WASHINGTON (AP) — Defense lawyers urged a federal judge Thursday to dismiss a criminal complaint charging two former FBI counterintelligence officials with making false statements to Congress about Hunter Biden, calling the case an overtly political prosecution aimed at placating President Donald Trump.
The arguments capped a days-long hearing in which lawyers for the former officials, Nikki Floris and Bradley Benavides, sought to cast the case — one
in a series of high-profile Justice Department actions before next week's midterm voting — as legally defective and tainted by politics.
The hearing included testimony that the investigation was ordered by FBI Director Kash Patel and that it was opened on the heels of a primetime election security speech by Trump in which the Republican rehashed long-running grievances about his 2020 election loss to Democrat Joe Biden.
“A political prosecution is always going to make for a shaky foundation for a criminal case,” said Mary Dohrmann, a lawyer for Floris. She, along with Benavides, is accused of falsely downplaying their knowledge of a laptop that the Justice Department says Hunter Biden dropped off at a computer repair shop in 2019. It was publicized a year later in a revelation that shook the final weeks of the presidential race.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui did not immediately rule on the defense lawyers’ request. A dismissal of the complaint would not prevent the Justice Department from attempting to get a indictment, but that could be a challenge given that grand juries in the nation's capital have repeatedly refused to approve charges in politically sensitive cases. Even if the judge sustains the complaint, prosecutors would presumably still need to secure a grand jury indictment for the case to proceed.
The alleged false statements were made in 2023 before the House Judiciary Committee as the Republican-led panel was conducting its own investigation into Hunter Biden. The complaint alleges that though the two officials downplayed their knowledge about the laptop, they participated in numerous discussions about it. They were both leaders of a since-disbanded FBI task force set up to police foreign influence in elections.
A Justice Department prosecutor, James Kirkpatrick, argued Thursday that the two officials had a motive to minimize their knowledge about Hunter Biden and the laptop given that his father was president at the time of the questioning. Kirkpatrick suggested the two may have been leery of discussing Hunter Biden and the laptop since, he said, the task force did not publicly correct a narrative from some Democrats and former intelligence officials that the laptop was connected to Russian disinformation as opposed to actually being authentic.
“At the end of the day, the FITF got it wrong,” Kirkpatrick said, referring to the Foreign Intelligence Task Force. “They didn’t quash the narrative that this laptop was the product of Russian disinformation. They didn't correct the record.”
Defense lawyers insisted that their clients did not lie and had no incentive to do so, and that any potentially false statement was not intentional and would have been the product of vague questioning or a faulty memory.
“There is absolutely zero proof that Mr. Benavides knew and remembered and misled. They have to prove that the statements were made intentionally and not the result of confusion, mistake, faulty or other innocent reasons," said Ron Safer, a lawyer for Benavides.
Safer disputed the prosecution’s suggestion of a motive, arguing that the Foreign Influence Task Force -- which was shuttered by the Trump administration last year -- never made an assessment on the authenticity of the laptop.
The case was filed more than a week before the midterm elections in an unusual mechanism. The Justice Department charged the two via a criminal complaint — which is more often used for instances when officials need to swiftly take someone into custody — and not a grand jury indictment.
The hearing featured startling testimony from Bryan Witt, a FBI special agent who investigated the case. He said he regarded it as a “huge distraction” from his other work and appreciated that it could be seen as political. He said that Patel had mandated the investigation and taken an unusual interest in it, requesting and receiving regular updates about it.
He also testified that the FBI had been directed to investigate Floris after a July primetime speech in which Trump amplified debunked theories about his 2020 election loss.
Among the grievances the White House raised at the time was a disputed FBI intelligence report about an alleged effort by China to influence the election through fraudulent driver’s licenses. Floris has long been a magnet for her role in ordering the report be withdrawn because the intelligence it relied on had not been properly vetted.
