WASHINGTON — Two former FBI intelligence officials have been charged with making false statements to Congress about Hunter Biden’s laptop, the Associated Press reported Friday, in a case filed just 10 days before the Nov. 3 midterm elections.
Who has been charged
One of the officials is Nikki Floris, a former FBI intelligence official who specialized in foreign election interference. Her lawyers confirmed Friday that she had been charged by the Justice Department and said she was due in court the same day. AP identified Floris as an official who briefed Congress on foreign interference in 2020. The full details of the charges against both officials had not been made public as of the AP’s initial report, and the AP’s first report did not name the second official.
Her lawyers: “nonsense” charges timed to the election
Floris’s attorneys pushed back hard. “Nikki Floris is a patriot. She served our nation as a 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,” they said in a statement. “It’s no coincidence the government is filing these nonsense charges now, years later, on the eve of an election.”
The 2020 briefing at the center of the fight
Floris has long been a target of Republican criticism. According to congressional records, on Aug. 6, 2020, Floris, then a deputy assistant director for counterintelligence, and Bradley Benavides, then a section chief of the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, gave Republican Sens. Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin a so-called “defensive” briefing about the threat of Russian disinformation.
Grassley and Johnson were investigating Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings at the time. The senators later said the briefing was unnecessary and unconnected to their investigation, and that its existence was leaked in a way that falsely portrayed their work as advancing Russian disinformation. In 2022 they asked Floris and Benavides to sit for transcribed interviews, and in 2023 the House Judiciary Committee opened its own inquiry into the briefing and interviewed Floris.
Part of a string of politically charged cases
The AP noted the case is the latest in a series of splashy and politically charged investigative actions the Justice Department has taken in the run-up to the midterms. With early voting already underway in many states, the timing is sure to fuel a fierce debate: supporters of the prosecution see long-awaited accountability over the handling of the laptop story, while Floris’s defense calls it politics dressed up as law enforcement.
This is a developing story and will be updated as more details about the charges become available.