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A federal magistrate judge dismissed a criminal complaint on Monday charge two former senior FBI counterintelligence officials lied to Congress about their roles in the bureau’s Hunter Biden investigation. He said the entire case is politically charged and lacks evidence.
In a scathing, hour-long oral ruling, Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui chastised the Justice Department and the FBI for what he called a “slapdash” case. no probable cause was found that there was evidence that Nikki Floris or Bradley Benavides had committed a crime.
“Without a motive, without direct evidence, I have nothing,” he said. “It’s not close. It’s nothing.”
“I am deeply concerned about what happened in this case,” Faruqui said. “What happened here cannot be described as anything other than weaponization.”
Even if the complaint was dismissed, the Justice Department could still appeal Faruqui’s ruling to the chief judge or seek a grand jury indictment.
CBS News has contacted the Justice Department, the FBI and the DCUS Attorney’s Office for comment.
Floris was a former top intelligence analyst in charge of the Washington Field Office, while Benavides was the former deputy assistant director in the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division. The two embraced outside the courtroom after the decision as Floris wept tears of relief.
They were flanked by many former senior Justice Department and FBI officials who came to support them, including former FBI Director Brian Driscoll and Steve Jensen, the former head of the FBI’s Washington Field Office.
“This case should never have been brought,” Margaret Donovan, one of Floris’ attorneys, said in a statement to reporters outside the courthouse. “This was a lame complaint, spaghetti on the wall, Hunter Biden conspiracy fever dream. But facts still matter in a courtroom.”
The criminal case against Floris and Benavides has been highly unusual since it came to light earlier this month.
Prosecutors charged the pair in a criminal complaint, a charging document generally only used in felony cases that pose exigent public safety or national security threats. Usually, prosecutors secure a grand jury indictment before indictment.
After midnight on the eve of the first day of the court hearing last Tuesday, prosecutors used an unsigned and unsworn substitute complaint to try to block new charges from Congress – a maneuver that the magistrate judge said was unfair and unheard of.
Faruqui struck the replaced complaint from the record, said it lacks adequate judicial review. But he allowed hearings on the original complaint to continue in a marathon evidentiary hearing with three days of testimony that culminated in Monday’s extraordinary decision.
During those three days, FBI Special Agent Bryan Witt, who was assigned to investigate the matter, frankly acknowledged to the court that the case was not handled like any other in his career.
He said it was opened at the behest of FBI Director Kash Patel just one day after President Donald Trump gave a televised speech in July in which he accused intelligence officials of engaging in a cover-up for China’s interference in the Election 2020 and ordered the Justice Department to proceed with prosecution. During the investigation, senior officials including the FBI deputy directors and Patel himself reviewed the progress.
Witt also acknowledged that he feared it might be seen as political and that others in his FBI field office in Kansas City were concerned it was a witch hunt.
Faruqui, a former federal prosecutor himself, at one point also quoted loudly from the Justice Department manual, which states that prosecutors should not take overt investigative or prosecutorial steps to influence or influence the outcome of an election.
“Why did this charge in October 2026?” he asked aloud, noting that there was no concern about the statute of limitations expiring in the near future.
“There was simply no other event on the calendar, other than the midterm elections,” he said. He added that he refuses to bury his head in the sand and pretend timing isn’t an issue.
“I’m not going to lobotomize myself in this way,” he added.
