MAGA Fell For Its Own Hunter Biden Laptop Conspiracy Theory And Brought A Case Too Dumb To Survive A Probable Cause Hearing

You may have heard some talk in the last week or so regarding a criminal case against two former FBI agents, supposedly having something to do with Hunter Biden's infamous laptop." On Monday, a magistrate judge dismissed the case, noting that it was pure political hackery.

A federal judge on Monday tossed out a criminal case accusing two former senior FBI officials of lying about their involvement in an investigation of former President Joe Biden's son Hunter, excoriating the Justice Department for bringing what he said was a political prosecution before Tuesday's midterm elections.

US Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui threw out the case at a remarkably early stage, finding that prosecutors had not shown sufficient evidence that the two officials, Nikki Floris and Bradley Benavides, both former high-ranking FBI counterintelligence officials, had knowingly made false statements.

What has transpired here cannot be described as anything other than weaponization" of federal law enforcement, Faruqui said during a court hearing.

But the reason behind the actual case is so stupid, and so convoluted, that it's difficult for most people to follow. Indeed, MS Now's Steve Benen put up a post correctly calling the case dumb," but even he got the details wrong, claiming that the FBI agents worked on the Hunter Biden laptop case.

But part of what makes this case so dumb is that the two agents in question did not work on the Hunter Biden case at all, even if most of the media coverage suggests otherwise. They were working on something entirely different. They were arrested because, years later, they were asked during a congressional interview about their knowledge of the laptop, and both answered that they didn't really know much about the laptop (which, again, was not something they were directly working on), and that was the lie to Congress" the DOJ went after them for.

Part of this actually has to do with the never ending MAGA fantasy that Hunter Biden's Laptop" was the scandal of the century. In the past, I've dealt with the complete fabrications regarding the false claims that the FBI told Twitter to censor the story about the laptop. That did not happen. But some of the conspiracy theories about this revolve around the claim that the store owner where Biden had brought some computer equipment in for repair had delivered hard drives to the FBI a year or so earlier.

It is clear that the FBI did get access to some computer equipment that once belonged to Hunter Biden in late 2019. Though, it appears that this material was somewhat different than what became the source material for the infamous NY Post story in October 2020. At issue was that there were multiple copies of the data in question. There was a laptop and an external hard drive. There was data that the repair shop owner (John Paul Mac Isaac) copied from the laptop in the spring of 2019 to the hard drive as part of his attempt to repair (both machines were then never picked up).

The FBI was alerted to this leftover equipment and eventually got a subpoena and picked up the machines in late 2019. Mac Isaac apparently made a backup copy of all the data, and in 2020 got some information from the backup to Rudy Giuliani through a colleague of Giuliani, who then got it to the NY Post, who published their story about it.

The FBI team that picked up the computer equipment in late 2019 were investigating Biden for a few things, including financial impropriety. There is little indication that there was anything all that important on either the laptop or the hard drive. But, because the laptop" looms so large in the minds of MAGA conspiracy theorists, they are also convinced that it was a HUGE priority of everyone in the FBI in 2019 and 2020. They are positive that basically every FBI agent was intimately familiar with the laptop and how important it was.

And that means that they assumed that when the NY Post story broke in October of 2020, everyone at the FBI immediately knew that the story was legit" because the FBI already had possession of one copy of the data. That's part of the reason they claim it was so damning that the FBI told Twitter to take down the story (which, again, the FBI never actually did).

The confusion (or, really, the confirmation bias) came from conspiracy theorists mashing that together with an entirely separate story: FBI folks who worked on foreign interference" had given very general warnings to social media platforms to watch out for foreign agents, including the Russians, launching misinformation campaigns targeting high profile figures in US politics. People from Twitter and Facebook have said (sometimes under oath) that FBI agents gave them general briefings to watch for Russians leaking hacked data" and for content targeting key political figures. Reports are mixed on whether Hunter Biden's name ever came up, and if it did, it was likely in passing, as one example in a longer list.

The conspiracy theorists believe - with no evidence - that the reason Hunter Biden may have been briefly, incidentally, mentioned in these discussions was because the traitors in the FBI were trying to suppress the eventual leak of the laptop" which THE FBI ALREADY POSSESSED!!!" But, again, the more likely explanation was just that the agents working on foreign influence had no idea about the laptop (which was part of a financial crimes investigation) and were generally mentioning the kinds of people who might be targeted, which would likely include anyone in and around the Biden family (and likely also the Obamas, the Clintons, and Kamala Harris).

