DC federal judge tosses case against FBI officials accused of lying about Hunter Biden laptop
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’ interna...