Attorneys for two former FBI agents charged with lying to Congress about past probes of Hunter Biden are back in court Wednesday seeking to convince a magistrate judge to immediately dismiss their case, citing a lack of evidence and alleged prosecutorial misconduct.
In a marathon hearing Tuesday, magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui lambasted the conduct of federal prosecutors, striking from the record a superseding complaint they attempted to file in the case because it lacked proper signoff from a judge.
Faruqui said the growing record of “inappropriate” actions by the government was “throwing enormous amounts of gasoline onto this fire,” which supported arguments from lawyers for former agents Nikki Floris and Brian Benavides that the charges against them were politically motivated.
“And so everything you’re doing just is making me more and more concerned that there’s something to that,” Faruqui told DOJ prosecutors.
The Justice Department on Friday charged Floris and Bradley with allegedly making false statements to Congress stemming from a probe into whether investigators in the lead-up to the 2020 election sought to suppress or discredit the veracity of material on the laptop of former President Joe Biden’s son that included embarrassing photos and videos.
Under cross-examination by attorneys for Floris and Benavides, FBI agent Bryan Witt, who was tasked with investigating their clients, disclosed that the genesis for the entire case was President Donald Trump’s July speech that centered around unverified claims of fraud in past U.S. elections.
Witt said that following the speech, FBI Director Kash Patel personally assigned the investigation of a list of former agents, including Floris and Benavides, to the FBI’s Kansas City field office.
Witt, who conceded that the sequence of events was unusual, further testified that the office received regular check-ins from FBI leadership on the status of their probe.
At the start of Wednesday’s hearing, a DOJ attorney sought to object to a line of questioning related to Trump and Patel’s personal involvement in initiating the investigation.
Faruqui seemed skeptical of the objection, saying that the testimony appeared to be directly relevant to his eventual determination of whether there is sufficient probable cause for the charges.
“It’s not typical that the president of the United States says go investigate people,” Faruqui said. “So that seems to squarely fit within an investigation to the reasonableness of the basis for the charge.”
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