Washington — Two former senior FBI officials have been charged with allegedly making false statements to Congress during 2023 testimony about the bureau’s investigation into Hunter Biden’s laptop.
Nikki Floris, 46, a former intelligence analyst in charge at the FBI’s Washington Field Office, and Bradley Benavides, 56, the bureau’s former deputy assistant director in its Counterintelligence Division, appeared in federal court in Washington, D.C., on Friday. Both were given criminal complaints accusing them of one count each of lying to Congress about their roles in the Foreign Influence Task Force during the 2020 election, including the FBI’s investigations involving Hunter Biden.
According to a statement of facts prepared by the FBI and filed with the complaints, Floris allegedly made false statements to Congress on July 19, 2023, while Benavides allegedly did so in September of that year. The statements concerned what the two officials knew about their involvement in the FBI’s Hunter Biden investigations.
“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,” the filing said.
The decision by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia to bring criminal complaints over allegations dating back three years is highly unusual. Defense attorneys for both former officials, as well as the magistrate judge who presided over Friday’s hearing and the unsealing of the case, questioned the timing and handling of the charges.
“The alleged conduct happened years ago. The government has had the information about this for years,” said Ron Safer, an attorney for Benavides. He urged Zia Faruqui, the magistrate judge overseeing Friday’s hearing in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, to schedule a preliminary hearing “as soon as humanly possible” to determine whether sufficient probable cause existed to show that a crime had been committed.
The politically sensitive case was unsealed roughly two weeks before the midterm election. That timing could prompt scrutiny from former Justice Department officials, particularly because the testimony at issue was given more than three years ago.
Faruqui said the way the case had been charged appeared “strange.” He also rejected prosecutors’ request to postpone the preliminary hearing for at least two weeks.
The judge ordered the parties to return to court at 11 a.m. Tuesday.
“This is the Sword of Damocles hanging over their heads,” Faruqui said. “This will follow them for the rest of their lives.”
Hunter Biden, the son of former President Joe Biden, has long been a focus of President Trump and his political allies.
The FBI conducted extensive investigations into Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine involving the energy company Burisma, as well as the contents of a laptop he left at a Delaware repair shop.
Former Attorney General Merrick Garland ultimately appointed a special counsel to oversee the investigations. Hunter Biden was later tried and convicted on three felony gun charges. In a separate criminal case, he pleaded guilty to three felony tax offenses and six misdemeanor tax offenses.
His father pardoned him shortly before leaving office. Hunter Biden was never charged with wrongdoing related to allegations concerning his overseas business dealings.
The charges
The criminal complaint unsealed Friday said an FBI unit chief told investigators in October 2026 that Floris and Benavides each held oversight responsibilities involving the various Hunter Biden probes.
The filing centers on an FBI counterintelligence operation conducted by the Foreign Influence Task Force known as “Round River.” The operation was focused on gathering “derogatory informant reporting on, among other things, Hunter Biden, to flag the reporting as Russian disinformation,” according to the complaint.
Floris served as the FITF’s deputy assistant director from mid-2019 through mid-2022. Benavides was the task force’s section chief from mid-2019 until the 2020 election, the complaint 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,” prosecutors wrote.
When Floris testified before the House Judiciary Committee in July 2023, the complaint alleges that she misrepresented her involvement in the Hunter Biden investigation and the Foreign Influence Task Force’s role.
The complaint cited one exchange in which Floris was asked, “Did you have any involvement in the Hunter Biden investigation?” She answered, “I did not,” according to the filing.
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.
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“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.