U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s office walked back claims hours before a hearing on charges that two former FBI officials lied to Congress about probes into former president’s son Hunter Biden.
Pirro’s prosecutors filed a revised FBI affidavit at 12:22 a.m. Tuesday in the case against Nicole Floris and Bradley Benavides, former leaders of the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, court records show.
The docket shows the two are due before U.S. Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui at 11 a.m. Faruqui set that hearing after prosecutors requested more time, and it will address whether there is enough evidence to move the case forward.
After the magistrate refused to delay the hearing, the prosecutors, at the last moment, watered down the claims they would have to defend today.
FBI Special Agent Byron Militello swore to the original affidavit by phone on Oct. 20, according to the document.
The new version is in the name of FBI Special Agent Bryan Witt, and the filing shows blank lines for his signature and the date of his oath.
That means the agent who swore to the original claims is not the agent whose name appears on the revised ones.
“I did not,” Benavides told House Judiciary Committee staff in 2023 when asked whether he had discussed the FBI’s possession of Hunter Biden’s laptop with anyone from the bureau’s Criminal Division, according to both affidavits. Prosecutors say that answer was false.
To support that, the original affidavit said a Criminal Division unit chief, identified as FBI Employee 1, “made clear” during an October 2020 meeting with Benavides that the FBI had the laptop’s contents and that the laptop was Hunter Biden’s.
The new version says FBI Employee 1 “was present when personnel from the FBI Criminal Division made clear” those facts. That moves the job of telling Benavides from the government’s witness to other officials in the room.
“FBI Employee 1’s testimony is hearsay, and hearsay repeating what were basically lies from the trial team,” independent journalist Marcy Wheeler wrote Tuesday on her emptywheel blog.
The original affidavit called FBI Employee 1 “the primary conduit” between the Criminal Division and the task force, while the new version calls him “one of the primary conduits.”
The first affidavit also described him as “the lead agent overseeing” the Hunter Biden investigations. The new one calls him “an agent involved in overseeing” them.
The government also originally claimed Floris and Benavides were “at the center” of the task force’s dealings with the Hunter Biden case teams. The new version says they were “involved in” those dealings.
The original also said Floris took part in “scores of conversations” about Hunter Biden. The new version says she took part in “conversations.”
Even as prosecutors pulled back those claims, the new complaint adds a second charge, obstruction of a congressional proceeding, which accuses the pair of acting “corruptly,” the filings show.
Wheeler wrote that the charge comes “without adding any evidence to support corrupt purpose, an element of that offense.”
The case was filed 10 days before the Nov. 3 midterm elections, and Floris’s attorneys said it was “no coincidence the government is filing these nonsense charges now."
The case fits a broader push by FBI Director Kash Patel to reexamine past FBI controversies that President Donald Trump’s supporters have long cared about.
Wheeler wrote that unless prosecutors persuade Faruqui the new complaint “buys them a few more days,” one of the two agents “can be expected to take the stand” at Tuesday’s hearing.