Judge rejects prosecutors' overnight bid to add charge against ex-FBI officials in Hunter Biden case

A federal magistrate judge in Washington on Tuesday rejected a last-minute attempt by Justice Department prosecutors to add a new charge against two former senior FBI officials accused of lying to Congress about the bureau's investigation of Hunter Biden, scolding the government for filing an unsigned, unsworn document hours before the pair's scheduled court hearing.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui said he would not accept the amended complaint against Nikki Floris and Bradley Benavides, both former leaders of the FBI's now-disbanded Foreign Influence Task Force. The filing, submitted to the court docket after midnight, sought to add a charge of obstructing a congressional proceeding on top of the single false-statements count each defendant already faced. Faruqui said the document lacked the sworn affidavit and judicial sign-off that criminal complaints ordinarily require before they are made public.

"We have never had complaints filed that are unsigned. It is inappropriate. It harms the defendants." — U.S. Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui, quoted by CBS News

What happened in court

Floris and Benavides were first charged on Oct. 23 by criminal complaint, not a grand jury indictment, with one count each of making a false statement in a matter within the jurisdiction of Congress, a felony that under 18 U.S.C. § 1001 carries a maximum sentence of five years. Both surrendered to authorities and made an initial court appearance before Faruqui, who set Tuesday's date for a preliminary hearing over prosecutors' objection to a faster timeline.

Prosecutors used the overnight hours before that hearing to file the superseding complaint, which added the obstruction count and, according to reporting from the Associated Press, alleged that the officials' false statements had allowed them to dodge questions about their own knowledge of Hunter Biden's abandoned laptop and had impeded a House investigation. Because the document went onto the public docket without a judge's probable-cause review, Faruqui said he was troubled by its appearance and indicated he would strike it. He told the government it remained free to pursue the added charge through the proper process, including by taking it to a grand jury.

A Justice Department attorney, John Borchert, told the court prosecutors were prepared to have the FBI agent who wrote the complaint's supporting affidavit swear to it after the fact, followed by a separate hearing. "We are not afraid of a probable cause finding," he said. Defense lawyers objected strenuously; one called the proposed fix "Kafkaesque." Faruqui said the original preliminary hearing, on the lying-to-Congress count alone, would proceed as scheduled to determine whether prosecutors have enough evidence to meet the probable-cause standard.

Floris's attorneys, Mary Dohrmann among them, said the differences between the original and superseding complaints were substantial enough to raise doubts about the government's accuracy, and said in a statement that in their combined decades of Justice Department service, they had never seen or even heard of a filing handled this way.

The allegations and their origin

The case, first reported when the original complaint was unsealed on Oct. 23, traces back to 2023 testimony Floris and Benavides gave to the House Judiciary Committee. According to the original complaint, Floris testified on July 19, 2023, that she had not been involved in discussions about Hunter Biden while serving at the Foreign Influence Task Force; Benavides testified on Sept. 28, 2023, that he first learned the FBI possessed Hunter Biden's laptop by reading about it on Wikipedia. Prosecutors allege both statements were false and intended to minimize the task force's role in scrutinizing the Biden family.

The task force, created in 2017 under then-FBI Director Christopher Wray to counter foreign election interference, ran an internal project known as "Round River," under which analysts reviewed informant reporting, including unfavorable material about Hunter Biden, to assess whether it might be tied to Russian disinformation. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley has pursued the matter since 2022, arguing the project was used to brand legitimate congressional inquiries as foreign disinformation; Benavides and Floris briefed Grassley and Sen. Ron Johnson on the task force's work in August 2020, a session Grassley's office says was followed by leaks to the press. Years earlier, House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan had separately pressed Benavides for an interview over the same briefing and its aftermath, a request documented by the House Judiciary Committee in 2023. The Foreign Influence Task Force itself was shut down in February 2025 under Attorney General Pam Bondi, who said the bureau needed to redirect resources.

Who is affected, and what comes next

For Floris and Benavides, the stakes are a potential felony conviction and the end of any claim to the FBI pensions and professional standing built over roughly two decades each in federal law enforcement; both have denied wrongdoing, and neither has been accused in this case of any misconduct in the underlying Hunter Biden investigations themselves, only in how they later described their own roles to lawmakers. For the Justice Department, the botched overnight filing adds to a run of difficulty securing grand jury cooperation in politically charged cases brought in the capital during the Trump administration's second term, a pattern that has already forced prosecutors in several high-profile matters to rely on criminal complaints rather than indictments returned by a grand jury, and that has given defense lawyers in those cases a recurring argument that the charges are being rushed or improperly brought. Faruqui's magistrate-level ruling does not end the case; it only keeps the obstruction count off the docket for now, and the judge made clear prosecutors could still try to secure an indictment on that charge later, or add it through a signed and sworn filing.

Grassley, in a statement from his committee after the original charges were filed, called the prosecutions a mark of "accountability efforts in action," saying the two officials had used their positions to smear his and Johnson's oversight work and that "at long last, Americans can see all the facts and evidence for themselves." Defense attorneys have countered that the entire prosecution is retaliatory, noting that the original complaint was filed ten days before the Nov. 3 elections, and that Tuesday's additional, unsigned filing only reinforced their argument that the case was being pursued hastily and outside normal channels.

The preliminary hearing on the original false-statements complaint continued Tuesday before Faruqui, who must decide whether the government has shown probable cause to let the case move toward a grand jury indictment or a plea. A ruling against the government at that stage would not necessarily end the prosecution, since prosecutors could still seek an indictment independently, but it would be a further setback in a case that has already drawn unusual judicial criticism twice within a week. Floris and Benavides, who were not held in pretrial detention after their initial arrests, were due to remain free pending the outcome.