WASHINGTON — Two former FBI intelligence officials who helped lead an election security task force were charged Friday with lying to Congress regarding their review of Hunter Biden’s laptop before the 2020 election.
Bradley Benavides, 56, and Nikki Floris, 46, surrendered to federal authorities and made their initial appearance before U.S. Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui in Washington, according to court accounts reported by NPR and The Guardian. Each faces a single criminal charge of making false statements during 2023 testimony before the House Judiciary Committee.
Prosecutors filed the charges through a criminal complaint instead of seeking an indictment from a grand jury, NPR reported. In court documents, the government claimed both Benavides and Floris maintained real-time awareness of inquiries into Hunter Biden while heading the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, despite telling lawmakers that the unit had not participated in the laptop matter, according to Al Jazeera and NPR.
Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for Washington, stated on social platform X that the defendants “allegedly lied to Congress about their roles in the FBI’s Hunter Biden investigations, with one claiming they only learned about it from Wikipedia — despite evidence showing their involvement in helping shape the public narrative about Hunter Biden’s laptop right before the election,” NPR reported.
Federal prosecutors alleged that internal messages from that period contradicted the former officials’ sworn statements, allowing them to evade follow-up questioning and hindering the congressional inquiry, Al Jazeera and NPR reported.
Defense Alleges Political Timing
Attorneys representing the former agents sharply pushed back against the allegations, arguing that the Department of Justice brought the case to influence voters just 10 days before the Nov. 3 midterm elections, Al Jazeera reported.
Floris’ legal counsel noted that she had served the government as an intelligence officer for almost two decades. “Yet today, the DOJ has accused her falsely of a crime on the say-so of politicians, not on the facts,” her defense team said in a statement. “It’s no coincidence the government is filing these nonsense charges now, years later, on the eve of an election.”
During Friday’s proceeding, Faruqui commented that both defendants possessed “sparkling backgrounds” as career public servants and noted that using a criminal complaint for conduct that is “quite old” remains unusual, NPR reported.
FBI Director Kash Patel, however, defended the prosecution in a statement published on X, saying that “lying to Congress by senior FBI officials strikes at the heart of our system. No one is above the law,” according to Al Jazeera.
Revisiting the 2020 Inquiry
The criminal case revives a controversy that surfaced in October 2020, when the New York Post published emails from a computer left at a Delaware repair facility, news reports noted. The computer data was given to the news outlet by Rudy Giuliani, who was serving as Donald Trump’s personal attorney.
While several former intelligence officials initially warned the discovery might reflect Russian disinformation, the FBI subsequently verified the computer and its files, Al Jazeera reported. Federal prosecutors later used material from the device in tax evasion and firearm prosecutions against Hunter Biden, who received an unconditional pardon from his father, former President Joe Biden, in December 2024, NPR reported.
The Foreign Influence Task Force was formally shut down in January 2025 following prolonged accusations from congressional Republicans that agency leadership used it to suppress coverage of the laptop.
The actions against Floris and Benavides represent the latest in a wave of high-profile Justice Department operations unfolding ahead of the election, which also included a search at the residence of Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar and a state-level corruption charge against Virginia state Sen. L. Louise Lucas, Al Jazeera reported.
Benavides and Floris are scheduled to return to federal court on Tuesday for a preliminary hearing.
