President Donald Trump listens as Attorney General Todd Blanche speaks at a roundtable event in the East Room of the White House, Wednesday, Oct. 21, 2026, in Washington (AP Photo/Alex Brandon).
Poor judgment by the U.S. Department of Justice took center stage during a hearing over a case in which two former FBI agents are accused of lying to Congress about the Hunter Biden investigation.
The Trump administration alleges Nikki Floris and Bradley Benavides knowingly made “materially false statements” to the House Judiciary Committee during the summer and fall of 2023, respectively.
The sealed criminal complaint was filed in the case last week, alleging charges of false statements to Congress. Overnight, however, the government filed a “superseding criminal complaint” that tacked on felony charges of obstruction and attempted obstruction.
The defendants called foul in an early Tuesday morning motion.
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“The unsigned, unsworn document reflects an apparent effort by the government to fix deficiencies in their original complaint; switch out the law enforcement officer attesting to the allegations underlying the complaint; and add a second meritless charge,” the motion reads. “[P]ursuant to the U.S. Constitution, [such a charge] requires indictment by a grand jury in order to be sustained.”
The four-page motion to strike filed by defense attorneys ridiculed the government’s second charging document as “purported” and an attempt to game the criminal justice system.
“The government’s last-ditch filing before the pre-scheduled preliminary hearing in this case is not merely procedurally improper and substantively deficient,” the motion goes on. “It represents a serious abuse of the criminal charging process, a troubling disregard for the judicial safeguards governing the initiation of criminal proceedings, and a calculated effort to evade judicial scrutiny and shield the government’s allegations from adversarial testing at the scheduled preliminary hearing.”
That preliminary hearing, already scheduled for late Tuesday morning, was overtaken by the dispute about the “superseding” complaint.
And the jurist overseeing the matter was none too pleased.
“I am not going to bless it as a superseding complaint,” Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui told the DOJ at the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., according to a courtroom report by CNBC.
The court tended to agree with the sharply worded characterization of the charging document supplied by Floris’ defense team.
“No rule authorizes its filing on the public docket,” the motion to strike goes on. “It stands in plain defiance of the fundamental requirements for initiating criminal charges. The filed document is, in essence, a nullity, but worse—it flouts Ms. Floris’s rights.”
The motion elaborates:
The government’s decision to place this document on the public docket is particularly egregious and warrants a finding that it was filed in bad faith. The public docket is not a vehicle for the government to publish unapproved criminal accusations, advance its preferred narrative, or generate publicity under the imprimatur of a federal criminal proceeding. Yet that is precisely the effect of filing a document styled as a criminal complaint, containing new allegations concerning conduct dating back to 2023, without first satisfying the requirements that distinguish a legally cognizable charging instrument from an untested prosecutorial accusation or, worse still, mere political narrative[.]
To hear the judge tell it, this might have been the first time prosecutors tried to file charges without a judge’s signature.
“It is not our court’s practice … that unsigned complaints are filed in the docket,” Faruqui reportedly went on.
The court then laid into the DOJ for what it termed “essentially creating a new way of charging people,” according to a courtroom report by Lawfare senior editor Anna Bower.
“I’m concerned with your view as to what the law is,” the judge said. “Why today on this one case are you, the United States, changing the way it has done things in its entire history?”
The court went on to call the DOJ’s behavior in the case “very concerning” and accused the government of “throwing gasoline on what defendants are saying about this being unusual.”
“Why would you not just want a magistrate judge to make a probable cause finding as you would in every other case?” Faruqui asked.
The government leaned into that idea without directly addressing the court’s question about the apparent sea change in charging practice.
“To be clear, we’re ready for a probable cause finding,” a DOJ attorney told the judge.
After some back and forth, the judge told the government lawyer he was “reluctant” to move forward with a probable cause hearing “given what you’ve said your view is of what my signing that complaint would mean … the idea that the magistrate judge just rubber stamps it without a probable cause determination.”
The judge eventually determined the hearing would continue on the basis of the first complaint.
Notably, just before the hearing started, the DOJ filed a notice that the disputed charging document and associated “[f]ilings were entered in error, as this filing is an Amended Complaint not a Superseding and needs to be processed by the Clerk’s Office and sworn by the judge before being filed on the docket.”
The post ‘Throwing gasoline’: Judge ridicules DOJ lawyers for filing unsigned complaint in case against former FBI agents, refuses to sign off on new charging document first appeared on Law & Crime.
