Federal prosecutors filed new criminal charges Tuesday against two former FBI counterintelligence officials, accusing them of obstructing a congressional proceeding and lying to lawmakers about their role in the bureau’s investigations of Hunter Biden.
The unsigned and unsworn superseding complaint, filed early Tuesday morning, comes just hours before defendants Nikki Floris and Bradley Benavides are scheduled to appear in federal court in Washington, D.C. for a preliminary hearing.
At that hearing, attorneys for Floris and Benavides are expected to question one of the government’s witnesses to test the strength of the complaint and whether the Justice Department can demonstrate that there is probable cause to believe a crime was committed.
The decision of the Ministry of Justice to file a criminal complaint against two former top FBI officials for their testimony three years ago, so close to the midterm elections, has raised eyebrows among former prosecutors and other federal officials.
Criminal complaints in criminal cases are generally reserved for more urgent circumstances, such as ongoing threats to public safety or national security. And Justice Department guidelines and standards have generally urged prosecutors to avoid taking overt investigative steps in politically sensitive cases so close to national elections.
Prosecutors who file a superseding complaint overnight without an oath and signature will likely raise further questions about whether the case is politically motivated.
“What is going on at the DCUS Attorney’s Office? In the middle of the night, the government filed an unsigned, unsworn complaint in an attempt to resolve issues with the original accusation against Ms. Floris and add a new accusation just as baseless as the first,” Floris’ legal team said in a statement provided to CBS News.
“In our combined decades of service at the DOJ, we have never seen or even heard of a filing like this,” the attorneys said. “That’s because the public filing of criminal charges must be authorized by the grand jury, a judge or the defendant himself. Here, the government has appropriated this authority in a desperate attempt to delay our client’s right to challenge the charges in court and argue this case in the media, rather than in the courtroom. We have demanded that this outrageous government conduct against a decorated public servant be addressed at today’s hearing.”
The charges focus on testimony Floris and Benavides gave before a congressional committee on July 19, 2023 and September 28, 2023, respectively.
The superseding complaint alleges that the defendants “knowingly and willfully provided materially false statements to the Committee regarding their respective knowledge and
participation in the FBI’s investigations of Hunter Biden, and thereby obstructed, obstructed, and attempted to influence, obstruct, and impede the due administration of the law.
The complaint focuses on statements they made during testimony regarding their roles on the Foreign Influence Task Force and one of its counterintelligence operations known as “Round River,” which sought to collect disparaging informants reporting on, among others, Hunter Biden, to flag those reports as Russian disinformation “before the 2020 election.”
Floris served as deputy deputy director of the FITF from mid-2019 to mid-2022, while Benavides served as its section head from mid-2019 until the 2020 elections.
The complaint alleges that defendants made false statements in their testimony “in an effort to minimize or conceal FITF’s engagement and communications in the Hunter Biden investigations and to obstruct the Congressional investigation.”
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