Two former senior FBI officials who helped run the bureau's Foreign Influence Task Force during the 2020 election were charged Friday with lying to Congress about their roles in the FBI's Hunter Biden investigations, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro of the District of Columbia and FBI Director Kash Patel announced.
Nikki Floris, 46, and Bradley Benavides, 56, each face one count of lying to Congress in a criminal complaint. Pirro said the pair surrendered Friday morning, and both appeared in federal court in Washington that morning. Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui said in court that the charges relate to "Hunter Biden's laptop and allegations around that," CNN reported. Neither will be detained while awaiting trial, and a further hearing is set for Tuesday morning.
Pirro said the two lied about the parts they played. One of them, she said, claimed to have learned of the investigation from Wikipedia, even though evidence showed "their involvement in helping shape the public narrative about Hunter Biden's laptop right before the election," CBS News reported.
Patel spelled out the positions they held. Floris led the task force as a deputy assistant director from mid-2019 through mid-2022, and Benavides was its section chief from mid-2019 through the 2020 election, he said. "Both testified that the FITF was not involved in the Hunter Biden investigations," Patel said in a statement quoted by Just the News. "Documentary evidence, contemporaneous communications, and witness accounts contradict their testimony."
He also said Floris is on record privately claiming to be "running a shadow government" during the 2020 election in her task force role, the New York Post reported. The accusation is not new. A conservative candidate for Michigan governor has repeatedly accused Floris of running a "shadow government" against Trump in 2020, according to CNN.
The case rests on what the two told House investigators. According to an affidavit supporting the complaint, Floris and Benavides made "materially false statements" to the House Judiciary Committee during its inquiry into the task force's involvement in the bureau's Hunter Biden investigations, Just the News reported. A source familiar with the charges told the Post they grew out of transcribed interviews the two gave the committee in July and September 2023. Two people briefed on the investigation told CNN it focused on whether FBI investigators sought to minimize allegations of Biden family corruption and evidence related to Hunter Biden's laptop.
Floris's lawyers rejected the accusation and attacked its timing. "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," they said in a statement. "It's no coincidence the government is filing these nonsense charges now, years later, on the eve of an election." The government's aim, they said, was "to push a false narrative for a shot at political points," and they said they look forward to her day in court.
The statement was issued by attorneys Margaret Donovan, Chris Mattei, Mary Dohrmann and Kyle R. Freeny, NBC News reported. No lawyer for Benavides was yet listed on the court docket, and the Post said representatives for the pair could not immediately be reached.
The charges arrive less than two weeks before Election Day. They were brought by complaint, and no federal grand jury in Washington has yet returned an indictment. Lying to Congress is a rarely charged offense that can be difficult to prosecute, NBC noted, adding that grand jurors in the capital have been skeptical of cases brought during Trump's second term.
Floris joined the FBI as an intelligence analyst in 2005, worked on the director's daily briefing staff and was promoted to the counterterrorism division in 2017. She was also the bureau's security lead for the 2020 presidential election. Benavides, a former colleague, focused on election security, foreign influence and Chinese intelligence threats.
Floris had already drawn Republican criticism over emails discussing intelligence work that Congress obtained and that Trump declassified in July. Republicans allege that FBI officials buried what they describe as a credible report on Chinese efforts to influence the election in order to protect then-Director Christopher Wray. Intelligence officials and her legal team have said pulling the report back was a standard administrative step for a report that may have been unverified or built on flawed intelligence.
Republicans have repeatedly criticized the FBI's early handling of the Hunter Biden investigations and have accused the Biden family of corruption, especially after IRS whistleblowers claimed the bureau had slow-walked an investigation into the younger Biden. Hunter Biden was eventually convicted on federal gun and tax charges and pardoned by his father around Thanksgiving in 2024. Special counsel David Weiss, who investigated the Republican allegations, did not recommend charges beyond those cases and separately charged a government informant with providing false information alleging bribery in the Biden family.