Lawyers for an ex-FBI official charged with lying to Congress lashed out at federal prosecutors in Washington for adding an “unsigned and unsworn” criminal count to her case just hours before a court hearing.
“What is going on at the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office?” counsel for the former official, Nikki Floris, said in a statement Tuesday morning. “In our combined decades of DOJ service, we have never seen or even heard of something like this being filed.”
Overnight, that office, led by Jeanine Pirro, submitted a “superseding criminal complaint” charging Floris and co-defendant Bradley Benavides, another ex-FBI official, with obstruction and attempted obstruction of a congressional proceeding.
The new count comes on top of the charge of making false statements to Congress that the Department of Justice unveiled four days earlier.
Floris and Benavides were initially accused of lying when they testified to the House Judiciary Committee in 2023 about their involvement in investigations of then-President Joe Biden‘s son, Hunter Biden.
The charges against the former agents were filed shortly before Election Day, breaking with longstanding DOJ guidance and fueling more concerns from election observers and Democrats about how the Trump administration may try to interfere in the midterms.
The case against Floris and Benavides was filed via a sealed criminal complaint in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. That’s distinct from a criminal indictment, which a prosecutor must obtain from a grand jury.
A criminal complaint, which does not require a grand jury’s approval and can therefore be filed much faster, is often used to establish probable cause to get an arrest warrant in situations where prosecutors need to move quickly.
But the relevant conduct in the case against Floris and Benavides took place more than three years prior.
“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 former FBI official’s lawyers wrote in Tuesday’s statement.
“In our combined decades of DOJ service, we have never seen or even heard of something like this being filed. That’s because the public lodging of criminal charges must be authorized by the grand jury, a judge, or the defendant herself,” they wrote.
“Here, the government has taken that power for itself in a desperate attempt to delay our client’s right to challenge the charges in court and litigate this case in the media, rather than the courtroom,” they asserted.
Floris and Benavides were arrested Friday and have been released, their case docket shows. A preliminary hearing was set for Tuesday at 11 a.m. ET before Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui.
“We have asked to address this outrageous government conduct against a decorated public servant at today’s court hearing,” Floris’ legal team wrote.
Ahead of that hearing, the attorneys filed a motion asking the court to strike the superseding criminal complaint, arguing it is legally deficient and was filed in bad faith.
“It represents a serious abuse of the criminal charging process, 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,” the filing reads.
“It demonstrates a flagrant disregard for a fundamental principle of our nation’s criminal justice system: the presumption of innocence. And it reflects a troubling disregard for the prosecutors’ obligations not to heighten the condemnation of the accused.”
An attorney for Benavides and Pirro’s office did not immediately respond to CNBC’s requests for comment.
This is developing news. Please check back for updates.