A hearing expected to move quickly turned into a full afternoon of testimony on Tuesday, as an FBI special agent explained under questioning how he came to investigate two fellow agents — an assignment he confirmed came directly from FBI Director Kash Patel.

AlterNet covered the details of the Tuesday hearing from start to finish. One detail that emerged near the end of the proceedings revealed a direct link between the case and President Donald Trump's weaponization of the FBI and Justice Department against Nikki Floris and Bradley Benavides, two agents who worked to protect the 2020 election.

During questioning, Margaret Donovan, Floris's defense attorney, asked FBI Special Agent Bryan Witt where the case originated.

"Director [Kash] Patel directed the investigation," Witt said.

A July letter referenced several potential crimes, including 18 U.S.C. § 1512, which covers witness tampering, victim and informant intimidation, and obstruction of official proceedings.

Witt explained that the directive was handed down in July and assigned to the Kansas City FBI office.

"I was assigned through chain of command," he added.

"Is that normally how investigations play out?" Donovan asked.

"I've not had a tasking from a director in my career," Witt said. He agreed that it was "unusual."

The testimony made the chain of command a central issue: Witt described the assignment as coming from Patel personally, while also saying he had never before received a tasking from an FBI director.

The tasking followed Trump's July 17 speech, in which the president once again alleged that the 2020 election was stolen from him. CNN's full annotated transcript of Trump's remarks makes no mention of Hunter Biden or the laptop.

National security expert Marcy Wheeler flagged the same moment. A key piece of the work Floris and Benavides did in 2020 was fighting to prevent foreign governments from meddling with the election.

"Jeanine Pirro and Todd Blanche and Kash Patel were so determined to ensure nothing like that happens between now and Tuesday — to ensure that no one at the FBI would reject frivolous claims of election fraud by criminalizing doing so — that they flubbed the charges they filed against Floris and Benavides last week," Wheeler said.

The lawyers for Floris and Benavides have gathered enough evidence, Wheeler wrote, that "will surely be used in lawsuits and, hopefully, impeachment or criminal indictments in the not too distant future."

Lawfare's Anna Bower said in her post-hearing analysis that the House Judiciary Committee witness in the case is Steve Castor, the committee's counsel and a former Trump impeachment defense attorney.

Witt testified that he had spoken with Castor only on Monday, the day before the hearing. As it turned out, Castor was not present for any of the interviews of the FBI agents accused of lying — and may not even have read the interview transcripts. The Justice Department said it could not discuss what Castor knew because the "Speech and Debate Clause" protects him. That protection is typically applied to officials, but on rare occasions it extends to top committee staff.

That meant Witt had no real basis to allege that Benavides's comments to the committee mattered.

Donovan also got Witt to admit that he lied in his affidavit, which claimed the agents were "sworn to tell the truth." On the stand, he said neither had been sworn in.

Wheeler noted that attorneys typically do this to explain to a jury what was wrong. In this case, the judge does not need anyone to connect the dots showing that Witt lied. But Wheeler thinks the lawyer did it for Witt specifically.

"I suspect Safer did this for Witt's benefit, to make him think, to demonstrate to him how easy it is for someone to take an inadvertent false statement and make it a crime, to put him on the defensive," she said. "But for the vagaries of political fortune, Witt could be the one facing charges, not Benavides. And with that demonstration, Witt's testimony may have shifted from defending the trumped-up charges to telling the truth."

Indeed, it was after that exchange that Witt began throwing others under the bus.

Margaret Donovan is not just any defense lawyer. She is part of the duo that founded the Washington Litigation Group, alongside Norm Eisen, who has attacked Trump by name. As Wheeler explained, Eisen writes lawsuits the way most people write emails. Donovan has spent the past year helping FBI agents who were fired by Patel.

"Her FBI complaints feature loads of detail about how Kash Patel, personally, knew he was violating the law when firing her clients," Wheeler said.

In another case, Donovan laid out evidence that Patel lied to Congress at least twice.

"On behalf of the FBI Agents Kash has fired, Margaret Donovan has spent a good deal of time accumulating what could be an impeachment of Kash Patel if and when Jamie Raskin gets a gavel in January. And by rushing through charges against Floris and Benavides on a complaint, Jeanine Pirro gave her an exceptional opportunity to do far more of that," Wheeler said.