A federal judge on Tuesday scolded the Justice Department over its unorthodox handling of a criminal case against two former FBI officials accused of making false statements to Congress about their knowledge of a laptop the department says belonged to Hunter Biden, the son of former President Joe Biden.

U.S. Magistrate Zia Faruqui struck from the record an amended criminal complaint that the Justice Department filed in the middle of the night, which added a new obstruction charge against the two former officials, Nikki Floris and Bradley Benavides. Such charging documents require a judge's sign-off that probable cause exists that a defendant committed a crime, and the amended complaint lacked that approval.

"It is not our court's practice — and I think it is appropriately not our practice — that unsigned complaints are filed on the docket," Faruqui said.

He later added: "I want to know why the United States is reticent or averse to putting before a probable cause determination that you must believe is righteous. Why today on this one case have you changed the entire history of how you charge cases?"

The removal of the superseding complaint was an embarrassing setback for a Justice Department that has undertaken a series of splashy and politically charged investigative actions in the run-up to next week's midterm elections. The original false statements case against the former officials, announced Friday, remained intact for now, as Faruqui proceeded Tuesday with a preliminary hearing.

What the case alleges

The case accuses the former officials of falsely playing down their knowledge of a laptop the Justice Department says Hunter Biden abandoned at a computer repair shop in 2019. Beyond that, it represents a Trump administration broadside against a since-disbanded FBI task force that was set up to monitor foreign influence — a unit congressional Republicans have long criticized, saying it tried to discredit their own investigations into the Biden family.

Defense lawyers were set to challenge the case at Tuesday's preliminary hearing in Washington's federal court, including by highlighting the unusual fact that the ex-FBI officials were charged via a criminal complaint signed by a magistrate judge rather than an indictment voted on by a grand jury. The Justice Department has repeatedly struggled in high-profile cases to persuade grand juries in the nation's capital to return indictments.

That distinction carries procedural weight. A complaint is an interim charging document, and a felony case generally cannot reach trial without a grand jury indictment; the preliminary hearing gives a magistrate an early check on whether prosecutors have probable cause to proceed. Any bid to restore the struck obstruction charge would need a fresh complaint bearing a judge's sign-off.

Hours before the hearing, the Justice Department added a new obstruction charge alleging that the former officials' false statements allowed them to avoid questioning about their knowledge of Hunter Biden and impeded an investigation that House lawmakers were conducting into the Bidens.

"What is going on at the D.C. U.S. Attorney's Office?" lawyers for Floris asked in a statement early Tuesday. "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."

"In our combined decades of DOJ service," the lawyers said, "we have never seen or even heard of something like this being filed."

A tangled saga revisited

The prosecution, a rare Justice Department criminal case against a former employee, revisits a tangled saga that roiled the final weeks of the 2020 race. That episode began after the New York Post revealed the existence of a laptop it said had been dropped off by the younger Biden at a Delaware computer repair shop about a year earlier.

The Post said it had obtained the laptop's hard drive from Rudy Giuliani, a close ally of President Donald Trump, and reported on some of the computer's contents, including emails that appeared to show some of Hunter Biden's foreign business dealings.

The curious circumstances of the laptop's discovery raised concerns among Democrats and former intelligence officials about the possibility of Russian involvement — particularly when the Trump administration's own intelligence community had assessed that Moscow was attempting to undermine the candidacy of Democratic nominee Joe Biden, who went on to defeat Trump in 2020, and as Giuliani had traveled abroad looking for dirt on the Bidens.

But Trump's then-national intelligence director, John Ratcliffe, quickly sought to quell speculation about the laptop's provenance by saying there were no signs it had anything to do with Russian actors. The FBI said it had nothing to add to Ratcliffe's statement and investigated the younger Biden on gun and tax charges that later resulted in felony convictions. President Joe Biden pardoned his son in late 2024.

The accused led the Foreign Influence Task Force

Floris and Benavides were leaders of the Foreign Influence Task Force, which was established during the first Trump administration to police influence campaigns staged by Russia and other nations and aimed at sowing discord, undermining democracy and spreading disinformation.

In that capacity, the two FBI officials briefed Republican Sens. Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson in August 2020 as the lawmakers conducted their own investigation into Hunter Biden's work in Ukraine. News of the briefing leaked, and the senators lashed out at the FBI, saying their efforts to scrutinize the Biden family had been discredited and falsely linked to Russian disinformation.

The criminal complaint accuses them of lying to lawmakers in 2023 by denying contemporaneous knowledge of the Biden laptop or participation in internal FBI conversations about it. Their lawyers have denied any allegations of wrongdoing.

The task force was disbanded in February 2025 by then-Attorney General Pam Bondi.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com.