2 ex-FBI officials charged with lying to Congress about Hunter Biden laptop probe
Washington — Two former senior FBI officials are facing criminal charges for allegedly making false statements to Congress during testimony in 2023 about the bureau's investigation involving Hunter Biden's laptop.
Nikki Floris, 46, a former intelligence analyst in charge in the bureau's Washington Field Office, and Bradley Benavides, 56, the former deputy assistant director at the FBI's Counterintelligence Division, each appeared in court on Friday in Washington, D.C., where they were presented with a copy of a criminal complaint charging them with one count each of lying to Congress about their roles on the Foreign Influence Task Force during the 2020 election, specifically the FBI's Hunter Biden investigations.
A statement of facts prepared by the FBI and filed with the complaint alleges that Floris made false statements to Congress on July 19, 2023, and Benavides allegedly did the same that September. Their alleged false statements pertained to "their awareness of involvement in the FBI's investigations into Hunter Biden," it said.
"The evidence further establishes probable cause to believe that Floris and Benavides made these statements for the purpose of concealing [the Foreign Influence Task Force's] engagement with and communications about the Hunter Biden investigations and impeding the congressional investigation," it said.
The decision by the U.S. Attorney's Office in D.C. to charge the pair in a criminal complaint stemming from three-year-old allegations is highly unusual, and both their defense attorneys and the magistrate judge who presided over Friday's hearing and unsealing raised questions about the decision.
"The alleged conduct happened years ago. The government has had the information about this for years," said Ron Safer, an attorney for Benavides. He asked Zia Faruqui, the magistrate judge at Friday's hearing in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, to immediately schedule a preliminary hearing "as soon as humanly possible" to review whether there was adequate probable cause that a crime was committed.
The politically charged case was also unsealed just about two weeks before the midterm election — a fact that may raise questions by DOJ veterans about the timing of a case involving testimony to Congress that occurred more than three years ago.
Faruqui said he thought the manner in which the case was charged seemed "strange" and he rejected a request by prosecutors to delay the preliminary hearing for two weeks or more.
He ordered the parties to return at 11 a.m. on Tuesday.
"This is the Sword of Damocles hanging over their heads," he said. "This will follow them for the rest of their lives."
Former President Joe Biden's son Hunter has long been a target of President Trump and his allies.
Hunter Biden was extensively investigated by the FBI over his business dealings in Ukraine with the energy company Burisma, and the contents of his laptop after he left it at a repair shop in Delaware.
Former Attorney General Merrick Garland eventually appointed a special counsel to handle the investigations. Hunter Biden was tried and convicted on three felony gun charges. He pleaded guilty in a separate criminal case to three felony tax offenses and six misdemeanor tax offenses.
He was pardoned by his father shortly before his father left office, and was never charged with wrongdoing in connection with the allegations involving his overseas business dealings.
The charges
The criminal complaint unsealed on Friday said an FBI unit chief told investigators in October 2026 that Floris and Benavides both had oversight roles into the various Hunter Biden probes.
The complaint focused on an FBI counterintelligence operation by the Foreign Influence Task Force known as "Round River," which, it said, was focused on collecting "derogatory informant reporting on, among other things, Hunter Biden, to flag the reporting as Russian disinformation."
Floris served as the deputy assistant director of the FITF from mid-2019 through mid-2022, while Benavides served as its section chief from mid-2019 through the 2020 election, it said.
"Witness accounts and contemporaneous documents from December 2019 through September 2021 show that Floris and Benavides knew about and were actively involved in the FBI's investigations of Hunter Biden. FITF hosted classified briefings for the agents and prosecutors on the Hunter Biden case in which Floris and Benavides were active participants," the complaint said.
When Floris later testified to the House Judiciary Committee in July 2023, the complaint alleged she lied about her involvement in the Hunter Biden investigation and the role of the Foreign Influence Task Force.
In one exchange cited in the complaint, she was asked: "Did you have any involvement in the Hunter Biden investigation?" to which she responded, "I did not," the complaint said.
