Court Date: Former FBI Agents Face Lie Charges

Former FBI agents Nikki Floris and Bradley Benavides return to federal court in Washington on Tuesday to face charges that they lied to Congress. The Justice Department announced the prosecution on Friday, marking the latest legal action in the period before the midterm elections next week.

The criminal complaint alleges the pair falsely minimized their knowledge of Hunter Biden’s laptop. The Justice Department states the laptop was left at a computer repair shop in 2019. Floris and Benavides led the Foreign Influence Task Force, a unit created in the first Trump administration to monitor foreign influence campaigns. They briefed Republican Senators Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson in August 2020 while the lawmakers investigated Hunter Biden’s work in Ukraine.

Defense attorneys plan to contest the case during the preliminary hearing. They intend to point out that the agents were charged via a criminal complaint signed by a magistrate judge rather than by a grand jury indictment. Prosecutors in the capital have often struggled to secure grand jury indictments in high-profile cases. The lawyers describe the case as baseless and politically motivated.

The case revisits the timeline that followed the New York Post’s report on the laptop’s existence. The newspaper said it obtained a hard drive from Rudy Giuliani, a close ally of President Donald Trump. The report detailed emails regarding Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings. Democrats and former intelligence officials raised concerns about Russian involvement because the intelligence community assessed Moscow was trying to undermine Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign.

John Ratcliffe, the national intelligence director at the time, stated there were no signs of Russian actors connected to the laptop’s provenance. The FBI investigated Hunter Biden on gun and tax charges, leading to felony convictions. President Joe Biden pardoned his son in late 2024. The Foreign Influence Task Force was disbanded in February 2025 by Attorney General Pam Bondi.

The complaint accuses Floris and Benavides of denying contemporaneous knowledge of the laptop and their participation in internal FBI conversations about it in 2023. Their lawyers have denied any wrongdoing. The agents are due in court Tuesday in Washington.