Hunter Biden, son of former President Joe Biden, seen in July 2024 in Washington, DC.
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Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
The Justice Department has charged two former FBI employees with making false statements to Congress in connection with the bureau’s investigations into Hunter Biden and his laptop ahead of the 2020 presidential election.
Bradley Benavides and Nikki Floris each face a single criminal count stemming from testimony before lawmakers in 2023. The pair, who held senior positions on the FBI’s now defunct Foreign Influence Task Force, both turned themselves in and made their initial court appearance Friday morning in Washington, D.C.
The new prosecution is the latest politically fraught case to be brought by the Justice Department since President Trump returned to the White House. It dredges back up the bizarre saga surrounding former President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, and his various legal troubles that featured throughout the 2020 presidential campaign.
Hunter Biden’s laptop was the subject of intense scrutiny after The New York Post reported weeks before the 2020 presidential election that the device was abandoned at a Delaware repair shop in 2019, and then obtained by President Trump’s former personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani.
Republicans have long accused the FBI of mishandling the laptop and the investigations into the younger Biden. Hunter Biden was convicted of federal gun charges and later pleaded guilty to separate tax offenses. (Joe Biden signed a full and unconditional pardon for his son in December 2024.)
In a statement on Xthe U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., Jeanine Pirro, said Floris and Benavides “allegedly lied to Congress about their roles in the FBI’s Hunter Biden investigations, with one claiming they only learned about it from Wikipedia — despite evidence showing their involvement in helping shape the public narrative about Hunter Biden’s laptop right before the election.”
Prosecutors charged Benavides and Floris by criminal complaint, which means prosecutors have yet to secure an indictment from a grand jury. Under the second Trump administration, grand juries in the nation’s capital and other cities have refused on several occasions to return indictments in high-profile, politically charged cases.
At a court hearing Friday morning, Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui noted that both of the defendants have “sparkling backgrounds” in federal law enforcement and were longtime dedicated public servants. He also noted that charging them by criminal complaint for conduct that is “quite old” is unusual.
Court hearing planned next week
Benavides, 56, and Floris, 46, are due back in court for a preliminary hearing on Tuesday.
In a statement, Floris’ attorneys called her a “patriot” who served as “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 added.
The Post reported Hunter Biden’s laptop showed wrongdoing by then-Democratic nominee Joe Biden, who subsequently won the election. Some of the data on the laptop was later ascertained to belong to Hunter Biden. House Republicans subsequently launched an impeachment inquiry into President Biden, focusing on Hunter Biden’s business dealings at the time his father was vice president. But no evidence has ever been presented that Joe Biden financially gained from his son’s business activities.
The complaint alleges that Benavides and Floris both had real-time knowledge of the Hunter Biden investigations, including into his laptop, in their top posts on the Foreign Influence Task Force.
But in interviews with the House Judiciary Committee in 2023, both of them allegedly lied about their knowledge and involvement in those investigations.
Those purported false statements were material to the committee’s investigation, the complaint says, because they allowed both Benavides and Floris to “escape” further questioning about Hunter Biden, which hindered the panel’s investigation.
Source: www.npr.org
