Federal prosecutors have filed criminal charges against two former FBI officials, Nikki Floris and Bradley Benavides, accusing them of giving false statements to Congress about their role in the bureau's handling of the Hunter Biden laptop matter before the 2020 presidential election.

Both previously helped lead an FBI task force focused on foreign interference in U.S. elections, a unit that has since been disbanded. Prosecutors allege that when questioned by lawmakers, the two denied taking part in FBI investigative work involving Biden, and that those denials were untrue.

The pair made their first appearance in federal court in Washington on Friday. Their lawyers asked the court to move quickly so they can challenge the allegations.

The case stands out for several reasons. Criminal prosecutions of former FBI employees by the Justice Department are uncommon. The charges were also brought by criminal complaint rather than grand jury indictment, a route prosecutors usually take when they need to detain someone quickly, for example because of flight risk or danger to the public. Both the defense and the judge commented on that choice in court. The Justice Department has had trouble in recent high-profile cases persuading grand juries in the capital to return indictments.

Timing has also drawn attention. The complaint came less than two weeks before the Nov. 3 midterm elections, as part of a wider review under FBI Director Kash Patel of past bureau episodes that have long been criticized by President Donald Trump's supporters. Patel was a vocal critic of the FBI before he took over the agency.

Lawyers for both defendants rejected the charges. Floris's attorneys described her as a career FBI intelligence officer with nearly two decades of service and argued the case was driven by politics rather than evidence, pointing to its timing so close to an election. Benavides's legal team called the complaint baseless and politically motivated, and said they expect the court process to clear him.

Because the case was filed by complaint, prosecutors have not yet presented it to a grand jury. Both defendants are presumed innocent unless proven guilty in court.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday turned away an appeal from former Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, leaving intact a ruling that wiped out the $8.2 million defamation verdict he won over a political ad aired during his 2017 U.S. Senate campaign.

By declining to hear the case, the justices let stand a decision by the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that set aside a jury's finding that the ad had defamed Moore. The outcome is a win for Senate Majority PAC, the Democratic-aligned super PAC that paid for the ad and has maintained that it was accurate.

Monday's order follows an earlier setback for Moore. In June, the Court denied his emergency request to freeze the 11th Circuit ruling while his appeal was pending.

Background of the 2017 race

Moore, known for his opposition to same-sex marriage and his support for displaying the Ten Commandments in public places, lost the 2017 Senate election after his campaign was engulfed by allegations of misconduct. Leigh Corfman accused Moore of touching her inappropriately in 1979, when she was 14 and he was a 32-year-old assistant district attorney. Moore denied the allegation. Other women said Moore had dated them or asked them out when they were in their late teens.

The disputed ad

Senate Majority PAC financed Highway 31, a group that ran a heavy advertising campaign against Moore during the race. Moore's defamation suit focused on one of its television spots. His lawyers argued that the ad combined statements and fragments of quotes from different news stories in a way that falsely suggested he had been accused of soliciting sex from young girls at a shopping mall. They described it as a "fabricated accusation, never made by any reporter," and said it aired 533 times in Alabama in the closing days of the election.

From jury win to reversal

A federal jury sided with Moore in 2022 and awarded him $8.2 million. The 11th Circuit later vacated that award, concluding that Moore had not proven the PAC acted with actual malice, the standard a public figure must meet to win a defamation claim.

A close ally of former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro long described by U.S. officials as the ousted leader’s frontman pleaded guilty Tuesday to a single count of money laundering tied to an alleged bribery conspiracy to win lucrative government contracts in the South American country.

As part of the plea deal, Alex Saab agreed to cooperate in continuing federal investigations, paving the way for his eventual cooperation against his former protector. He also agreed to forfeit $195 million in criminal proceeds from the corruption scheme.

Saab, 54, was deported in May by Venezuela’s acting President Delcy Rodriguez to the U.S., which has been targeting the Colombian-born businessman for more than a decade.

The money laundering offense carries a maximum 20-year penalty but prosecutors agreed to recommend a sentence at the low end of the recommended range and seek additional reductions should his cooperation prove substantial. Saab was previously charged during the first Trump administration in 2019 and then arrested during a refueling stop in Cape Verde on what the Venezuelan government described as a high-level humanitarian mission to Iran.

But President Joe Biden pardoned Saab in 2023 in exchange for the release of several imprisoned Americans in Venezuela. The deal, part of a failed effort by the Biden White House to lure Maduro into holding a free presidential election, was harshly criticized by Republicans and federal law enforcement officials, who immediately began investigating Saab for other alleged crimes not covered by the narrowly tailored pardon.

“This case sends a clear message: Political connections, wealth and proximity to a corrupt regime will not put anyone beyond the reach of American justice,” said Jason A. Reding Quiñones, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida, who attended Tuesday’s proceedings along with more than a dozen federal agents.

