Last month, two former officials from the FBI’s since-disbanded Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF), the unit that was supposedly protecting American elections from "malign foreign influence," were arrested and charged with lying to Congress about what they knew of Hunter Biden's laptop.
Nikki Floris served as deputy assistant director of the FITF, and documents show she boasted of running something tantamount to a “shadow government,” pulling the levers of federal power without the Trump administration’s consent. Her underling, Bradley Benavides, ran the task force.
"Evidence shows that Floris discussed the FBI's investigations into Hunter Biden routinely for more than a year both within the FITF and with others in the FBI," the DOJ said in a press release.
We thought this meant justice would prevail.
So much for that.
On Monday, U.S. Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui tossed the criminal complaint against Floris and Benavides from the bench in Washington, D.C., then turned his fire on the prosecutors. "What has transpired here cannot be described as anything other than weaponization," Faruqui said. He also branded the case a "rush job" directed by President Donald Trump and FBI Director Kash Patel.
Weaponization? That's the word he chose to describe an effort to hold FBI officials accountable for allegedly misleading Congress about one of the most consequential cover-ups of the 2020 election? That’s rich.
Prosecutors alleged that Floris and Benavides made false statements during 2023 congressional interviews about what they knew and what they did, and that the FBI's own internal communications and witness accounts told a very different story. Republicans have argued for years that political bias drove the bureau's handling of Hunter Biden information in the run-up to the 2020 election. There was every reason to bring this case to trial. Now, a rogue activist judge has put an end to that.
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Faruqui spent a string of hearings attacking the government's process, demanding to know why prosecutors filed a criminal complaint instead of going to a grand jury for an indictment. At a preliminary hearing the week before, he tore into prosecutors over an unsigned, unsworn revised complaint that added obstruction charges without his approval, and he struck it from the record. That forced the government back to the original charges of lying to Congress. Defense attorneys pounced, arguing the revised complaint had actually scaled back the government's earlier claims about how deeply the two officials were involved in the Hunter Biden investigations.
Appointed a magistrate judge in 2020, Faruqui has repeatedly gone after Trump-era federal prosecutors. If his name sounds familiar to you, it should. This is the same guy who apologized to Cole Allen, the man accused of plotting to assassinate Trump at the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner. In May, he publicly agonized over Allen's treatment behind bars.
"To me, it's extremely disturbing that he was put in five-point restraints, a person with no criminal history," Faruqui said. "It's troubling. I never heard of one Jan. 6 defendant who was put in five-point restraints or in a safe cell. If the only way to keep him safe is the most punitive thing, that's a problem."
Consider the pattern. A man accused of trying to kill the president gets the judge's sympathy. Two FBI officials accused of lying to Congress walk out of his courtroom free of charges. The prosecutors who tried to hold them accountable get accused of weaponizing the system.
Faruqui has also clashed repeatedly with U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro's office over cases from the administration's law enforcement surge in D.C., accusing her team of overreach for bringing cases into federal court that he insisted belonged in local court. Every time this administration tries to enforce the law in his jurisdiction, Faruqui seems to find a reason to stand in the way.
This is the real tragedy of the past decade in American law enforcement.
The people who abused federal power to tilt an election have spent years hiding behind the institutions they corrupted, and every time the country inches toward a reckoning, some activist in a robe ruins everything.
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