It's worth restating, because you need to understand this chain of weak connections to understand how this case was eventually brought: the nutjobs believed that the FBI got the laptop and hard drive in 2019, knew it was full of damning stuff, then collaborated with social media companies to eventually suppress the bombshell reporting on it, because they wanted Biden to win. That's the scandal in a nutshell. The problem is that none of that is true.

So, that takes us to this year. Back in July, Donald Trump gave a rambling speech blaming China for the 2020 election, even though the evidence" he released showed that everyone agreed that Russia had, in fact, tried to meddle in the 2020 election while China had decided to sit it out. In that speech, Trump whined that rogue bureaucrats" had suppressed information about Chinese meddling and kept it from him.

They seemed to concentrate on Floris in particular because she had convinced the FBI to retract an initial report that the Albany office had released, based on a highly questionable Chinese source about potential interference in the election. But the sourcing was sketchy (he claimed China was building bunkers in Republican states). So Floris convinced the FBI to pull back that report - which Trump now claims was an attempt to hide from him that China was interfering in the election.

However, as a part of Floris getting that report retracted, she made a joke, saying she was running a shadow government" within the FBI.

Because of her frustration with the shoddy report coming out of Albany, she pushed to have all FBI offices releasing any reports regarding foreign interference in the election go through her office handling Foreign Influence campaigns since they'd have a better sense of what's real. In explaining that effort to a colleague, she jokingly texted i'm basically running a shadow government across the FBI at this point."

But, of course, Donald Trump and Kash Patel misread that to mean that she was part of the deep state" running a shadow government" in the US. Indeed, they dropped the across the FBI" part of her quote, making it sound like she was running a shadow US government. Trump mentioned it in his big China interfered!" speech.

One email among intelligence analysts admitted that they had, quote, deliberately massaged the presidential daily briefing to withhold information regarding Chinese activities related to the election. Another official inside the FBI wrote that she was running, quote, a shadow government, unquote, to keep intelligence about China's election meddling from becoming known and to keep it away from the honorable press.

That's... not at all what she said or implied. But, Kash Patel had been given his orders and immediately ordered an investigation. Patel highlighted the very out of context shadow government" quote in his triumphant tweet about the arrest of Floris and Benavides, while also accusing them of lying about their (non-existent) involvement in the Hunter Biden case.

According to testimony at last week's three-day preliminary hearing (aptly covered by Anna Bower at Lawfare), the very next day after the speech, Kash Patel directly tasked an FBI agent (something that agent testified was unprecedented in his 24-year career) to investigate former FBI agents for apparently not telling Trump enough about China's (non-existent) attempts to interfere in the 2020 election.

Special Agent Bryan Witt (or possibly Special Agent Byron Militello - we'll get to that) apparently then just combed through everything Floris and Benavides did to try to find something to charge them with. When the original assignment (that recalled report from the FBI's Albany office on Chinese interference) turned up nothing chargeable, investigators shifted to the most technical of technicalities.

In 2023 (nearly three years after the NY Post story about the laptop) both Floris and Benavides were called before a congressional committee that was fully down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole that the FBI tried to suppress the story of the laptop. So they asked those two FBI agents about their knowledge of the laptop and both basically said yo, that wasn't our job, didn't really know much about it, we were focused on actual foreign influence campaigns."

But, the FBI then went back to their communications from when the NY Post story came out, and showed that Floris and Benavides had been curious about whether or not the FBI had the laptop in question, and had asked around to find out more info about it. The complaint makes a big deal of the fact that the FBI criminal team that got the laptop had met with Benavides and Floris in August of 2020 (before the NY Post story came out) as part of preparations for some defensive briefings" (basically warning people that they may be targets of foreign influence campaigns) given to some Republican Senators (Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson). The affidavit is vague on this point, hinting (without strong evidence) that FITF prepared to discuss Hunter Biden as a potential target during that defensive briefing.

When the NY Post story came out, Benavides was asking around about whether the FBI actually had the laptop, which suggests he didn't know they had it:

So, that indicates that he didn't know about the laptop and was just curious if the FBI had a copy. Benavides and Floris then worked with others at the FBI to figure out how to answer questions - including from Senator Mark Warner - regarding their own estimation of whether or not the files the NY Post revealed were real or if they were a part of a foreign influence campaign, as some suspected. Benavides basically pointed out that they should say that the FBI has not made that determination in this specific instance and... won't comment on investigations or investigative actions."

