Two former FBI officials have been charged with allegedly lying to Congress about their involvement in the investigation into Hunter Biden’s laptop ahead of the November 3 midterm elections.
What happened in court
Nikki Floris and Bradley Benavides were charged on Friday. They were once top leaders of a task force that was set up to stop foreign countries from interfering in elections. That task force has since been shut down.
Both surrendered to authorities and made their first appearance in a federal court in Washington. Their lawyers asked for a quick hearing so they could fight the charges.
This is a rare case. The Department of Justice has charged a former employee with a crime, and this does not happen often. It also comes as FBI Director Kash Patel looks into big events from the FBI’s recent past. Before he became FBI chief, Patel was a strong critic of the agency. These events have kept President Donald Trump’s conservative supporters upset for years.
Floris’ attorneys called her “a patriot” and said she has “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,” her attorneys said in a statement. “It’s no coincidence the government is filing these nonsense charges now, years later, on the eve of an election.”
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Why the timing is being questioned
The case was filed 10 days before the November 3 elections. It was filed through a criminal complaint. This means prosecutors have not yet shown the case to a grand jury to get an indictment. The Justice Department has often struggled to get grand juries in the nation’s capital to agree to indictments in high-profile cases.
Both the defense lawyers and the judge pointed out that this was an unusual move. A criminal complaint is more often used when prosecutors urgently need to take people into custody, for example if they are a danger or may flee.
US Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui said it is “rare that we have charges this old coming in this nature.” He set a preliminary hearing for next Tuesday, even though prosecutors wanted more time. The judge described the situation as a “sword of Damocles” hanging over the defendants’ heads.
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The laptop story and the allegations
The laptop’s existence came out in October 2020. It created a tricky storyline in the race between Trump, who was then president, and Joe Biden, Hunter Biden’s father, who went on to win.
The New York Post published material from the laptop. The newspaper said it had received a hard drive from Rudy Giuliani, an ally of Trump. Hunter Biden had reportedly left the computer at a repair shop in Wilmington, Delaware, about a year earlier.
The laptop’s discovery raised concerns among Democrats and former intelligence officials, who feared the material could be Russian disinformation. At the time, US intelligence officials believed Russia was trying to interfere in the election in Trump’s favor. Giuliani had also travelled abroad to look for damaging information about the Bidens. Dozens of former US intelligence officials signed a letter saying the laptop had the hallmarks of an “information campaign.”
But Trump’s then-director of national intelligence, John Ratcliffe, wrote to Congress that there was no proof foreign actors were involved. The FBI under then-Director Chris Wray later backed this up.
The criminal complaint adds to long-standing Republican complaints about how the FBI handled the laptop. Republicans have accused the bureau of not being open with the public about its finding that the laptop’s contents, including emails about Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings, were genuine and not Russian disinformation.
The complaint says Floris and Benavides led the Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF) and were involved in the Hunter Biden investigations. It says Biden was a repeat subject at FITF meetings. Yet, the complaint says, both played down what they knew first-hand about the laptop, or their role in the probes, when they gave testimony to Congress in 2023. It also accuses Benavides of making a false statement by telling lawmakers that he learned through Wikipedia that the FBI had the laptop.
“Lying to Congress by senior FBI officials strikes at the heart of our system. No one is above the law,” Patel said.
(With AP inputs)
