Not too long ago, the Department of Justice could generally be trusted to prosecute cases in which lawyers believed that real wrongdoing had occurred. Now DOJ frequently unveils lawsuits that seem designed mostly for securing likes and reposts on right-wing social media—the actual facts be damned. Any high-profile criminal case brought by the Trump administration arrives with an air of suspicion.
Today, Jeanine Pirro, the top federal prosecutor for Washington, D.C., announced an odd set of charges against two former FBI officials for allegedly lying to Congress during testimony in 2023. “When senior FBI agents lie to Congress believing they are above the law, it’s time to bring the hammer of justice down on them,” Pirro posted on X. For all of the fanfare, DOJ provided little evidence to back up its claims. But the timing of the charges—they’ve arrived just more than a week before the midterm elections—and with the puzzling substance of the allegations and the administration’s crowing online, does not inspire confidence in the integrity of the prosecutorial work.
The charges concern several statements made by the defendants, Nikki Floris and Bradley Benavides, in the course of a congressional investigation into supposed “weaponization” of the government against President Trump. In brief, the Justice Department is alleging that Floris and Benavides lied to the House Judiciary Committee regarding their level of knowledge about the FBI’s handling of Hunter Biden’s laptop. Lawyers for Floris issued a statement saying that DOJ “has accused her falsely of a crime on the say-so of politicians, not on the facts.” Benavides’s lawyer likewise described the charges as “baseless.”
The saga of the Hunter Biden laptop has now spanned four federal elections, and the specifics of the story may, reasonably, no longer be top of mind. Understanding its relevance here requires a deep plunge into far-right mythology. But the quick version is that MAGA became obsessed with the possibly stolen laptop, and the material it contained documenting Biden’s drug addiction, after the New York Post published an article about the laptop in the lead-up to the 2020 election. Social-media companies, burned by their experience of Russian election interference in 2016, worried that the underlying documents might be Russian misinformation. (This suspicion was never confirmed.) They responded aggressively by suppressing links to the Post’s story—which outraged the right. The laptop would go on to play a starring role in the coming years as the GOP used congressional investigations to tell a story about the victimization of the right, supposedly having been a target of a sprawling network of government-backed online censorship and unfair treatment by the FBI.
This was the context in which Floris and Benavides were testifying in 2023. The two had held leadership positions in the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF) during 2020, a section created to respond to foreign interference after Russia’s 2016 election meddling. There they had crossed paths with the laptop. In recent years, congressional Republicans have pointed to various decontextualized snippets of that testimony and internal FBI documents as part of their efforts to suggest that the FBI was working against Trump in the 2020 election.
By then, for a certain kind of very online Trump supporter, Floris and Benavides had already become familiar if relatively minor villains in the anticanon of deep-state enemies. The criminal charges today make sense in this larger narrative. In his X post announcing the charges, FBI Director Kash Patel referred to the agency’s past “political weaponization targeting their opponents.”
Just because MAGA hates someone does not mean that they are innocent. But Floris and Benavides’s work as described in the affidavit seems unremarkable. And the document is opaque when describing what the two defendants are actually alleged to have lied about. To be prosecutable under the relevant statute, a lie to government authorities must be told “knowingly and willfully,” and it must be “material” in a way that substantively affects the investigation in question. Some of Floris and Benavides’s alleged misstatements, as described in the affidavit, don’t initially appear to be misstatements at all. For example, Floris said she was not involved in the criminal investigation into Hunter Biden during which the FBI seized the laptop; in fact, her work at the FITF really was separate from the criminal probe, which was carried out by a different team.
Other supposed lies might well be better understood as forgetfulness. The two defendants were high up in the bureau and wouldn’t necessarily recall the minutiae of an incident that took place three years before they testified. In one instance, the affidavit alleges that Floris lied about her involvement in “an assessment to discredit the Hunter Biden investigations,” but contains no further mention of this supposed assessment nor any quotes from the relevant testimony. Perhaps DOJ will be able to provide more evidence for its allegations as the case goes on, but as things now stand, the charges appear less than airtight.
How the Justice Department chose to bring this case also invites suspicion. The charges were filed via a criminal complaint, a method the government uses in many investigations that must move quickly, because a complaint does not require the immediate involvement of a grand jury. The need to rush here is hard to see, given that the relevant testimony was three years ago. Conversely, it’s easy to imagine why DOJ would want to push out incendiary allegations without having to convince a potentially skeptical grand jury—an all-but-certainty in D.C., where jurors have delivered a number of high-profile rebuttals to federal prosecutors. In the next 30 days, if the department wishes to move forward with the case, it will have to seek a grand jury’s indictment. By then, though, the Trump administration may have already gotten the propaganda boost it was looking for.
At a hearing today, Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui appeared skeptical of the case, noting the government’s decision to delay seeking an indictment and describing the defendants’ “sparkling backgrounds.” As many judges have commented over the past year, the traditional “presumption of regularity” awarded to the Justice Department’s work has been eroded by the Trump administration’s habitual use of criminal prosecutions as a tool to harass the president’s enemies. With this case, DOJ has provided little material to reassure its critics.