Basically, the foreign influence side of the FBI was pretty much in the dark as well and didn't want to say too much.

After sending that out, he kept digging with other folks at the FBI to find out about the laptop:

Benavides left the FBI in November of that year, but the complaint details that Floris had a few more conversations about Hunter Biden over random emails at the end of 2020 and throughout 2021. It cites... seven whole emails over a period of 10 months, but makes it seem like that number of emails meant that it was a regular topic between FLORIS and her FITF subordinates."

Three years later, in 2023, Rep. Jim Jordan had the House Judiciary Committee on a basically never ending quest to accuse the deep state" of conspiring" with Twitter to suppress this story. As part of that, he hauled both Floris and Benavides in for questioning. During that questioning, both of them were quizzed repeatedly about the Hunter Biden laptop" and both said - accurately - that it wasn't something they were investigating, because it wasn't. Remember, they were focused on foreign influence campaigns, and the only place that crossed over was some early questions about whether or not the NY Post story was the result of just such a campaign, which it turned out not to be.

Floris repeatedly points out that her work had nothing really to do with Biden's laptop. Benavides claims that he remembers some of the hubbub about the laptop when the NY Post story was published, but didn't recall any of the details until he reviewed the Wikipedia page days before the Jim Jordan hearing.

From this... the DOJ claims that Floris and Benavides lied to Congress.

That's literally it.

Because when the NY Post story came out, the two had brief discussions about it (effectively crossing t's and dotting i's since it wasn't really within their purview). Then, three years later, Jim Jordan hauled them in while trying to gin up a fake controversy that the FBI suppressed info about the laptop, and they accurately said it wasn't their thing. And then, three years after that, because Donald Trump demanded Kash Patel find some scalps, the FBI went hunting for literally anything they could find.

Meanwhile, the DOJ continued its track record of absolute incompetence in this case. They filed a complaint that includes a statement of facts signed by Special Agent Byron Militello which made some pretty big claims. Oddly, they did not go to a grand jury to try to get an indictment first. It's possible they realized just how weak the case was and knew they'd never get an indictment (at least not before the midterms, which is what they clearly wanted). So they just filed the complaint without it, which is odd. But that also entitled the defendants to a preliminary hearing, which meant someone from the FBI would have to answer questions on the stand about all of it.

So, then, just hours before that hearing was supposed to happen, they tried to file a superseding criminal complaint" with a declaration that was quite similar to Militello's (though toned down in some key areas) and this time signed by a different Special Agent, Bryan Witt. But again they fucked up. A complaint needs to be made under oath before a magistrate, but they hadn't done that. Also, there's no such thing as a superseding complaint. There are superseding indictments, but that's different.

The DOJ basically looks like it has no clue what it's doing.

When called on this by the magistrate judge, Faruqui, the DOJ said that you could do a superseding complaint and that they didn't need a probable cause finding from the judge because they weren't seeking a new arrest warrant (that's not how any of this works). Faruqui (correctly) refused to treat the filing as a complaint.

Then Witt (who signed the later declaration) was put on the stand where he basically had to admit to the differences between his declaration and the original statement of facts" signed by Militello, effectively admitting that that original complaint was full of some pretty important errors. Also, Witt's updated version claimed that Benavides was under oath when he testified before Jim Jordan's committee, but on the stand admitted that was false (kinda a big deal).

Either way, the whole thing turned into a complete joke, mainly because people up and down the DOJ, and MAGA staffers in Congress, so thoroughly believe their own conspiracy theories about Hunter Biden and the deep state that they cooked their own brains into believing that a truthful we didn't work on Hunter Biden issues" statement in 2023 to Congress somehow implicated them in lying to Congress" because in 2020, while working on foreign influence and election issues, they very briefly overlapped as the Hunter Biden story became public - and they sought to figure out if the story was part of an actual foreign influence campaign, and asked around to others at the FBI to see what they knew.

This is the most nothingburger of nothingburger stories, and the judge finally saw it for what it was. Political theater in an attempted October surprise" before the midterms.

But just the fact that it's taken me nearly 3,000 words just to explain the nonsense, and even experienced reporters think these two former FBI agents actually did work on the Hunter Biden case should give you some sense of just how ridiculous MAGA conspiracy theories run these days, and the lengths one has to go through to debunk them.