Two former FBI officials charged with lying to Congress were taken into custody Friday. Prosecutors say they misled lawmakers about their roles in the bureau’s investigations into Hunter Biden.
Nikki Floris, 46, and Bradley Benavides, 56, each face one count of making false statements to Congress over testimony they gave lawmakers in 2023. Prosecutors brought the case through a criminal complaint. A criminal complaint is a charging document a prosecutor can file without going to a grand jury first, and no grand jury has indicted either of them yet.
Both worked on the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force. That unit was created to track foreign attempts to interfere in American elections, including disinformation campaigns spread on social media. The task force has since been dissolved. When Floris and Benavides testified, they told Congress the task force had nothing to do with the Hunter Biden investigations, and Floris said she personally had no involvement.
The Justice Department says that testimony was false. According to the complaint unsealed Friday, witness accounts and records from December 2019 through September 2021 show the two former FBI officials knew about the Hunter Biden probes and were actively involved in them. An FBI unit chief told investigators this month that both held oversight roles. The department claims Floris routinely discussed the investigations inside the task force for more than a year. It also claims Benavides regularly discussed the laptop investigation with other bureau officials.
Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., announced the charges on X. She claimed one of the two told Congress they only learned about the Hunter Biden investigation from Wikipedia. She also accused them of helping shape the public narrative around the laptop right before the 2020 election. FBI Director Kash Patel said the charges came out of an ongoing investigation into the task force.
The laptop has been a political flashpoint for six years. The FBI seized it in 2019. In October 2020, weeks before the presidential election, the New York Post published emails it said came from a laptop Hunter Biden had left at a Delaware repair shop, including messages about his foreign business dealings. Dozens of former intelligence officials then signed a letter suggesting the story had the hallmarks of a Russian disinformation operation, and Twitter blocked users from sharing the article. Federal prosecutors later confirmed the laptop was real when they used it as evidence in Hunter Biden’s 2024 gun trial.
Republican Senators Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson have spent years accusing the bureau of mishandling the matter. They previously accused the two former FBI officials of taking part in a 2020 briefing about Russian disinformation. The senators said that briefing was meant to undercut their own investigation into Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings.
Hunter Biden is not charged in this case. His father pardoned him in December 2024, wiping out his federal gun and tax convictions before leaving office.
Floris’s legal team is pushing back hard. Her attorneys described her as a patriot who served nearly 20 years as an FBI intelligence officer. They said the Justice Department accused her based on what politicians want rather than on the facts, and called the case “nonsense charges.” They also said it is no coincidence the government filed the case years later and right before an election, and they said they look forward to her day in court.
The charges land less than two weeks before the midterm elections on November 3. A legal expert who spoke with NPR said that charging conduct this old through a criminal complaint is unusual.
