Bradley Benavides was rushed, conducted at the behest of Trump and FBI Director Kash Patel and dogged by “critical mistakes" that require the dismissal of the case.

“I am deeply troubled by what has happened here in this case," Faruqui said. “What has transpired here cannot be described as anything other than weaponization.”

The ruling may not bring a permanent end to the matter because the Justice Department still has the option of pursuing an indictment, even though it has struggled during the Trump administration to persuade grand juries in the nation’s capital to return indictments in politically charged prosecutions like this one. In the meantime, it nonetheless amounts to a resounding rebuke of a department the judge said could have sought an indictment at any time but instead opted for transparently political purposes to file a criminal complaint in the immediate run-up to Tuesday's midterm voting.

“I will not bury my head in the sand and pretend that I cannot read a calendar,” Faruqui said, alluding to the proximity of the charges to the elections, which will determine control of Congress for the last two years of the Republican president's second term.

Prosecutors had accused the two former FBI officials of falsely downplaying to Congress their knowledge of investigations into President Joe Biden's son and of a laptop the younger Biden dropped off at a computer repair shop in Delaware in 2019. But Faruqui said the Justice Department had failed to establish in its complaint that any statements made during 2023 testimony were intentionally false and had affected lawmakers' investigation of Hunter Biden or that the former officials had any motive to deceive.

“Without motive, without direct evidence, I have nothing" to go on, Faruqui said, to establish probable cause needed to affirm the complaint.

Lawyers for Floris, who after the ruling hugged supporters outside the courtroom, said the “so-called prosecution was nothing more than a politically motivated smear campaign aimed at scoring political points before the midterm elections."

“The charges brought under the clearly discredited authority of the Department of Justice should never have been brought in the first place,” the attorneys said in a statement.

The judge identified a political motive and ‘critical mistakes’

The dismissal followed a dramatic three-day hearing last week in which an FBI agent who had been assigned to investigate the case conceded that the inquiry had been regarded around his office as something of a “witch hunt” and that he himself had regarded it as a “huge distraction” from his ordinary case work.

The agent, Bryan Witt, said the investigation had been opened one day after a primetime election security speech from Trump in which he rehashed longstanding grievances over his 2020 loss to Joe Biden, a Democrat. He said the investigation was assigned to his Kansas City, Missouri, office and that Patel, a close Trump ally, demanded and received constant updates — something Witt said was unusual.

Recounting the pressure to deliver that Witt said he operated under, Faruqui faulted the Trump administration for a rushed investigation that undermined the results.

“The rush to charge led to critical mistakes,” he said. Among the errors the magistrate cited was that the complaint said the two officials had provided sworn testimony to the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee when they were not under oath.

The judge's concerns about the case were apparent almost immediately, when he raised questions about why the Justice Department had charged the case through a criminal complaint — which is more typically done when investigators have a pressing need to take a defendant into custody — as opposed to an indictment that requires a grand jury's approval.

“It is self-evident that the U.S. attorney's office is avoiding taking this case to a grand jury,” Faruqui said.

Last week, the Justice Department failed to secure a grand jury indictment against Cassidy Hutchinson, a former White House staffer who provided dramatic but disputed testimony against Trump before a House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol insurrection.

Then, at a preliminary hearing last week, Faruqui criticized the Justice Department for filing overnight an amended complaint with an additional criminal charge straight to the docket instead of first clearing the new charge with the court — something he said he had never seen before.

The case concerns years-old questions about a laptop

The case centers on a laptop that the Justice Department says Hunter Biden abandoned at a Wilmington, Delaware, computer repair shop in 2019. The laptop's existence was publicly disclosed in October 2020 with a New York Post story that reported on some of the laptop's contents.