The new indictment centers on contracts for the so-called CLAP program set up by Maduro to provide staples — rice, corn flour, cooking oil — to poor Venezuelans at a time of rampant hyperinflation and a crumbling currency. Saab amassed a fortune through Venezuelan government contracts but became even more valuable to Maduro as U.S. sanctions forced Venezuela to conduct much of its oil sales and foreign trade outside of Western financial institutions.

A jury on Monday convicted a Vermont man of attempted murder in the shootings of three Palestinian college students who were walking near his home, rejecting an insanity defense rooted in his claims that he was acting on orders from U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies.

Jason Eaton faces up to life in prison in the November 2023 attack in Burlington, which paralyzed Hisham Awartani from the waist down and wounded his friends, Tahseen Aliahmad and Kinnan Abdalhamid.

The men, all 20 at the time, had been visiting Awartani’s grandmother for Thanksgiving. They were smoking cigarettes and speaking a mix of English and Arabic as they walked near the University of Vermont campus after dusk. Two of them were wearing traditional Palestinian scarves known as keffiyehs.

The jury deliberated for several hours before reaching its verdict after a weeklong trial that saw testimony from the three men, who recounted how their stroll ended in bloodshed, and defense and prosecution psychiatric experts who offered differing views of Eaton’s mental health and criminal culpability.

Eaton, 51, stared ahead blankly as the verdict was read, standing alongside his lawyers — public defenders whom he tried to fire last week over his concerns that his defense hadn’t been “adequately presented.” Judge John Pacht, who blocked Eaton’s midtrial bid to act as his own lawyer, ordered him jailed pending sentencing, which has yet to be scheduled.

Awartani and Aliahmad watched from the front row of the courtroom gallery, smiling and hugging people around them.

“The verdict cannot undo what happened or erase the trauma our families still carry, but it affirms something fundamental: Jason Eaton is responsible for what he did,” Awartani’s mother, Elizabeth Price, told reporters afterward.

Eaton had pleaded not guilty but did not dispute that he was the shooter. He claimed that the CIA and Mossad transmitted their orders via FM radio and that God was commanding him to protect his Jewish neighbors. His lawyers had urged jurors to find him not guilty by reason of insanity, an outcome that would’ve spared him from prison but could have required that he undergo mental health treatment.

Eaton’s lawyers, Margaret Jansch and Joshua O’Hara, said he had struggled with mental health issues his whole life, including diagnoses of attention deficit, post-traumatic stress, bipolar, depression and borderline personality disorders, culminating in a psychotic break after losing his job at a credit union two weeks before the shooting.

Prosecutor Sarah George countered that Eaton was a narcissist but not legally insane. He had a grandiose sense of self-importance and lacked empathy but was fully aware of the criminality of his conduct, George said in a closing argument. He appeared nervous when police arrived at his door, repeatedly asked for a lawyer and hasn’t claimed to have received any other messages directing his actions, she said.

Eaton told officers that he had a shotgun in his apartment, but didn’t disclose that he had other weapons, including a Ruger .380-caliber handgun that was found in a bedroom dresser and that crime lab testing concluded was used in the shooting, said George, the Chittenden County state’s attorney.

Days after the shooting, George said in her closing argument, Eaton had told his lawyers that he wished Awartani’s grandmother had warned him that the men were “going to dress up like terrorists” and trek through his neighborhood.

The shooting, weeks after the start of the Israel-Hamas war, shook Burlington, and reverberated in the West Bank, where the three wounded men grew up and became friends as schoolmates in Ramallah before moving to the U.S. for college. It spawned calls for a hate crime investigation.

But no hate crime charges were filed as questions persisted about whether anti-Palestinian animus, an altered mental state or something else had compelled Eaton to open fire. After the verdict, Awartani’s mother said Eaton’s hateful rhetoric, aired at the trial, had made it clear why he targeted her son.

The Supreme Court on Monday rejected President Donald Trump's bid to restrict mail ballots for the midterm elections, capping a flurry of last-minute legal action with voting already underway.

The decision allows states to continue sending out mail ballots under the same processes they've used for years and have accounted for nearly a third of votes cast.

It represented a stark defeat for Trump on an issue he consistently has emphasized as vital to ensuring election integrity even though there is virtually no evidence of fraud with mail ballots.

The Supreme Court majority wrote that the administration's push to implement the restrictions this year is likely to lose in court, though the brief emergency order didn't detail its reasoning. Two justices, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, publicly dissented.

The Trump administration had asked the justices, once again at the center of a roiling political controversy, to clear the way for restrictions before the pivotal November contests for control of Congress.

Alito wrote in his dissent that the Postal Service "has broad authority to regulate the mail" and likely does have the power to enforce Trump's restrictions.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh, meanwhile, agreed that the restrictions should not go into effect for the midterms but indicated he might rule in favor of the Trump administration if the issue comes back before the court at a later time.

