Former FBI Officials Charged with Lying to Congress About Hunter Biden Laptop Investigation
Two former senior FBI officials have been charged with making false statements to Congress while testifying in 2023 about the bureau’s investigation into Hunter Biden’s laptop.
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Nikki Floris, a former intelligence analyst in charge in the bureau’s Washington Field Office, and Bradley Benavides, the former deputy assistant director at the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division, are facing one count each of lying to Congress in connection with statements made about “their awareness of involvement in the FBI’s investigations into Hunter Biden,” the indictment said. Both were members of the bureau’s Foreign Influence Task Force during the 2020 election.
Both Floris and Benavides told the House Judiciary Committee that the FITF was not involved in the FBI’s investigations into Hunter Biden.
Floris told the committee that she wasn’t involved in any discussions about Hunter Biden while she was at the FITF, while Benavides claimed that he only learned of the FBI’s possession of Hunter Biden’s laptop from reading a Wikipedia article in 2023.
“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,” prosecutors say.
“Lying to Congress by anyone strikes at the heart of our democratic system but when senior FBI agents lie to Congress believing they are above the law, it’s time to bring the hammer of justice down on them,” U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro said in a statement. “When senior officials entrusted with safeguarding our nation’s security choose deception over duty, they undermine the very institutions they swore to uphold. Today’s action makes clear that no one is above the law, and we will hold accountable all who obstruct the truth.”
Judge Zia Faruqui said Friday he thought the manner in which the case was charged seemed “strange.” He rejected a request by prosecutors to delay the preliminary hearing for two weeks or more and ordered the parties to return on Tuesday morning.
Ron Safer, an attorney for Benavides, asked the judge to schedule a preliminary hearing “as soon as humanly possible” to review whether there was adequate probable cause that a crime was committed.
“The alleged conduct happened years ago. The government has had the information about this for years,” Safer said.
FBI special agent Erica Jensen said during Hunter Biden’s criminal trial in 2024 that law enforcement obtained the laptop’s hard drive in fall 2019 after receiving a tip from a computer store.
The FBI used forensic tools to extract data from the laptop after obtaining a search warrant, Jensen said. Federal investigators verified the laptop data by cross-referencing Biden’s iCloud storage accounts with the computer’s serial number, she testified. Videos and photos of drug use were recovered from the laptop, along with business communications and videos of sexual acts.
Floris and Benavides allegedly gave Senators Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson a fake “defensive briefing” in August 2020 to cast the senators’ Hunter Biden investigation as advancing Russian disinformation. The senators later said the briefing “consisted primarily of information that we already knew and information unconnected to our Biden investigation.”
“We made clear to you at the briefing that it was not relevant to the substance of our work. In response, you stated that the FBI is not attempting to ‘quash, curtail or interfere in the investigation in any way,’” Grassley and Johnson later wrote.
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When the New York Post first reported on some of the contents of the laptop in October 2020, much of the mainstream media and a group of more than 50 former senior intelligence officials dismissed the story as Russian disinformation. Social media platforms including Facebook and Twitter then censored the story under the guise of fighting disinformation.
It was later revealed that the FBI itself pressured Twitter to suppress the story by warning it could be part of a Russian “hack and leak” operation, despite the bureau knowing that concern was unfounded. FBI agents regularly held meetings with the social media companies in the lead up to the 2020 election in an apparent effort to fight election disinformation.
Floris, meanwhile, previously came under fire last year when it was revealed that she said in 2020 that she was “basically running a shadow government across the FBI at this point” to keep intelligence about China’s election meddling from becoming known.
Floris was one of several FBI officials who worked to recall and suppress an Intelligence Information Report in late September 2020 that contained information from an FBI confidential source that alleged the CCP was producing fake drivers’ licenses for fraudulent mail-in-votes in support of Biden, according to Just the News. Those efforts were first reported to Congress in June 2025.
Earlier this year, President Trump accused the Chinese Communist Party of attempting to boost Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election and claimed members of the U.S. intelligence community in the “deep state” were aware of the CCP’s meddling but carried out a cover up.
He alleged that China carried out “the largest compromise of election data in history” and was able to obtain data 220 million U.S. voter files, giving them access to names, addresses, phone numbers, political party preferences and “other sensitive data.” While the information found in voter files is largely accessible by the general public, Trump claimed the information could be used to “register to vote and engage in other nefarious activities, which is exactly what was happening.”
Trump has claimed, without evidence, since 2020 that the presidential election was rigged in Joe Biden’s favored. Top officials, including Trump’s then-Attorney General Bill Barr, have disputed his claims and have said no evidence of widespread fraud exists.
Trump said that while dozens of CIA and NSA reports mentioned China’s election targeting, those reports were omitted from his daily presidential briefing.
An internal email from an unknown person in the Director of National Intelligence’s office said that the IC is “deliberately avoiding mentioning a connection to elections for non-substantive reasons” in the presidential daily brief.
Trump cited a November 2020 email that includes a Strategic Intelligence Analyst specializing in China admitting they had “deliberately massaged our one pending PDB to avoid any direct links to the election.”
However, while documents show that there is evidence that China tried to influence Americans to support the CCP and that Chinese leaders were in fact critical of Trump, the assessments around China came from intelligence officers who said they had only low or medium confidence in their findings.
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