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.

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.

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.

Civil rights advocates on Monday asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review a Texas law requiring public schools to display the Ten Commandments, teeing up a potential new test of state-sponsored religious expression in classrooms.

Posters featuring the Ten Commandments began going up almost a year ago in classrooms across Texas, which educates about 5.5 million students. An appeals court earlier this year cleared the way for Texas’ law and one in Louisiana, and similar laws have been passed in Arkansas and Alabama.

“This is an issue of nationwide importance because a number of states have been considering these laws in recent years,” said Heather Weaver, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union.

Over two dozen Texas families represented by the ACLU and other groups petitioned the nation’s highest court to hear their challenge after the conservative-leaning 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in April upheld the Texas law in a 9-8 ruling.

“We would like for the Supreme Court to make clear that singling out Scripture for display in public schools is a violation of the First Amendment,” Weaver said.

The office for Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton did not immediately comment Monday.

In the families’ Supreme Court brief, their attorneys argue that the law violates basic First Amendment principles governing the separation of church and state.

“The question of whether a state may impose scripture on impressionable, captive-audience children — for nearly every hour of every school day, for up to (13) years — implicates the most fundamental guarantees of the First Amendment and our Nation’s highest ideals,” they wrote.

The New Orleans-based 5th Circuit reversed lower federal court rulings that had blocked some Texas school districts from putting up the posters.

Republican Gov. Greg Abbott signed the law, which took effect last September. Because Texas’ law only requires districts to hang the Ten Commandments if they are donated, conservative groups and individuals began dropping off boxes of posters at campuses across the state as the school year began last year.

“No child is made to recite the Commandments, believe them, or affirm their divine origin,” the 5th Circuit’s ruling says.

In 1980, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a similar Kentucky law violated the establishment clause of the U.S. Constitution, which says Congress can “make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” The high court found that the law had no secular purpose but rather served a plainly religious purpose.

Right-leaning legal activists along with Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company have brought sweeping challenges against a cornerstone of legal enforcement in the United States: the right of private groups, people and local governments to sue over violations of many major laws.

Their argument, supported by the Trump administration, is that the Constitution reserves tremendous power for the president and federal agencies to decide how — or whether at all — to enforce federal law. They contend Congress should never have handed that power to others through so-called citizen suits that are part of environmental, campaign finance and certain other laws.

Environmentalists say it would be devastating to lose this essential, decades-old tool that is used to impose fines and halt lawbreaking by bad actors. Citizen suits, for example, have extracted millions from heavily polluting oil and gas operations, and ensured that lead pipes in Flint, Michigan, would be removed after its water crisis.

Legal experts say four pending federal cases — one of them filed last week — are moving forward at a time when the conservative majority on the Supreme Court gives opponents of citizen suits a greater chance than ever of success. The hard part for those opponents now is winning early federal cases and creating disagreement between the country’s appeals courts, which may help convince the Supreme Court the issue is important enough for a nationwide ruling.

Back in 2000, a Supreme Court opinion opened the door for that possibility.

“Many of us who worked in this area have been waiting basically 26 years for this shoe to drop,” said Richard Lazarus, a Harvard professor with decades of experience in environmental law.

Lazarus was referring to former moderate Justice Anthony Kennedy’s comments in a Clean Water Act case that citizen suits raised “difficult and fundamental” questions about whether they improperly dilute executive power. The late conservative Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in a dissenting opinion in the same case that citizen suits turn “over to private citizens the function of enforcing the law.” He avoided explicitly saying they were constitutional.

“The court is more like Scalia’s court since he died than it ever was when he was there,” said Lazarus.

He observed that those who lost cases where Scalia dissented are rushing back to today’s court hoping for a more favorable result.

The critical issue for citizen suits is who — the government or private citizens — collects fines and has control. A person filing a citizen suit must tell the government ahead of time. The government can stop the suit if it sufficiently pursues the case itself, but its options are limited and the person suing can stay involved. Citizen suits can force compliance with the law and result in fines, which go to the U.S. Treasury.