Two former FBI officials accused of lying to Congress about their roles in investigations tied to Hunter Biden are scheduled to return to federal court in Washington on Tuesday. Their lawyers have called the case baseless and politically motivated.
Nikki Floris and Bradley Benavides were charged in a prosecution announced Friday. It is the latest in a string of high-profile, politically charged actions by the Justice Department ahead of next week's midterm elections.
The complaint alleges that the pair falsely downplayed what they knew about a laptop that the Justice Department says Hunter Biden, the son of former President Joe Biden, left at a computer repair shop in 2019. More broadly, the case amounts to an attack by the Trump administration on a now-disbanded FBI task force created to monitor foreign influence. Congressional Republicans have long faulted that unit, arguing it tried to discredit their own probes of the Biden family.
At Tuesday's preliminary hearing, defense lawyers are expected to challenge the case. They are likely to point out an unusual feature: the former officials were charged through a criminal complaint signed by a magistrate judge, not an indictment voted on by a grand jury. The Justice Department is believed to have repeatedly had trouble convincing grand juries in the nation's capital to return indictments in high-profile cases.
The case, a rare criminal prosecution of a former Justice Department employee, revives a tangled episode that shook the final weeks of the 2020 campaign. The New York Post reported on the existence of a laptop it said the younger Biden had dropped off at a Delaware repair shop about a year earlier. The paper said it got a hard drive from Rudy Giuliani, a close ally of President Donald Trump, and described some of the contents, including emails that appeared to show aspects of Hunter Biden's foreign business dealings.
The odd circumstances of the laptop's discovery prompted worries among Democrats and former intelligence officials about possible Russian involvement. The Trump administration's own intelligence community had assessed that Moscow was trying to undermine Joe Biden's candidacy, and Giuliani had traveled abroad seeking damaging information on the Bidens. Joe Biden went on to defeat Trump in 2020.
John Ratcliffe, then Trump's national intelligence director, moved quickly to calm speculation, saying there were no signs Russian actors were behind the laptop. The FBI said it had nothing to add to his statement and investigated the younger Biden on gun and tax charges, which later led to felony convictions. President Joe Biden pardoned his son in late 2024.
Floris and Benavides led the Foreign Influence Task Force, established during the first Trump administration to counter influence campaigns by Russia and other nations meant to sow discord, weaken democracy and spread disinformation. In August 2020, they briefed Republican Sens. Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson, who were then examining Hunter Biden's work in Ukraine. News of the briefing leaked, and the senators criticized the FBI, saying their scrutiny of the Biden family had been undermined and wrongly tied to Russian disinformation.
The criminal complaint alleges the two lied to lawmakers in 2023 by denying they had contemporaneous knowledge of the laptop or took part in internal FBI discussions about it. Their lawyers deny any wrongdoing. Then-Attorney General Pam Bondi disbanded the task force in February 2025.