In another exchange cited, it said she was asked: "Was there ever a discussion at the FITF about Hunter Biden?"
"No. At least not with me," she responded, adding: "And again, there's a whole team below me, so whether or not conversations happened, I don't know, but I personally did not have any conversations."
In the September 2023 interview with Benavides before the House Judiciary Committee, the complaint said he told investigators he only learned some of the details about the investigation into the Hunter Biden laptop from Wikipedia when preparing for the hearing.
"When did you learn that there was an ongoing criminal investigation related to the laptop?" it says he was asked.
"The Wikipedia page," he said.
When pressed whether he had any knowledge about the matter during his time at the FBI, the complaint alleges he said, "No."
The complaint also cited a congressional staffer who was present for both interviews. That staffer told investigators the testimony from both officials appeared to be "materially untrue."
An FBI employee also later told investigators that he personally spoke with Benavides about the laptop and discussed reviewing its contents.
"Floris testified that she had no involvement in the Hunter Biden investigations. In reality, she was in frequent communication with the case team for over a year during which she both sent and received information about Hunter Biden," the complaint said.
"Benavides' testimony followed a similar pattern," it added.
The complaint and accompanying sworn statement also allege that Floris and Benavides were involved in reviewing materials to help prepare a script for a defensive brief, which aims to warn someone that he or she may have been the subject of foreign disinformation.
On Aug. 6, 2020, they provided two separate defensive briefings to Sen. Charles Grassley and Ron Johnson related to potential Russian disinformation, it said. It also alleged that Benavides and Floris were involved in reviewing and approving a Round River report that scrutinized informant intelligence related to the Hunter Biden investigations.
Floris' attorneys said in a statement that she has been falsely accused of a crime and raised concerns about the timing of the charges.
"Nikki Floris is a patriot. She served our nation as a dedicated FBI intelligence officer for nearly 20 years. Yet today, the DOJ has accused her falsely of a crime on the say-so of politicians, not on the facts. It's no coincidence the government is filing these nonsense charges now, years later, on the eve of an election," they said.
"The government's reasons for charging Nikki are as transparent as they are unjust: to push a false narrative for a shot at political points. It's another sad day for the DOJ, but we look forward to Nikki's day in court."
During Friday's hearing, James Kirkpatrick, a special assistant U.S. attorney who came from the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Western District of Missouri, appeared at the lectern and spoke for the Justice Department. He was accompanied by George Massucco, the criminal chief in the U.S. Attorney's Office in D.C.
A spokesperson for Pirro's office said that Kirkpatrick does work in the criminal division there, though an internal Justice Department directory and his LinkedIn page still listed him as being in Kansas City.
At the hearing, after the defendants' attorneys asked for a preliminary hearing as soon as Monday, Kirkpatrick raised concerns about such rapid timing, saying the case agent is from out of town and that he would be out of town as well.
"You have charged this case," Faruqui retorted. "So you will be spending a lot of time in town."
Kirkpatrick's LinkedIn profile has since been taken down. A spokesperson for Pirro said that Cory Jacobs, the deputy chief of the criminal division, and John Borchert, the chief of the Fraud, Public Corruption and Civil Rights Section, are also working on the matter.
This is not the first time that the Justice Department has tapped prosecutors from other districts to help on controversial cases.
Last year, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Virginia tapped prosecutors in the Eastern District of North Carolina to help with the prosecution of ex-FBI Director James Comey over lying to Congress.
That office also tapped an assistant U.S. attorney from the Eastern District of Missouri who mostly handled civil cases to work on the prosecution of New York Attorney General Letitia James, who was accused of bank fraud in connection with a mortgage.
In the Comey and James cases, prosecutors from out of town were brought in after people inside the office refused to participate due to concerns with the evidence, sources previously said. Both cases were dismissed, after a judge found the interim U.S. attorney who secured the indictments was unlawfully appointed.
