The FBI spent years burying the Hunter Biden laptop story.
Now two of the officials at the center of that operation are facing federal charges – and the DOJ just got caught trying to rewrite its own complaint in the dead of night.
What a federal prosecutor admitted in open court about the Hunter Biden laptop story will haunt this case forever.
The Midnight Filing Nobody Was Supposed to Notice
Former FBI intelligence chief Nikki Floris and counterintelligence deputy Bradley Benavides were arrested last week for lying to Congress about their roles in the Hunter Biden laptop investigation.
Both were senior figures in the FBI's Foreign Influence Task Force – the since-disbanded unit Republicans accused of working to label the Hunter Biden laptop as Russian disinformation just weeks before the 2020 election.
The original charges were damaging enough.
https://twitter.com/BreannaMorello/status/2115455377563099578?
Floris, prosecutors said, was at the "center" of task force activities involving Hunter Biden and had participated in "scores of conversations" about him.
Benavides allegedly told Congress he learned the FBI had Biden's laptop through Wikipedia.
Wikipedia.
Hours before Tuesday's scheduled probable cause hearing, the DOJ filed a superseding complaint in the dead of night.
The new filing softened the language – suddenly Floris was only "involved in" conversations instead of being at their "center" – and tacked on new obstruction charges.
Nobody signed it.
Nobody swore to it.
And nobody asked a judge first.
The Prosecutor Walked Into the Courtroom and Said the Quiet Part Out Loud
Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui – who earlier this year apologized to Cole Allen, the man accused of trying to assassinate President Trump at the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner – did not let it slide.
"I think they should have filed nothing," Faruqui said from the bench.
He told prosecutors that cases in this district are never charged by complaint this way – unsigned, unsworn, without judicial authorization obtained first.
"Why today on this one case have you changed the entire history of how you charge cases?" Faruqui demanded. "It appears that it makes it look like the United States is afraid of me trying to find probable cause."
Then came the admission.
Lead prosecutor John Borchert told the judge it was the first time in his career he had filed new charges against someone without going through judicial review.
The first time in his career.
And he said it out loud in open court.
Faruqui threw out the superseding complaint entirely and ordered the preliminary hearing to proceed on the original charges – the ones that still place Floris at the "center" of everything.
What They Were Actually Covering Up
This case goes back to October 2020, when the New York Post published emails from Hunter Biden's laptop documenting his overseas business dealings and raising serious questions about his father's role in them.
The FBI had the laptop.
The Foreign Influence Task Force – run by Floris and Benavides – was briefed on it routinely, according to their own colleagues.
FBI Employee 1, identified in court documents, stated that if Floris testified she had no discussions about an investigation into Hunter Biden, "that testimony would have been inaccurate" – because he had "routine and regular discussions with Floris regarding the investigations into Hunter Biden."
Both officials told Congress they were barely aware of any of it.
The FBI under Chris Wray was simultaneously pushing the Russian disinformation narrative – a claim Trump's own Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe directly contradicted.
The task force was quietly disbanded in February 2025.
FBI Director Kash Patel has said one of the two officials privately claimed to be running a shadow government operation during the 2020 election.
They Panicked Because the Evidence Is Real
Here is what the DOJ's midnight maneuver actually tells you.
The Trump Justice Department built a real case, got it to court, and then watched their own prosecutors try to quietly swap out the strongest language hours before a judge could scrutinize it.
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That is not what you do when you are confident.
The grand jury shortcut tells the same story.
Grand juries in Washington, D.C. have repeatedly refused to indict in high-profile Trump-era accountability cases, so the DOJ went by criminal complaint instead – the procedural shortcut normally reserved for imminent public dangers and flight risks.
These two former FBI officials are neither.
The DOJ has witnesses who say Floris lied to Congress about conversations she was having routinely.
They have a deputy director who told lawmakers he learned about the laptop from Wikipedia – while sitting in classified briefings about it.
The evidence that the FBI worked to suppress the Hunter Biden story ahead of the 2020 election is not going away.
The only question now is whether DOJ prosecutors have the spine to stand behind what they filed – with their names on it, in the daylight, in front of a judge.
Sources:
- Robert Schmad, "Judge who apologized to accused would-be Trump assassin lights up DOJ in Hunter Biden FBI case," Fox News, October 27, 2026.
- "2 ex-FBI officials charged with lying to Congress about Hunter Biden's laptop," Associated Press via WSBTV, October 23, 2026.
- "Ex-FBI officials face charges over congressional testimony on Hunter Biden probe," Northeast Times, October 23, 2026.
- "2 ex-FBI officials charged with making false statements about Hunter Biden's laptop," Associated Press via Fox5Vegas, October 23, 2026.
