A magistrate judge in Washington just had to teach the Department of Justice something it should have learned in its first week of law school: you don't get to announce new criminal charges by filing an unsigned piece of paper and hoping nobody checks.
That is roughly what happened. Prosecutors filed a superseding complaint against former FBI officials Nikki Floris and Bradley Benavides, adding obstruction charges over their 2023 House testimony about the Hunter Biden investigations. They did it without judicial authorization and without a signature. Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui refused to approve it, said a judge must find probable cause first, pointed the government toward a grand jury, and had the filing scrubbed from the public docket. He left prosecutors free to try again the proper way.
The ruling looks like housekeeping. It is more than that, because the procedure is the protection. Probable cause, a judge's signature and a grand jury are the few things standing between a citizen and a prosecutor with a grudge. When a Justice Department skips them, you are entitled to ask whether it is in a hurry because it has a case or because it has a purpose.
The purpose is not hard to guess. This is the same department that indicted James Comey and Letitia James, only to see both cases thrown out after a judge found the prosecutor who brought them was unlawfully appointed. Grand juries in Washington, hardly a nest of radicals, have balked at this administration's requests. A department that keeps losing at the gate does not suddenly deserve trust because the defendants this time worked at the FBI.
Let me be fair to the other side. Lying to Congress is a real crime, and the Left should not pretend that a badge or a pension makes anyone immune. If prosecutors can show these two knowingly lied under oath, they should say so to a grand jury and make the case. That is what Judge Faruqui told them to do. Nobody on the Left should be defending a perjurer.
But look at the story the prosecution is built on. For years the Right has insisted that the FBI and the Justice Department sheltered Hunter Biden. Yet his own father's Justice Department kept a Trump-appointed U.S. attorney, David Weiss, on the case. Weiss brought gun and tax charges, won a conviction at trial, and the president then pardoned his son. Those are not the facts of a cover-up. They are the facts of a politically excruciating prosecution that went forward anyway. Turning the agents who worked that investigation into defendants rewrites that record into a morality play where every law enforcement official who ever touched a Biden file is presumed guilty of something.
That should alarm anyone who has ever worked in or near public service. Congressional testimony is high-pressure, often hostile, and frequently designed to produce a sound bite rather than a fact. If every answer a career official gives to a partisan committee can later be rebranded as obstruction by a successor administration, the lesson to civil servants is simple: do not testify, do not investigate anyone powerful, and above all do not be on the wrong side of the next election. That is not accountability. It is a loyalty test with a prosecutor attached.
Democrats have their own homework. For years too many of them treated the Justice Department's independence as a nice-to-have, a courtesy that mattered only when the other party was abusing it. Now they are discovering that norms you don't defend when they are inconvenient are hard to rebuild when they are gone.
So credit the judge. He did not decide whether Floris and Benavides are guilty. He decided that the government must follow the rules before it ruins people's lives. In 2025, that is no small thing to have to say, and it is a sad commentary that it needed saying at all.
