Two former FBI officials told Congress their task force had nothing to do with the Hunter Biden investigations.

Their lawyers call the charges politics. A federal judge called the charge rare.

And Kash Patel pointed to one private remark from 2020 that makes the whole denial look even worse.

Kash Patel Lays Out the Case Against Two Former Task Force Bosses

The Justice Department charged Nikki Floris and Bradley Benavides with one count each of making a false statement to Congress.

Both helped run the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force during the 2020 election. According to FBI Director Kash Patel, Floris led the unit as a Deputy Assistant Director from mid-2019 through mid-2022, and Benavides served as its Section Chief from mid-2019 through the 2020 election.

Prosecutors say the pair sat down with the House Judiciary Committee in 2023, when Republicans wanted to know whether the task force had a hand in the Hunter Biden investigations. Both said no.

“Both testified that the FITF was not involved in the Hunter Biden investigations,” Patel wrote on X. “Documentary evidence, contemporaneous communications, and witness accounts contradict their testimony.”

But the detail that’ll get folks talking at the coffee shop involves Wikipedia. According to the criminal complaint and DC US Attorney Jeanine Pirro, Benavides told Congress he first learned the FBI had Hunter Biden’s laptop from a Wikipedia article in 2023.

Think about that for a second. A senior official on the FBI’s election-influence unit, learning about the most famous laptop in America from an online encyclopedia anybody with a keyboard can edit. Three years after the fact.

The complaint also describes a task force operation code-named “Round River.” According to CBS News, the complaint says the operation focused on collecting “derogatory informant reporting on, among other things, Hunter Biden, to flag the reporting as Russian disinformation.”

Then Patel dropped the line that will stick. He wrote that Floris “is also on record privately claiming to be ‘running a shadow government’ during the 2020 election in her role on the FITF.”

Neither defendant has had a chance to answer that in court, and both remain presumed innocent. Floris’ lawyers call her “a patriot” and say prosecutors charged her “on the say-so of politicians.”

“It’s no coincidence the government is filing these nonsense charges now, years later, on the eve of an election,” her attorneys said.

Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui noted that both former agents have “sparkling backgrounds.” He also pointed out that prosecutors brought the case by complaint rather than through a grand jury, and he told the government to come ready, since the charge will “follow them for the rest of their lives.”

Chuck Grassley Sat Across the Table From These Two Back in 2020

Here’s the piece of the story CNN’s write-up never touched.

On August 6, 2020, Floris and Benavides delivered a briefing on behalf of the FBI and the intelligence community to US Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and US Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI). At the time, the two Republicans were wrapping up a report on Hunter Biden’s financial ties to foreign governments.

The senators never asked for that meeting. In an August 2022 letter addressed to Floris and Benavides by name, Grassley and Johnson wrote that the briefing “was unnecessary and was only done because of pressure from our Democratic colleagues.”

And the pressure came from the top. In July 2020, then-Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), and two other Democrat intelligence leaders sent the FBI a letter claiming Congress had become the target of a foreign disinformation campaign. Days later, the top Democrats on the senators’ two committees demanded a briefing from the Foreign Influence Task Force itself.

The FBI went ahead and gave it to them.

According to the senators, the briefers mostly rehashed things they already knew or covered matters with no connection to their probe. The briefers also assured them the FBI had no plan to “quash, curtail, or interfere” with the investigation.

Then the leaks started. Grassley and Johnson wrote that the briefing “provided the Democrats and liberal media the vehicle to spread their false narrative that our work advanced Russian disinformation.”

So in August 2020, two task force officials sat down with Republican senators to talk about disinformation risks hanging over a Hunter Biden investigation. In 2023, those same two officials told the House their task force stayed out of the Hunter Biden investigations.

Now, prosecutors haven’t said whether that 2020 briefing shows up anywhere in their evidence, and a briefing to senators isn’t the same thing as an FBI case file. But readers can line up the dates for themselves.

Disinformation Became the FBI’s Favorite Rubber Stamp

Grassley’s 2022 letter flagged something else. Whistleblowers had alleged that in August 2020, the very month of that briefing, FBI officials kicked off a scheme to downplay derogatory information about Hunter Biden by labeling it “disinformation.”

Now a federal complaint describes Round River in almost the same terms. Flag the reporting. Call it Russian.

But the label didn’t stay inside the Bureau. In the weeks before the 2020 election, Big Tech buried the laptop story under the suspicion that it might be foreign propaganda, and millions of Americans still want to know who planted that idea first. The task force existed to pass warnings about foreign accounts to platforms like Facebook and Twitter, which then decided whether to pull the plug.

And here’s the irony nobody in Washington, DC wants to sit with. President Trump’s first administration created the task force after the 2016 election to fight genuine foreign meddling. According to the charges, it ended up tangled in the one American story Democrats most wanted kept quiet before Election Day 2020.

Then-Attorney General Pam Bondi dissolved the unit in February 2025, saying the move would “free resources to address more pressing priorities, and end risks of further weaponization and abuses of prosecutorial discretion.”

Defenders of the two officials see something else entirely. One former US official told CNN the administration was “fighting imaginary adversaries of the past and perceived political grievances.” They also point out that special counsel David Weiss dug into the Republican allegations about Hunter Biden and recommended nothing beyond the gun and tax counts, and that Weiss charged a government informant for feeding investigators false bribery claims about the Biden family.

Hunter Biden did end up convicted on federal tax and gun charges. His father pardoned him in late 2024.

But none of that settles the narrow question in this courtroom. Whether Hunter Biden deserved more charges has nothing to do with whether two senior officials told Congress the truth about their own unit. Testimony is either accurate or it isn’t.

Pirro made the point in her own style. “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,” she wrote.

Both defendants head back to court soon, and their lawyers want a fast hearing to fight the allegations. If the documents and witness accounts hold up the way Patel describes, Congress will have every reason to reopen the whole 2020 playbook, including every conversation the FBI had with the social media giants before the votes came in.

If they don’t hold up, Floris and Benavides will walk out with their names cleared and their lawyers’ “political points” argument ringing loud.

Either way, the calendar won’t change. On August 6, 2020, Nikki Floris and Bradley Benavides briefed two Republican senators in the middle of their Hunter Biden investigation. In 2023, both told the House their task force stayed out of the Hunter Biden investigations.

Sources:
CNN, “First on CNN: DOJ brings criminal charges against FBI officials it believes hampered Biden corruption investigation”
US Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, “Two Former FBI Officials Charged in Lying to Congress about Hunter Biden Investigations”
CBS News, “2 ex-FBI officials charged with lying to Congress about Hunter Biden laptop probe”
Fox News, “Ex-FBI officials arrested in Hunter Biden laptop probe as testimony comes under scrutiny”
NBC News, “DOJ charges two former top FBI officials who were frequent targets of Trump allies”
CNBC, “Two ex-FBI officials charged with allegedly lying about Hunter Biden probe: DOJ”
Townhall, “Two Former Senior FBI Officials Were Arrested Today for Lying to Congress”
Senators Charles E Grassley and Ron Johnson, letter to Nikki Floris and Bradley Benavides, August 25, 2022