US court dismisses charges against two former FBI employees — The Hill

A federal judge in Washington, US, dismissed charges against two former Federal Bureau of Investigation employees — Nikki Floris and Bradley Benavides. They were accused of allegedly making false statements during interviews with the US House of Representatives Judiciary Committee in 2023 regarding their knowledge of and involvement in an FBI investigation connected to Hunter Biden’s laptop.

As The Hill reports, Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui found insufficient grounds to sustain the charges. The hearing lasted about an hour.

The judge’s position

During the hearing, Faruqui said that the investigation had been conducted hastily. He also said it could not be described as anything other than using the US Department of Justice as a tool.

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Floris and Benavides worked in the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force. Prosecutors argued that they knew about the FBI’s investigation involving Biden and actively participated in it. To support this version, the prosecution cited documents and testimony that, according to it, indicated regular discussions of the case within the task force and with other bureau employees.

The laptop case

The controversy surrounding Hunter Biden’s laptop escalated several weeks before the 2020 US presidential election. At the time, the New York Post published materials based on its contents. The owner of a repair shop in Delaware claimed that Biden had left the laptop there and did not retrieve it.

According to the publication, the FBI seized the laptop in 2019, and a copy of the hard drive was provided to Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudolph Giuliani, who later passed it on to the New York Post. Federal prosecutors may still turn to a grand jury to seek indictments.