Magistrate Judge Dismisses False-Statement Charges Against Former FBI Officials Linked to Hunter Biden Laptop Probe

A federal magistrate judge in Washington, D.C., on Monday dismissed a criminal complaint against two former senior FBI officials accused of making false statements to Congress about the bureau’s handling of matters involving Hunter Biden’s laptop and the Foreign Influence Task Force.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui ruled from the bench that prosecutors had not established probable cause. He stated that several of the alleged statements were not false as pleaded and that the remaining ones lacked sufficient evidence of intent to deceive. “What has transpired here cannot be described as anything other than weaponization,” Faruqui said, citing the timing of the charges less than two weeks before the midterm elections, the origins of the investigation, and what he described as critical mistakes in the case.

The defendants are Nikki Cole Floris, formerly a Deputy Assistant Director who led the Foreign Influence Task Force from mid-2019 through mid-2022, and Bradley Benavides, who served as the task force’s Section Chief during the same period. Both testified before the House Judiciary Committee in 2023 that the task force was not involved in the FBI’s investigations related to Hunter Biden. The Justice Department charged them in mid-to-late October 2026 via criminal complaint with making false statements. Prosecutors alleged that documentary evidence, contemporaneous communications, and witness accounts showed Floris discussed the Hunter Biden investigations routinely for more than a year and that Benavides regularly discussed the laptop with other FBI officials in the lead-up to the 2020 election. The department also stated that Floris privately claimed to be “running a shadow government” in her task-force role during the 2020 election period.

Faruqui noted that an FBI agent who worked the case testified that he found no evidence of a motive for the officials to lie and that the congressional investigation into the Biden family did not appear to have been slowed or altered by their answers. The judge further observed that the investigation opened the day after a July primetime address by President Trump that referenced the 2020 election and was directed and tracked by FBI Director Kash Patel. He questioned the use of a criminal complaint rather than a grand jury indictment and identified procedural issues, including the filing of an amended complaint that added a charge without prior judicial approval. Faruqui said the rush to charge produced critical mistakes and that he would not ignore the calendar proximity to the midterms.

The Justice Department disagreed with the ruling. In a statement, it said the magistrate’s decision “remarkably appears to suggest that high-ranking government officials are immune from accountability for making materially false statements to Congress.” Because the charges were brought by complaint rather than indictment, the department retains the option to present the case to a grand jury or to seek review by a district judge.

The Foreign Influence Task Force has since been dissolved. The laptop at the center of the underlying inquiries was obtained by the FBI in 2019 after it was left at a Delaware computer repair shop. The dismissed complaint alleged that the former officials’ 2023 testimony minimized or denied task-force involvement in related investigations. Faruqui’s ruling addressed only the probable-cause standard on the complaint and did not resolve the underlying factual disputes about the task force’s activities or the content of the officials’ testimony. A full written order was expected to follow the oral ruling.