Judge rejects new charges against FBI officials accused of lying to Congress about Hunter Biden’s laptop investigations

 

The U.S. Department of Justice is seen on September 26, 2025, in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Samuel Corum/Getty Images)

A federal judge has rejected the U.S. Department of Justice’s (DOJ’s) attempt to file new criminal charges against two former Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) counterintelligence officials who were accused of lying to Congress about their knowledge of Hunter Biden’s notorious laptop.

Late Monday night, former Deputy Assistant Director Nikki Cole Floris, 46, and former Section Chief Bradley Benavides, 56, were charged with obstruction of a congressional proceeding. On Tuesday, however, Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui said he would not sign off on the new criminal charges because prosecutors could not take that step without judicial review.

Filing an unsworn complaint on the public docket and bypassing judicial review, he explained, is unheard of.

“We have never had complaints filed that are unsigned,” Faruqui said. “It is inappropriate. It harms the defendants.”

 

“I am unaware of that ever happening before in this court,” he stressed. “I am frustrated that I got it in the middle of the night. But I am much more concerned that it is filed on the public record.”

The judge ordered that the new charging documents be “struck from the record,” though the Justice Department could try to add the charges again through the proper channels. He also told prosecutors that a judge would have to find probable cause that a crime had been committed instead of sending him the complaint overnight.

“I am not going to bless it as a superseding complaint,” Faruqui said at a court hearing, after Floris’ lawyers filed a motion arguing the new complaint was filed in bad faith. 

“In the middle of the night, the government filed an unsigned and unsworn complaint attempting to fix the issues with their original charge against Ms. Floris and adding a new charge just as meritless as the first one,” Floris’ attorneys said in a statement.

The first complaint, announced Friday, charged Floris and Benavides with making false statements to the House Judiciary Committee in 2023 about their involvement in investigations of Hunter Biden, former President Joe Biden’s son. They were also arrested on Friday, but have since been released.

A criminal complaint is often used to obtain an arrest warrant in scenarios where prosecutors must move quickly as it only requires a judge’s signature. According to the DOJ in its first complaint and affidavit, the FBI officials both claimed before Congress that they did not discuss the controversial laptop or its ongoing investigations.

However, they were both senior members of the now-dissolved FBI Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF), which led several probes into the younger Biden. Both defendants testified at the time that the task force was not involved in these investigations.

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