The Justice Department on Friday charged two former FBI officials with making false statements to Congress that allegedly hindered a Republican-led House committee as it was investigating President Joe Biden’s son Hunter in the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election.
Nikki Floris, a former analyst who led the intelligence division in the FBI’s Washington field office, and Bradley Benavides, a former deputy assistant director for counterintelligence, gave testimony to the House Judiciary Committee in 2023. Both allegedly obfuscated what they knew about FBI probes into Hunter Biden and his laptop, according to charging documents filed in U.S. District Court in D.C.
The two former FBI officials face up to five years in prison if convicted. Neither has been indicted by a grand jury. They were released Friday morning after self-surrendering and making a brief initial appearance before a federal magistrate judge.
The charges are the latest example of the Trump administration wielding its authority against law enforcement officials who have drawn criticism from the president or his allies.
Attorneys for Floris said in a statement that the Justice Department “has accused her falsely of a crime on the say-so of politicians, not on the facts.” An attorney for Benavides, Ron Safer, urged the court to hold a hearing early next week on whether prosecutors had enough evidence to charge the “two lifetime public servants.”
“Nikki Floris is a patriot,” her attorneys said in a statement. “She served our nation as a dedicated FBI intelligence officer for nearly 20 years. … It’s no coincidence the government is filing these nonsense charges now, years later, on the eve of an election.”
U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro, the top federal prosecutor in D.C. and an ally of President Donald Trump, said in a statement that Floris and Benavides had undermined “the very institutions they swore to uphold.”
“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,” said Pirro, whose office is prosecuting the case.
In court Friday, U.S. Magistrate Judge Zia M. Faruqui raised questions about the timing of the charges and whether the alleged false statements had a material effect on the congressional investigation.
The judge granted defense attorneys’ request for a hearing to weigh the government’s evidence on Tuesday. Faruqui acknowledged that such a hearing usually would not be held so quickly when the defendants are sent home instead of jailed.
“It’s certainly rare,” Faruqui said. “But it is more rare that we have charges that are this old of this nature.”
The judge noted that the facts of the case “certainly appear quite old.” The case was charged three years after the former FBI agents testified to Congress, and Faruqui said Floris and Benavides had an interest in getting a chance to clear their names as quickly as possible. The judge said both had “sparkling backgrounds” in law enforcement.
“There is a Sword of Damocles hanging over their head … this will follow them for the rest of their lives,” Faruqui said.
For years, Democrats and Republicans have debated the significance of Hunter Biden’s laptop, with Republicans saying it contained evidence of corruption within the Biden family and Democrats saying it was fodder for Republican conspiracy theories.
In 2019, a computer shop owner in Wilmington, Delaware, handed a laptop to the FBI that he said Hunter Biden had dropped off and never reclaimed. The owner told The Washington Post that he decided to turn the laptop over to authorities after he viewed some of its contents.
An FBI affidavit alleges that Floris was asked repeatedly about her involvement in the Hunter Biden investigations, and denied having a role, during a hearing before the House Judiciary Committee on July 19, 2023.
“Did you have any involvement in the Hunter Biden investigation?” Floris was asked, according to the affidavit. “I did not,” she replied.
“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 affidavit states. “FLORIS testified that she knew nothing about the Hunter Biden laptop. In reality, she coordinated the FBI’s response to news articles about the laptop in real time.”
Testifying on Sept. 23, 2023, Benavides told the same committee that he had learned of the laptop from a Wikipedia entry as he was preparing for his congressional testimony. “In reality, he was in constant communication about the laptop over a period of days,” according to the affidavit.
A House Judiciary Committee staff member who was present for both interviews in 2023 said that those answers “influenced the Committee’s investigation significantly, including by thwarting investigative follow-up interviews and subpoenas,” Pirro’s office alleged in the court filing.
Since Trump took office for a second time in 2025, the FBI has pushed out scores of agents who the president’s allies claimed were working to undermine him, including agents who say they were fired solely because they worked on investigations into Trump, and others who claim they were ousted because they did not show sufficient loyalty to the president.
In addition to their involvement in the Hunter Biden probe, Floris and Benavides have come under fire from Trump allies for their work on security around the 2020 presidential election, which Trump falsely claims was stolen from him.
In a social media post about the charges Friday, FBI Director Kash Patel said the agency had “dismantled the corrupt … squad that engaged in political weaponization targeting their opponents, including President Trump.”
The charges against the agents are the latest in a string of high-profile cases from the Justice Department involving perceived political enemies of the president days ahead of the November midterm elections.
Last week, federal authorities searched the Washington home of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota) as part of an investigation into whether she or her family members lied on immigration paperwork. On Thursday, Attorney General Todd Blanche and Patel appeared together for an unusual news conference to announce racketeering charges against Virginia state Sen. L. Louise Lucas, a powerful Democrat and vocal Trump critic who runs a marijuana business.
Pirro’s office previously investigated claims that the Federal Reserve’s then-chair, Jerome H. Powell, gave false testimony to Congress about renovation costs for the central bank’s headquarters in Washington. But Pirro closed that investigation without filing charges, after the chief judge in D.C. federal district court tossed out subpoenas in the case and found that the probe was a ruse to pressure Powell to resign or lower interest rates, as Trump had long demanded.
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