Two former FBI officials face charges of lying to Congress

Two former FBI officials have been charged with lying to Congress about their roles in work related to the investigation of Hunter Biden, the son of former President Joe Biden, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro said Friday. Lawyers for one of the officials called the accusation false and questioned why the case was brought now.

Nikki Floris, 46, and Bradley Benavides, 56, each face one count of lying to Congress in a criminal complaint. Pirro, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, said in a post on X that the two had surrendered Friday morning. She alleged that they lied about their roles on the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force during the 2020 election and in the bureau’s Hunter Biden investigations.

Pirro also alleged that one of the former officials claimed to have learned about the Hunter Biden investigation from Wikipedia, despite what she described as evidence of “their involvement in helping shape the public narrative about Hunter Biden’s laptop right before the election.” She did not identify which official made that claim in the accounts provided.

Floris’s attorneys rejected the charge. “Nikki Floris is a patriot. She served our nation as a dedicated FBI intelligence officer for nearly 20 years,” they said in a statement. “Yet today, the DOJ has accused her falsely of a crime on the say-so of politicians, not on the facts.”

The lawyers, Margaret Donovan, Chris Mattei, Mary Dohrmann and Kyle R. Freeny, said the government was filing the charges “years later, on the eve of an election.” They accused it of trying “to push a false narrative for a shot at political points” and said they looked forward to Floris’s day in court.

NBC News reported that Floris was a former deputy assistant director of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division and its security lead for the 2020 presidential election. She joined the bureau as an intelligence analyst in 2005 and was promoted to its counterterrorism division in 2017, according to NBC News. The outlet described Benavides as a former colleague whose work focused on election security, foreign influence and Chinese intelligence threats.

The charges were filed by criminal complaint, not a federal grand jury indictment, NBC News reported. The outlet said an attorney for Benavides was not listed on the court docket.

Floris has also faced criticism from Republicans over emails discussing intelligence work that Congress obtained and President Donald Trump declassified in July, according to NBC News. Republicans have alleged that FBI officials buried a report they considered credible about Chinese efforts to influence the 2020 election. Intelligence officials and Floris’s legal team have said pulling back the report was a standard administrative step for intelligence that might have been unverified or flawed.

Hunter Biden was convicted of gun and tax crimes before his father pardoned him shortly before leaving office, NBC News reported.