Two former FBI leaders face court over Hunter Biden laptop charges

Nikki Floris and Bradley Benavides, two former FBI officials, appeared before a federal judge in Washington on Tuesday to address criminal charges that they misled Congress regarding their knowledge of Hunter Biden’s laptop. The prosecution was announced on Friday, placing the case squarely in the middle of the midterm election cycle scheduled for next week.

The government accuses Floris and Benavides of falsely minimizing their awareness of a laptop that the Justice Department says Hunter Biden left at a computer repair shop in 2019. Beyond the specific device, the case targets the Foreign Influence Task Force, a unit created in the first Trump administration to monitor foreign interference. Congressional Republicans had long argued that the task force attempted to discredit their own inquiries into the Biden family.

Defense attorneys plan to use the Tuesday preliminary hearing to question the unusual legal path of the prosecution. They will point out that the former officials were charged via a criminal complaint signed by a magistrate judge, rather than through a grand jury indictment. This distinction matters because the Justice Department has had difficulty persuading grand juries in the District of Columbia to return indictments in high-profile matters.

Hours before the hearing, the Department of Justice filed an additional obstruction charge. The new allegation states that the former officials’ false statements allowed them to avoid questioning about their knowledge of the laptop and impeded a separate investigation conducted by House lawmakers. Floris’ lawyers reacted to the late addition in a statement released early Tuesday. They asked, “What is going on at the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office?” The attorneys described the filing as an unsigned and unsworn complaint intended to fix issues with the original charge.

The legal team noted that in their combined decades of service at the Justice Department, they had never seen or heard of a charge filed in such a manner. They called the new obstruction charge just as meritless as the initial accusation. The case revisits a complex timeline that began when the New York Post reported on a laptop it said had been dropped off by the younger Biden at a Delaware repair shop about a year before the 2020 election.

The newspaper stated it obtained the hard drive from Rudy Giuliani, a close ally of President Donald Trump. Reports included emails that appeared to show some of Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings. Democrats and former intelligence officials raised concerns about the circumstances of the laptop’s discovery, particularly when the administration’s intelligence community assessed that Moscow was attempting to undermine Joe Biden’s candidacy. Trump’s then-national intelligence director, John Ratcliffe, sought to quell speculation by saying there were no signs of Russian involvement.

The FBI investigated the younger Biden on gun and tax charges, which later resulted in felony convictions. President Joe Biden pardoned his son in late 2024. Floris and Benavides, who led the Foreign Influence Task Force, briefed Republican Sens. Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson in August 2020. The briefing occurred while the senators investigated Hunter Biden’s work in Ukraine. News of the meeting leaked, and the senators criticized the FBI for linking their scrutiny of the Biden family to Russian disinformation efforts.

The criminal complaint alleges that Floris and Benavides lied to lawmakers in 2023 by denying they had contemporaneous knowledge of the laptop or participated in internal FBI conversations about it. Their lawyers have denied any wrongdoing. The task force was disbanded in February 2025 by then-Attorney General Pam Bondi.