WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal judge on Tuesday scolded the Justice Department for its unorthodox handling of a criminal case against two former FBI officials accused of making false statements to Congress about their knowledge of a laptop the Justice Department says belonged to Hunter Biden, the son of former President Joe Biden.

U.S. Magistrate Zia Faruqui struck from the record an amended criminal complaint filed overnight by the Justice Department that added a new obstruction charge against the two former officials, Nikki Floris and Bradley Benavides, after concluding that it was improperly submitted.

Such charging documents require sign-off from a judge that probable cause exists to believe a crime was committed by a defendant, but this complaint was filed straight to the docket with no court approval.

The development was an embarrassing setback for a Justice Department that has employed unusual maneuvers during a series of splashy and politically charged investigative actions before next week’s midterm elections. Newly unsealed documents in a separate case, for instance, revealed that prosecutors are attempting to again prosecute former FBI Director James Comey, an outspoken critic of President Donald Trump, in a manner that Comey's lawyers say is legally invalid.

Faruqui said he had never before seen a prosecutor file an unsigned criminal complaint, describing it as “inappropriate” given defendants’ presumption of innocence. He ticked off several atypical aspects of the case, including the decision to charge the former FBI officials via criminal complaint, which the judge noted is more often used when the government has disrupted an active crime or needs to take a defendant into custody immediately because of a potential danger to society.

“Everything is a little sideshow on top of a sideshow,” the judge said, telling prosecutors that they appeared to be throwing “gas” on defendants’ assertions that there is nothing typical about this case.

Prosecutors defend their approach

Assistant U.S. Attorney John Borchert defended the prosecutors’ move, saying they believed court rules allowed for the filing of the new complaint despite no sign-off from the judge because the government isn’t seeking to arrest the former FBI officials.

Faruqui was unmoved. “It is not our court’s practice — and I think it is appropriately not our practice — that unsigned complaints are filed on the docket,” Faruqui said.

He later added: “I want to know why the United States is reticent or averse to putting before me a probable cause determination that you must believe is righteous. Why today on this one case have you changed the entire history of how you charge cases?”

Mary Dohrmann, an attorney for Floris, told the judge that whether it was the result of “incompetence, recklessness or cruelty,” it was inexcusable for prosecutors to file a criminal complaint without a probable-cause sign-off from a magistrate judge.

Describing that as the “elephant in the room,” Dohrmann told the judge that “evidence is mounting that this prosecution is about some political football.”

Even so, the judge proceeded with a preliminary hearing Tuesday.

The case says officials falsely minimized what they knew

The case, announced Friday, accuses the former officials of falsely playing down their knowledge about a laptop the Justice Department says Hunter Biden abandoned at a computer repair shop in 2019.

Prosecutors say they claimed to have no independent insight into the FBI's recovery of the laptop while being interviewed in 2023 in a separate congressional Republican investigation into the Biden family. In reality, according to the criminal complaint, the two participated in numerous discussions about the laptop in their capacity as leaders of the since-disbanded FBI Foreign Influence Task Force that was set up to monitor foreign influence.

The Justice Department contends that the defendants' professed lack of knowledge misled the congressional investigation and impeded their efforts to scrutinize Biden family business dealings.

But Ronald Safer, a lawyer for Benavides, challenged that assertion during the hearing Tuesday as he questioned an FBI agent who investigated the case against the former officials. He also pointed out that Benavides, in 2023, was asked about events that occurred several years earlier, casting doubt on whether anything his client said was intentionally false.

“What evidence have you uncovered that in September of 2023, Mr. Benavides remembered the correct answers, in your view, to the questions asked about Hunter Biden but gave knowingly incorrect answers?” Safer asked.

It is a very intricate saga

The prosecution, a rare Justice Department criminal case against a former employee, revisits a tangled saga that roiled the final weeks of the 2020 race after the New York Post revealed the existence of a laptop it said had been dropped off by the younger Biden at a Delaware computer repair shop about a year earlier.

The Post said it had obtained a hard drive of the laptop from Rudy Giuliani, a close ally of President Donald Trump, and reported on some of the contents of the computer, including emails that appeared to show some of Hunter Biden's foreign business dealings.

The curious circumstances of the laptop’s discovery raised concerns among Democrats and former intelligence officials about the possibility of Russian involvement, particularly when the Trump administration’s own intelligence community had assessed that Moscow was attempting to undermine the candidacy of Democratic nominee Joe Biden, who went on to defeat Trump in 2020, and as Giuliani had traveled abroad looking for dirt on the Bidens.

But Trump's then-national intelligence director, John Ratcliffe, quickly sought to quell speculation about the laptop's provenance by saying there were no signs it had anything to do with Russian actors. The FBI said it had nothing to add to Ratcliffe's statement and investigated the younger Biden on gun and tax charges that later resulted in felony convictions. President Joe Biden pardoned his son in late 2024.

The accused led the Foreign Influence Task Force

The FBI officials under scrutiny, Floris and Benavides, were leaders of the Foreign Influence Task Force, which was established in the first Trump administration to police influence campaigns staged by Russia and other nations aimed at sowing discord, undermining democracy and spreading disinformation.

In that capacity, the FBI officials briefed Republican Sens. Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson in August 2020 as the lawmakers were doing their own investigation into Hunter Biden’s work in Ukraine. News of the briefing leaked, and the senators lashed out at the FBI, saying their efforts to scrutinize the Biden family had been discredited and falsely linked to Russian disinformation.

The criminal complaint accuses them of lying to lawmakers in 2023 by denying contemporaneous knowledge of the Biden laptop or participating in internal FBI conversations about it. Their lawyers have denied any allegations of wrongdoing.

The task force was disbanded in February 2025 by then-Attorney General Pam Bondi.