FBI agents accused of making lying in Hunter Biden investigations call charges ‘serious abuse’

Two former senior FBI officials who the Justice Department charged with allegedly making false statements to Congress in the probe into Hunter Biden’s laptop called the charges “a serious abuse of the criminal charging process.” According to the Justice Department’s Oct. 20 affidavit, former FBI officials Nikki Floris and Bradley Benavides made “materially false statements” as part of the House Judiciary Committee’s 2023 probe about their involvement in a specialized FBI foreign-influence task force that was investigating Biden, the son of former President Joe Biden, and their knowledge of his laptop.
The DOJ added an obstruction of a congressional proceeding charge against the two former FBI officials prior to a hearing on the matter on Tuesday. Both former agents deny the charges, ABC News reported. 
Floris’ attorneys said the “last-ditch filing before the pre-scheduled preliminary hearing in this case is not merely procedurally improper and substantively deficient.” 
“It represents a serious abuse of the criminal charging process,” the attorneys continued, “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.” 
According to documents filed overnight, the DOJ alleges that the two former agents knowingly lied to Congress on two separate occasions in 2023. The department alleges the false statements were made “for the purpose of minimizing or concealing [the FBI Foreign Influence Task Force’s] engagement with, and communications about, the Hunter Biden investigations and to impede the Congressional investigation.” 
In a statement responding to the filing, Floris’ attorneys said that in their combined decades of experience they’d never seen or heard of “something like this being filed.” 
“In the middle of the night, the government filed an unsigned and unsworn complaint attempting to fix the issues with their original charge against Ms. Floris and adding a new charge just as meritless as the first one,” the attorneys said. 

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