Two former senior FBI officials surrendered on arrest warrants Friday after being charged with lying to Congress about their roles in the bureau’s Foreign Influence Task Force during the 2020 election and its handling of investigations involving Hunter Biden.
Nikki Cole Floris, 46, and Bradley Benavides, 56, were taken into custody as part of a Justice Department investigation into the since-dissolved task force.
Floris led the task force as a deputy assistant director from mid-2019 through mid-2022. Benavides was the task force’s section chief from mid-2019 through the 2020 election, FBI Director Kash Patel said.
Both testified to Congress that the task force was not involved in the FBI’s Hunter Biden investigations, Patel said. Documentary evidence, contemporaneous communications, and witness accounts contradict their testimony, he said.
U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro, whose office is handling the case, said that one of the officials claimed to have learned about the investigation from Wikipedia, despite evidence showing the officials were involved in shaping the public narrative about Hunter Biden’s laptop before the 2020 election.
“Lying to Congress by anyone strikes at the heart of our democratic system,” Pirro said. “But when senior FBI agents lie to Congress believing they are above the law, it’s time to bring the hammer of justice down on them.”
Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Ron Johnson (R-WI) previously said Floris and Benavides briefed them on Aug. 6, 2020, about their investigation into Hunter Biden’s financial connections to foreign governments and foreign nationals.
The senators later accused the FBI of using the briefing to portray their investigation as Russian disinformation and of downplaying information about Hunter Biden and his laptop.
Floris moved on from the bureau to work as Microsoft’s director of insider risk, according to a professional profile. She previously spent nearly two decades at the FBI.
Her current employment drew renewed attention after President Donald Trump referred to her during a July address on election security. Trump cited declassified records showing that a former FBI official wrote, “I’m basically running a shadow government across the FBI at this point.”
The remark appeared in a 2020 internal exchange involving Floris as the FBI centralized election-related intelligence through headquarters. Trump touted the comment while arguing that information about alleged Chinese interference in the 2020 election had been kept from him.
Hunter Biden was later convicted on federal gun charges and pleaded guilty to tax charges before his father, former President Joe Biden, pardoned him in December 2024.
Patel said the charges show that “no one is above the law.” Floris’s lawyers said she was falsely accused and called the case “nonsense.”