WASHINGTON — A federal magistrate judge dismissed charges Monday against two FBI officials accused of lying to Congress about Hunter Biden’s laptop, saying the case “cannot be described as anything other than weaponization” of the Justice Department.
The ruling from US Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui followed a two-day probable cause hearing in the case of Nikki Floris and Bradley Benavides, formerly of the FBI’s now-defunct Foreign Influence Task Force.
Prosecutors say the duo downplayed what they knew about the bureau’s Hunter Biden probes when they sat for interviews with the House Judiciary Committee in 2023, with Benavides telling the committee he’d learned of the particulars on Wikipedia.
The Post broke the Hunter Biden laptop story in October 2020, which 51 former intel officials suggested was Russian disinformation, but an FBI agent confirmed the laptop was Biden’s at his 2024 gun trial.
Faruqui had picked the government’s case apart, weighing each of the pair’s 10 alleged lies on its own. The DOJ only needed one to survive per defendant for a case to move forward.
Meanwhile, defense lawyers had taken turns grilling FBI Special Agent Bryan Witt, the government’s only witness.
Had the case moved forward, it would have been the highest-level prosecution of federal officials to come out of the laptop saga. Floris was seen weeping in the courthouse hallway during a break in Tuesday’s session, and Faruqui opened that day by tossing a superseding complaint prosecutors had filed after midnight.
Wednesday mostly belonged to Floris’ attorney, Margaret Donovan, who spent the better part of the day depicting her client as an overworked bureaucrat. Donovan said Floris supervised “over 200-300 employees,” and “up to 600” after her promotion to acting assistant director. A few stray messages about Hunter Biden, she suggested, were bound to slip through the cracks.
Witt testified that agents reviewed “hundreds of thousands” of Floris’ internal communications “line by line.”
“How many hours [do you estimate she worked] in a day? Twelve, 14, 16?” Donovan asked. She argued it was unfair to “cherry-pick … five or six conversations out of hundreds of thousands.”
“You didn’t factor in the demands of her position?” Donovan chided.
“I didn’t see the relevance, no,” Witt said.
Donovan also worked through a list of what she called mitigating circumstances, including that Floris hadn’t been prepped on Hunter Biden specifically before her Judiciary Committee appearance, the events in question had occurred three years prior, and she was made to answer questions at 10 a.m., which the defense lawyer treated as roughly the crack of dawn.
“Whether it started at 10 a.m. or ended whenever … is that relevant?” Witt asked.
Much of Donovan’s cross-examination focused on semantics. Floris told the committee “I did not” when asked whether she’d been involved in the Hunter Biden investigation. Donovan’s argument was that answer could be true, depending on the meaning of “involved” and which investigation into the former first son was referenced.
Donovan also noted Floris was a counterintelligence official, not a criminal investigator, and that asking about a criminal case run by another division didn’t make her “involved” with it.
“The reason we charged her is because we know she was involved in the Baltimore investigation,” said Witt, referring to the FBI field office that led the probe of Hunter Biden for tax fraud and gun crimes. “She became involved by talking to the criminal division.”
Benavides’ lawyer, Ron Safer, then made a demonstrative argument to claim the FBI officials could have misspoken, but not lied.
During redirect, prosecutors had asked Witt whether the Judiciary Committee employed Democratic staff, and Witt said he assumed so but had “no idea.” Safer pointed out that the government’s own exhibits listed Democratic staffers by title.
“Basic civics tells us there are members of both parties on every committee,” he said.
“I should’ve said ‘I don’t know,’” Witt said.
“But you didn’t,” Safer snapped. “Should we infer that you knowingly and willingly violated your oath?”
Donovan closed by needling Witt for consulting Steve Castor, the House Judiciary Committee’s Republican counsel, over the relevance of the alleged false statements to the committee, but not Castor’s Democratic counterpart.
“No one explained to me the partisanship nature of the committee,” said Witt, who also admitted that FBI Director Kash Patel pressed for “check-ins” on the case “weekly,” calling it the first time in his career top officials had been so involved in a false statements case.
