Trump’s laptop revenge case crushed as judge scolds DOJ

Acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche testifies before a Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing on his nomination to be attorney general, on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., U.S., July 15, 2026. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

In a move that is a stinging rebuke to the Justice Department, a federal judge on Monday dismissed its criminal complaint against two ex-FBI officials. The case, which has put President Donald Trump’s old grievances over the 2020 election in the spotlight, is now dealt a sharp blow.

The accused are Nikki Floris and Bradley Benavides, who are said to have falsely downplayed their knowledge of a laptop prosecutors contend was Hunter Biden’s. U.S.

Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui dismissed the charges following an eventful hearing at which he reprimanded the prosecutors for some unorthodox methods. He said he was “deeply troubled by what has happened here in this case,” and that what happened “cannot be described as anything other than weaponization.”

According to the New York Times, Faruqui, a former federal prosecutor himself, said the government made a number of errors in its “slapdash job” of a case. He said no evidence had been presented to the court that the two officials’ statements were knowingly false or material, and that the government failed to establish a motive for making false statements.

He told prosecutors it was “incredibly unfair” that the department came into court with such a weak case.

Faruqui asked the prosecutors why they would go by way of a criminal complaint, normally the course of action when one must swiftly take a defendant into custody, as opposed to putting it before a grand jury for an indictment.

Last week, at a preliminary hearing, the judge let the department have it for filing an amended complaint with an extra charge overnight and on the docket without so much as running it past the court first. He said he had never seen that done. “It was a rush to charge, and that was a mistake,” Faruqui said of the case.

An FBI agent who was on the case provided the most telling evidence. He told the court he had concerns the inquiry would be viewed as “political.”

In his testimony, he said FBI Director Kash Patel set the probe in motion, kept close watch on it, and opened it hours afterTrump gave a speech on election security last July. “This does not feel like an investigation,” Faruqui said.

According to the Justice Department, the case concerns how Floris and Benavides misled Congress in 2023 about what they knew and did in connection with the investigation of the laptop left at a computer shop in Delaware by Hunter Biden in 2019.

Yet the prosecution has also been in step with the sort of complaints Trump and his Republican allies have leveled: that the FBI was trying to put damaging info about the Biden family out of sight during the 2020 campaign that Joe Biden won.

Prosecutors cited a 2020 briefing given to lawmakers by the two, something GOP Sens. Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin have maintained was employed to undermine their own work and link it to Russian disinformation.

The Justice Department could yet seek a grand jury indictment of the pair, whose counsel wanted the case thrown out. But that is no easy road; the AP reports prosecutors have had trouble of late in getting a D.C. grand jury to sanction a politically charged case of this nature.

As things stand, the ruling is an embarrassment for Trump’s Justice Department in a prosecution that, per its own agent, was ordered from above and set in motion within hours of a presidential address.

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