The Hunter Biden laptop saga is back with a vengeance, with the Justice Department on Friday criminally charging two former high-ranking FBI agents with lying to Congress — settling a long-running score for Republicans who felt the pair had impeded their attempt to make the scandal a decisive issue in the 2020 election.
Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, announced that both former bureau officials surrendered Friday after arrest warrants were issued in a legal complaint filed Tuesday. The investigation was led out of the FBI’s Kansas field office.
The former agents ran the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, which was created in 2017 under then-Director Christopher Wray in the aftermath of Russia’s attempts to influence the 2016 election by maligning Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. It was disbanded weeks after President Donald Trump returned to the White House last year, as part of his transformation of the FBI.
Nikki Floris, 46, was the task force’s assistant director, and Bradley Benavides, 56, was its section chief. After their tenure on that team, both were pulled into House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan’s yearslong crusade to probe the business activities of President Joe Biden’s son.
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The inquiry dates back to an incident in which Hunter Biden left his laptop at a Wilmington, Delaware, computer repair shop in 2019, only to have it turned over to MAGA stalwart Rudy Giuliani. The former New York City mayor handed it to the FBI, and the saga eventually blew up into a scandal following a New York Post story in the closing weeks of the 2020 presidential election alleging improper political influence tied to Hunter Biden’s business interests in Ukraine.
Floris and Benavides “knew about and were actively involved in the FBI’s investigations of Hunter Biden” but repeatedly feigned ignorance when answering the Judiciary Committee’s questions during two interviews in 2023, according to a 27-page affidavit written by FBI Special Agent Byron Militello, a longtime investigator at the bureau in the Midwest.
The affidavit alleges that Floris was directly involved with the way the bureau fielded press inquiries following the Post’s story on Oct. 14, 2020, and even approved additions to
Wray’s talking points about the matter for a call with Sen. Mark Warner (D-Virginia). And it points to her conflicting answer in 2023 when the House Judiciary Committee asked how long the FBI had the laptop.
“I don’t know what laptop the article was referring to,” it quotes her as saying.
The affidavit also cites messages between Benavides and a person who appears to have been the assistant special agent in charge of the Baltimore field office, in which they discuss when exactly the laptop was seized and whether emails on it were shared with agents in New York. However, the affidavit says, Benavides told Jordan’s committee otherwise.
“I was made aware per the Wikipedia article that the FBI had taken possession of a
laptop circa December of 2019,” it quotes him saying in a transcript.
“Okay. You didn’t have that knowledge from your role in the FBI?” he was asked.
“Absolutely not,” he responded, according to the transcript.
Court records show that Floris is being represented by several lawyers including Margaret Donovan, a Connecticut attorney who is representing several FBI agents being targeted by the Trump administration. Benavides’ lawyer is Kimberly Paschall, who until last year was a senior attorney in the same D.C. office now prosecuting her client and has publicly signed on to a letter protesting what it calls the weaponization of the DOJ. Paschall did not respond to a request for comment.
Donovan and Washington Litigation Group lawyers Mary Dohrmann and Kyle Freeny put out a statement calling Floris “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 wrote. “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.”
The current case stems from the Republican Party’s unfinished business with Hunter Biden, who faced decades in prison after being convicted of an illegal gun purchase and tax dodging — until he was pardoned by his father, the president. For years, Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley has publicly complained that Floris and Benavides had become a speedbump in his attempt to draw attention to the Biden scandal during the closing months of the 2020 presidential election, which Trump ultimately lost.
At a time when Republicans were trying to pin then-candidate Joe Biden as a former vice president whose influence helped his son benefit from corrupt business dealings in Ukraine, Democrats were trying to cast the entire affair as a mere Russian foreign influence operation.
In the midst of that scramble, according to Republicans, Democratic Sens. Gary Peters of Michigan and Ron Wyden of Oregon requested that the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force brief the Judiciary and Homeland Security committees about what they claimed was Russia’s attempt to sway the presidential election.
That briefing, which is mentioned in a GOP report, eventually came on Aug. 6, 2020. As Republicans tell it, that hearing derailed their congressional investigation into Hunter Biden by marring it as the spoils of a Russian disinformation campaign.
“That FBI task force was involved in unnecessarily briefing us two senators,” Grassley said last year, referring to himself and Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin. “But that only happened after pressure from our Democratic colleagues. So, pure and simple, this was a setup,”
“The contents of that briefing were later leaked to the media, even though the FBI promised us confidentiality,” he continued. “Those leaks were used to falsely link our Biden family investigation to somehow advancing Russian disinformation. The FBI’s conduct undermined and frustrated our congressional investigation.”
Grassley released a statement Friday that called Floris and Benavides “two unelected bureaucrats” who “used the power of government to smear my and Senator Johnson’s constitutional oversight and distract from inconvenient truths that weaponized bureaucrats and the Biden administration didn’t want you to know.”
The FBI affidavit unsealed Friday references that interaction and the way it later led to a House Judiciary probe under Jordan, whose committee interviewed Floris on July 19, 2023, and Benavides on Sept. 28, 2023. According to the affidavit, Floris described herself during that testimony as the FBI’s election security lead during the 2020 presidential election.
The affidavit quotes the House Judiciary Committee asking her, “Was there ever a discussion at the [Foreign Influence Task Force] about Hunter Biden?” To which she responded: “No. At least not with me. 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.”
However, the affidavit alleges that Floris and Benavides oversaw how the task force “informally formed a group of analysts to work on a project later known as ‘Round River,’” which is described as a group that was “scrutinizing informant intelligence relating to the Hunter Biden investigations as potential disinformation.”
Wyden’s office shot back on Friday afternoon.
“The idea that the Russian disinformation narrative was fabricated by the Foreign Influence Task Force is a conspiracy theory. As the Wyden-Peters report lays out, the overwhelming evidence shows that the Grassley Johnson investigation advanced a Russian disinformation campaign in an effort to affect the outcome of the 2020 presidential election,” senior Wyden aide Keith Chu told The Washington Sun.
The first Trump administration’s own Treasury Department sanctioned Ukrainian politician Andrii Derkach and others for their role in the Hunter Biden affair and attempt to influence the U.S. presidential election, noting that Derkach had “been an active Russian agent for over a decade, maintaining close connections with the Russian Intelligence Services.”
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