Lawyers for a former FBI official charged with lying to Congress have slammed federal prosecutors in Washington for adding “unsigned and unsworn” criminal counts to her case hours before a court hearing.
“What’s going on in the DCUS attorney’s office?” Nikki Floris, the former official’s attorney, said in a statement Tuesday morning. “In our decades at the Department of Justice, we have never seen or heard of a lawsuit like this filed.”
Overnight, that office, led by Jeanine Pirro, filed a “surrogate criminal complaint” charging Floris and co-defendant Bradley Benavidez, another former FBI official, with filibustering and attempted obstruction of Congress.
The new charges are in addition to charges of lying to Congress that the Justice Department announced four days ago.
Floris and Benavidez were initially accused of lying before the House Judiciary Committee in 2023 about their involvement in the investigation of then-President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden.
The charges against the former officials, filed just before Election Day and contrary to long-standing Justice Department guidelines, have heightened concerns among election observers and Democrats about how the Trump administration may seek to interfere in the midterm elections.
The case against Mr. Floris and Mr. Benavidez was filed through a sealed criminal complaint in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. This is different from a criminal indictment, which prosecutors must obtain from a grand jury.
Because criminal charges do not require grand jury approval, they can be filed more quickly and are often used to establish probable cause to obtain arrest warrants in situations where prosecutors need to act quickly.
However, the actions related to the case against Mr. Floris and Mr. Benavidez took place more than three years ago.
“In the middle of the night, the government filed an unsigned and unsworn complaint in an attempt to resolve the problems with the original charges against Ms. Floris, and then added new charges that are just as meaningless as the original charges,” the former FBI official’s attorney said in a statement Tuesday.
“In my combined decades at the Department of Justice, I have never seen or heard of a case like this being filed, because the public filing of criminal charges requires approval by a grand jury, judge, or the defendant himself,” they wrote.
“Here, the government has taken that power into its own hands in a desperate attempt to delay our client’s right to contest the charges in court and litigate this case in the media rather than in court,” they argued.
Floris and Benavidez were arrested Friday and have since been released, dockets show. A preliminary hearing was scheduled for Tuesday at 11 a.m. ET before Judge Zia Faruqui.
“We called for today’s court hearing to address this outrageous government action against a decorated public servant,” Floris’ attorneys wrote.
Prior to the hearing, lawyers filed a motion asking the court to dismiss the superseding criminal charges, arguing that they were legally flawed and filed in bad faith.
“This represents a gross abuse of the criminal prosecution process, an alarming disregard for the judicial safeguards governing the initiation of criminal proceedings, and a calculated effort to circumvent judicial oversight at the scheduled preliminary hearing and shield the government’s claims from adversarial scrutiny,” the filing said.
“This shows an egregious disregard for the presumption of innocence, which is a fundamental principle of our criminal justice system, and reflects an alarming disregard for the prosecutor’s duty not to elevate the blame of the accused.”
Lawyers from Mr. Benavidez and Mr. Pirro’s firm did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
This is developing news. Please check back for the latest information.
