Probable cause is one of the lowest bars in American law. It asks only whether there is a reasonable basis to believe a crime occurred. Federal prosecutors clear it so routinely that the old joke about grand juries indicting ham sandwiches has become a cliché. Yet Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui looked at the Justice Department's case against two former senior FBI officials, Nikki Floris and Bradley Benavides, and found it did not clear even that. He found no evidence they intentionally lied to Congress. He also struck an unsigned revised complaint that prosecutors tried to use to add an obstruction charge.
An unsigned charging document. In a prosecution of people accused of dishonesty.
This is not how the justice system behaves when it is pursuing wrongdoing. It is how it behaves when the outcome was chosen first and the case is being built backward. The pattern is now familiar. Officials who crossed the president, or who were part of institutions he has cast as enemies, find themselves charged on thin theories, rushed timelines and paperwork that embarrasses the department in open court. Two things are happening at once. The prosecutions are being brought, and they are collapsing. The public gets the image of a perp walk. The defendants get the legal bills, the reputational damage and the lesson everyone else is meant to absorb.
That lesson is the real product. These two testified before the House Judiciary Committee, which is how congressional oversight is supposed to work. Whatever one thinks of the Hunter Biden investigation, and the Left has no obligation to pretend it was a model of prosecutorial restraint, the principle matters. If career officials can be criminally charged because their testimony displeases a future administration, no official will speak candidly to Congress again. They will lawyer up, say little, and keep one eye on whoever holds the charging authority. The same Republicans who spent years warning about a "weaponized" Justice Department are now cheering a department that appears to have written the manual.
The false-statements statute is serious and I want it enforced. Lying to Congress corrodes oversight. But a statute that punishes real lies cannot be turned into a tool for punishing politically inconvenient recollections. Intent is the whole ballgame, and the judge found no evidence of it. Prosecutors who cannot show that someone knowingly lied are not enforcing the law. They are conducting a political exercise with a federal seal on it.
Democrats should resist a lazy victory lap. Faruqui's ruling is not the system working so much as one judge doing his job after the system's gatekeepers failed. The Justice Department can still seek further review or go to a grand jury, and the threat itself is part of the punishment. A defendant cleared on Monday can be re-charged on Friday, with years of exposure and expense in between. If the institutions meant to restrain prosecutorial abuse are only as strong as individual judges willing to say no, then we are relying on luck.
The Left also has to face its own history. For years, many of us defended the FBI as an institution of integrity whenever it was attacked from the right. That reflex was too uncritical. The Bureau has real abuses in its past, from COINTELPRO to the surveillance of Muslim communities, and our argument now should not be that the FBI is sacred. It should be that no one, including the FBI, should be prosecuted without evidence. That is a principle worth defending precisely because it protects people we do not like.
The ruling should be read as a warning. A case this weak was filed at all, a revised complaint arrived unsigned, and the department that brought it would not immediately comment. Those facts describe an institution that no longer feels obliged to justify itself to anyone but the person at the top.