Mail ballots are already being sent to voters

Election officials have said there was simply no way to carry out a complete overhaul in the weeks before the midterms. Indeed, Alabama, North Carolina and Wisconsin began sending mail ballots to voters over the past week while the new system was still not active.

The Trump administration plan would require states to adopt a uniform envelope style and submit lists of eligible voters to an online portal. The Postal Service could refuse to deliver ballots to states that didn't comply.

The administration's efforts had the potential to be especially disruptive in states that send out ballots entirely by mail. Washington's Secretary of State Steve Hobbs, a Democrat, said the decision means work "to carry out a safe, secure, and accurate election" can continue "without having to upend our election processes to meet unrealistic ballot mail requirements."

In Arizona, another largely vote-by-mail state, Democratic Secretary of State Adrian Fontes said "it is crucial for us to continue rejecting the notion that access and security are mutually exclusive when it comes to running strong elections."

Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, a Republican serving as the state's chief election officer, said on social media that the Supreme Court's decision means "Utahns can have confidence that the 2026 election will proceed as normal."

The White House and Justice Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment, but have in the past framed the restrictions as commonsense changes aimed at keeping elections secure.

State officials and voting rights groups pushed back

Democratic state officials and voting rights groups challenged the restrictions in court, arguing that the president has no constitutional authority to set election rules that would "virtually eliminate mail voting on the eve of a major election."

A whistleblower report, meanwhile, said the postal system's requirements could lead to millions of mail ballots never being sent, because problems with the not-yet-operational portal meant a single bar code error could result in an entire batch of ballots being tossed out.

Former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky appeared in court remotely Tuesday where he said he agreed with his lawyers not to go forward with testimony from an accuser who wants to recant allegations that Sandusky sexually abused him years ago.

The hearing was part of the latest bid by Sandusky's lawyers to secure a new trial for him as his lawyers prepare to go to federal court to seek a new trial after failing repeatedly in state courts.

In court, Sandusky, 82, appeared on a video screen in a spare room in Laurel Highlands state prison, seated at a small table in a maroon-colored shirt looking up at the camera through glasses.

Under questioning, he told Centre County Judge Maureen Skerda he had consulted with his lawyers about the decision not to present the accuser's testimony recanting the allegations from Sandusky's 2012 trial.

"I'm making this decision on advice of counsel," Sandusky said, his arms on the table in front of him, a notepad between them. "Is there anything wrong with that?"

Sandusky, 82, has been serving a decades-long prison sentence since he was convicted of 45 counts of sexual abuse in 2012, after eight young men testified about what happened to them as boys.

Sandusky's lawyer, Jerry Russo, told reporters later that state courts frown on granting new trials based on a witness recantation, seeing it as "inherently unreliable."

Instead, Russo said, he plans to take Sandusky's broader claims for a new trial to federal court — Sandusky's made at least three attempts in state courts — after one more procedural appeal in state court.

Last year, Sandusky's lawyers had asked for a new trial, claiming there were inconsistencies in the accusers' testimony and that their testimony was driven by the possibility of financial gain, coaching by prosecutors and "therapy intended to (help) them reconstruct memories of alleged abuse."

Skerda months ago had refused to hear the claims, except for the recantation of the victim identified in court documents as R.R.

On Tuesday, Russo suggested that it wasn't worth taking the time for the judge to hear and consider the recantation testimony if it has no chance to win a new trial in a state court.

"If that's the only issue that remains for us to litigate, there's no purpose being served litigating it here in state court," Russo said.

Skerda told Russo and Sandusky that withdrawing the request to present the recantation from the accuser, identified in court documents as R.R., meant that it could not be litigated again in state or federal court.

Russo agreed with that assessment, saying "technically" it is true, but also suggested that the recantation could find its way into federal court, saying that "there are other witnesses that can testify" about R.R.'s recantation.

The Pennsylvania Office of Attorney General had said the supposed recantation was "highly suspect" and said it had prepared to rebut the recantation claim with testimony from six witnesses and other evidence.

In a statement, Attorney General David Sunday called Sandusky a "convicted child predator" and said he is making another attempt to "avoid accountability and escape punishment for years of abuse he perpetrated."

Sandusky was the defensive coordinator at one of the country's top football programs under Hall of Fame head coach Joe Paterno. The scandal led to Paterno's firing, and the university paid more than $100 million to people who said they were abused by Sandusky.

Authorities said he found and groomed boys at The Second Mile, a charity he founded for at-risk youth. Sandusky has repeatedly declared his innocence.

R.R., who was 25 years old at trial, testified that when he was 11, Sandusky sexually abused him in the coach's basement in 1998, a transcript shows.