WASHINGTON — A federal magistrate allowed an unusual, dayslong examination this week of the effort to charge two former FBI officials with lying to Congress amid concerns about partisan prosecution ahead of the coming election.

The extended preliminary hearing delved into the details of the Justice Department’s case and focused on errors in the complaints against the pair, involvement by FBI Director Kash Patel in targeting the two and the case’s testifying FBI agent’s own misgivings about the political nature of the charges.

After the hearing, which stretched across three days and ended Thursday, Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui for the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia did not immediately act and said he would issue a written ruling Monday on whether the case could move forward.

The complaint alleged Nicole Floris and Bradley Benavides lied to Congress on two occasions in 2023 about their knowledge of investigations into President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden and a now-infamous laptop.

Floris’ attorney Mary Dorman urged the judge to address the “elephant in the room here.”

“The evidence is mounting that this prosecution is about some political football and not the law or the facts in this case,” Dorman said.

Usually the federal government avoids such hearings by proceeding with an indictment instead of a complaint. Regardless of the result of this week’s hearing, the government would need to seek an indictment to proceed with the case. Faruqui noted that there have been less than a half-dozen such hearings in the D.C. District Court in the last decade.

Under federal law, the government has 30 days from filing the complaint to secure an indictment. If the government does not secure an indictment, the case could be dismissed.

The case turns on what the pair told the House Judiciary Committee as it investigated what the FBI did in its probes of Hunter Biden in the lead-up to the 2020 election. The complaint alleges the pair misled the committee about a laptop left at a Delaware computer repair shop, as well as the involvement of the Foreign Influence Task Force in the FBI’s response to stories about the laptop ahead of the election.

Across the three-day hearing, Ron Safer, an attorney for Benavides, criticized the “Kafkaesque” nature of the case against his client. Defense attorneys elicited testimony about multiple errors in the complaint, as well as oddities such as the defendants accused of lying about their knowledge in August 2020 of a Senate report not released until September 2020.

FBI Agent Bryan Witt testified that agents never interviewed committee staff, and later discovered that the staff who responded to written questions about the alleged lies by Benavides and Floris were not necessarily present for all the interviews with them.

Witt also said he did not understand before this week that committees had partisan staff, and that only House Judiciary Committee GOP Majority Counsel Steve Castor responded to questions.

Only after investigators realized errors in the initial complaint did they conduct an interview with Castor, which Witt said occurred on Monday before the start of the sprawling hearing.

The defense also obtained a recording of an interview between Witt and investigators where they acknowledged a “f—up” in the complaint that they intended to correct.

Government attorneys objected to the scope of the hearing, arguing that the defendants should not be allowed to delve into possible political reasons for the case.

James Kirkpatrick, attorney for the Justice Department, argued that the pair took steps to downplay their knowledge of the investigations into Hunter Biden and that their attorneys are now trying to disguise those as innocent mistakes.

“Fool me two, three, four, five times — it is looking like less of a mistake,” Kirkpatrick said.

The DOJ announced the charges against Floris and Benavides on Friday, and they initially charged the pair with lying to Congress. The government attempted to file a superseding complaint against the pair Tuesday, replacing the initial charges with charges of false statements to Congress and adding obstruction or attempted obstruction of a congressional proceeding.

However, the DOJ filed that complaint without the signature of an attorney or approval of a magistrate judge, and Faruqui ordered that complaint struck from the case record.

Faruqui said he would not act as a “notary” for the federal government, and said that it was a fundamental constitutional principle that the government could not file criminal charges without a judicial signoff.

“Why today, on this one case, have you changed the entire history of how you charge cases?” Faruqui said. “It seems like you are afraid of me finding probable cause.”

Faruqui also criticized the government’s behavior more broadly in the case, saying the late-night unsigned complaint, the decision not to seek an indictment yet and the attempt to proceed with the charges without making a showing to a judge was making the case “a sideshow on top of a sideshow” that gave credence to the defense’s arguments about its partisan nature.

“Everything you are doing is making me more and more concerned there is something to that,” Faruqui said.

The pair worked for the FBI’s now-shuttered Foreign Influence Task Force, and their work drew Trump’s ire in part due to their alleged effort to tamp down on an intelligence report that suggested the Chinese government intended to interfere in the 2020 election on behalf of President Biden.

During a July 2026 primetime speech, Trump mentioned their work and called for them to be prosecuted. Witt testified in court this week that he received an assignment from Patel the next day to investigate Floris, Benavides and other members of the Foreign Influence Task Force.

Witt said he provided weekly updates to Patel and other senior leaders in the FBI, which was unusual. He also said he was concerned about the political nature of the case when he received the assignment.

While he said he had not called it a witch hunt, Witt said “people generally viewed it as that around the office.”

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