WASHINGTON– Two former FBI intelligence officials specializing in foreign election interference were charged Friday with making false statements to Congress about their role in the investigation into Hunter Biden’s laptop in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election.
Nikki Floris and Bradley Benavides turned themselves in on Friday and made their first appearance in federal court in Washington, where their lawyers insisted on a quick hearing in which they could challenge the allegations against them.
The Justice Department claims Floris and Benavides lied to Congress in 2023 about the involvement of a foreign influence task force in the Biden investigations as well as their knowledge of the laptop.
Floris’ lawyers called her a “patriot” and said she “served our nation as a dedicated FBI intelligence officer for nearly 20 years.”
“Yet today the DOJ wrongly charged her with a crime based on what politicians said, not on the facts,” her lawyers said in a statement. “It is no coincidence that the government is making these absurd accusations today, years later, on the eve of an election.”
The case was filed 10 days before the Nov. 3 election and marks the latest in a series of high-profile and politically charged investigations the Justice Department has undertaken in the run-up to the midterm elections.
The indictment, a rare Justice Department criminal case against a former employee, revisits a tangled and peculiar saga that roiled the final weeks of the 2020 race. It is also part of a broader, retrospective effort by FBI Director Kash Patel, who before taking the helm of the nation’s premier law enforcement agency had been a harsh critic of it, to scrutinize high-profile episodes in the bureau’s recent past that have for years animated President Donald Trump’s conservative base.
“The lying to Congress by senior FBI officials strikes at the heart of our system. No one is above the law,” Patel said in a statement published on X.
The revelation of the laptop’s existence in October 2020 injected a thorny storyline into the race between Trump, the Republican incumbent, and Hunter Biden’s father, Joe Biden, Trump’s Democratic challenger, who won the race.
The contents of the laptop were made public by the New York Post, which said it obtained from Trump ally Rudy Giuliani the hard drive of a computer dropped by Hunter Biden at a repair shop in Wilmington, Delaware. The laptop contained emails that appeared to show discussions about the younger Biden’s foreign business dealings.
The particular circumstances of the laptop’s discovery raised concerns among Democrats and former intelligence officials about the possibility of Russian disinformation, particularly when the Trump administration’s own intelligence community believed Russia was trying to interfere on Trump’s behalf in the election and Giuliani had traveled abroad looking for dirt on the Bidens.
Hunter Biden was later charged and convicted of gun and tax offenses during his father’s administration. Joe Biden pardoned him during his final weeks in office.
The Department of Justice has historically sought to avoid public and overt investigative acts in the period directly preceding an election that implicate candidates or risk influencing the outcome. But over the past two weeks, officials have taken a series of bold steps in politically charged cases, including a search of Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar’s home as part of an immigration fraud investigation and a corruption indictment unsealed Thursday against powerful Virginia Democratic state Sen. L. Louise Lucas.
Floris and Benavides, two experienced intelligence officials, were heading the FBI’s since-disbanded Foreign Intelligence Task Force (FITF) when the laptop was discovered. They are accused by the Justice Department of making false statements to Congress in 2023 claiming that FITF was not involved in Hunter Biden-related investigations when contemporaneous posts proved otherwise, according to a criminal complaint filed against them.
The case draws renewed attention to the work of the task force, which was created during the first Trump administration to monitor influence campaigns organized by Russia and other countries aimed at sowing discord, undermining democracy and spreading disinformation. The task force became a magnet for Republican criticism of Congress during the Biden investigation and was disbanded in February 2025 by then-Attorney General Pam Bondi in one of her first acts in office.
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