Defense lawyers expected to challenge case at Tuesday hearing
Nikki Floris and Bradley Benavides are due back in federal court in Washington on Tuesday for a preliminary hearing in a rare Justice Department criminal case involving former FBI employees. The charges accuse them of lying to Congress about their participation in investigations involving Hunter Biden, the son of former President Joe Biden, and concern a laptop the Justice Department says Hunter Biden abandoned at a Delaware computer repair shop in 2019. Their lawyers deny any wrongdoing and have described the case as baseless and politically motivated.
At the hearing, defense lawyers are expected to challenge the case, including by highlighting the unusual fact that the charges were brought through a criminal complaint signed by a magistrate judge rather than a grand-jury indictment. The Justice Department is thought to have repeatedly struggled in high-profile cases to persuade grand juries in the nation’s capital to return indictments.
The Justice Department’s criminal complaint alleges that in 2023 Floris and Benavides lied to lawmakers by denying contemporaneous knowledge of the Biden laptop or participation in internal FBI conversations about it. Prosecutors accused the former officials of falsely playing down their knowledge of the computer. Defense lawyers have described the prosecution as baseless and politically motivated.
The prosecution, announced Friday, is the latest in what the Associated Press described as a series of splashy and politically charged investigative actions the Justice Department has undertaken in the run-up to next week’s midterm elections. Beyond the laptop allegations, the Associated Press characterized the case as a Trump administration broadside against the since-disbanded FBI task force set up to monitor foreign influence. Congressional Republicans have long criticized the task force, saying it tried to discredit their own investigations into the Biden family. The case centers on two of its former leaders.
Floris and Benavides were leaders of the FBI Foreign Influence Task Force, which was established during the first Trump administration to monitor foreign influence campaigns staged by Russia and other nations aimed at sowing discord, undermining democracy and spreading disinformation. Then-Attorney General Pam Bondi disbanded the task force in February 2025.
In that capacity, the FBI officials briefed Republican Sens. Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson in August 2020 as the lawmakers pursued their own investigation into Hunter Biden’s work in Ukraine. News of the briefing leaked, and the senators accused the FBI of discrediting their efforts to scrutinize the Biden family and falsely linking those efforts to Russian disinformation.
The prosecution revisits the events that roiled the final weeks of the 2020 race after the New York Post reported that Hunter Biden had left a laptop at a Delaware computer repair shop about a year earlier. The Post said it had obtained the hard drive from Rudy Giuliani, a close ally of President Donald Trump, and reported on some of the computer’s contents, including emails that appeared to show some of Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings.
The laptop’s discovery raised concerns among Democrats and former intelligence officials about possible Russian involvement. The Trump administration’s own intelligence community had assessed that Moscow was trying to undermine the candidacy of Democratic nominee Joe Biden, who went on to defeat Trump in 2020. Giuliani had traveled abroad looking for dirt on the Bidens, according to the Associated Press. Then-national intelligence director John Ratcliffe sought to calm speculation about the laptop’s provenance, saying there were no signs it had anything to do with Russian actors. The FBI said it had nothing to add to Ratcliffe’s statement.
The FBI subsequently investigated Hunter Biden on gun and tax charges that later resulted in felony convictions, and President Joe Biden pardoned his son in late 2024. Those cases are separate from the allegations against Floris and Benavides, which concern their 2023 denials of contemporaneous knowledge of the laptop and their alleged participation in internal FBI conversations about it.
Defense lawyers are expected to challenge the case at Tuesday’s preliminary hearing, including by highlighting that the charges were brought through a complaint signed by a magistrate judge rather than a grand-jury indictment. The case remains at the preliminary stage, with the Justice Department relying on a criminal complaint rather than a grand-jury indictment.