A federal judge in the District of Columbia on Monday dismissed a case against two former FBI officials charged with lying to Congress during an investigation that focused on whether the FBI had sought to minimize allegations of corruption involving the Biden family and particularly evidence related to Hunter Biden’s laptop.

The judge found a lack of direct motive and, as a result, insufficient evidence to support a finding of probable cause.

“What has transpired here cannot be described as anything other than weaponization,” US Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui said in a ruling from the bench, dismissing the case against former FBI officials Nikki Floris and Bradley Benavides.

Judge Faruqui found that several of the alleged statements were not false as pleaded, and the ones that were false did not have sufficient evidence of an intent or motive to deceive.

He noted the FBI agent testified that he found no evidence of a motive for why the former officials would lie to Congress about the laptop investigation, adding that there was no evidence that Republican lawmakers’ investigation into the Biden family slowed down or changed based on the answers the defendants provided.

Judge Faruqui was also aware that the prosecution “unnecessarily rushed” to file these charges less than two weeks before a major midterm election. He pointed out that the Justice Department could have brought the case, which arises from statements made in 2023, at any time, but their decision to bring the case in the immediate run-up to the midterm election forced him to not ignore the transparent political reality of the situation: the only real deadline driving the rush to file the criminal complaint was the upcoming election.

The judge’s concerns were evident at the outset when he asked prosecutors why they filed the case through a criminal complaint, which is typically used when investigators have a pressing need to take a defendant (i.e., that is a flight risk) into custody—as opposed to an indictment that requires a grand jury’s approval.

He was also critical of the Department of Justice for filing an amended complaint overnight with an additional criminal charge listed straight to the docket instead of first obtaining the court’s explicit permission before amending the case record.

Faraqui ruled that the Trump administration’s rushed investigation resulted in several errors that undermined its credibility and results.

The ruling does not necessarily bring the matter to a permanent close. The Justice Department still has an opportunity to pursue a grand jury indictment against the two former officials, whose lawyers had pressed for dismissal of the charges; however, it has struggled during the Trump administration to persuade grand juries in the nation’s capital to return indictments in politically charged prosecutions like this one.

Each accused faced one count of making a false statement in a matter within the jurisdiction of Congress.