Nikki Floris once led the FBI’s task force on foreign influence in elections. Now she faces a charge of lying to Congress about the bureau’s Hunter Biden investigations. On Tuesday, Oct. 27, a federal judge in Washington threw out a new charge that prosecutors had posted overnight without his approval.
Floris, 46, and former colleague Bradley Benavides, 56, each still face one count of making a false statement to Congress. The two-day hearing that followed put the government’s evidence under unusual scrutiny, along with the FBI director’s role in the case. Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui hasn’t yet ruled on probable cause.
Who Nikki Floris is, and what the DOJ says she said
Floris led the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force as a deputy assistant director from mid-2019 through mid-2022. That’s according to the Justice Department’s announcement on Oct. 23. Benavides was the task force’s section chief from mid-2019 through the 2020 election.
Floris joined the FBI as an intelligence analyst in 2005. She was the bureau’s security lead for the 2020 presidential election, NBC News reported. She lives in Alexandria, Virginia, and Benavides in Aiken, South Carolina.
The House Judiciary Committee interviewed both in 2023, Floris on July 19 and Benavides on Sept. 28. The DOJ says Floris told the committee she took part in no discussions about Hunter Biden at the task force. It says Benavides testified that he learned the FBI had the laptop from a Wikipedia article in 2023.
Prosecutors say documents, messages from the time and witness accounts contradict both. Their release says Floris “discussed the FBI’s investigations into Hunter Biden routinely for more than a year.” It says Benavides “regularly discussed the laptop” with FBI officials before the 2020 election.
Each faces a count under 18 U.S.C. § 1001, which carries up to five years in prison. The law covers statements in a congressional committee’s investigation.
Why the defense calls the case political
Both deny wrongdoing. Floris’ lawyers called her “a patriot” who served “for nearly 20 years,” NPR reported. They said the DOJ accused her “on the say-so of politicians, not on the facts.” Benavides’ attorney, Ronald Safer, called the charges “baseless.”
Officials framed the case in sharp terms. FBI Director Kash Patel said in the DOJ release that one of the two had privately claimed to be “running a shadow government” in 2020. He didn’t say which one. President Donald Trump called the pair “dirty cops,” according to NBC.
The way prosecutors brought the case drew attention from the start. They used a criminal complaint rather than a grand jury indictment. At the first appearance, Faruqui noted that both defendants have “sparkling backgrounds” in law enforcement. He also called it unusual to charge conduct that is “quite old” by complaint.
The FBI task force no longer exists. Then-Attorney General Pam Bondi disbanded it in February 2025, the Associated Press reported.
What happened to the overnight obstruction charge
Hours before Tuesday’s hearing, prosecutors posted an amended complaint. It added a charge of obstructing a congressional proceeding. No judge had signed off, and neither had the FBI agent who swore out the complaint, ABC News reported.
Faruqui struck it. “I think they should have filed nothing,” he said, according to ABC. He called the filing “inappropriate” and said it “harms the defendant.” Floris’ lawyers called it “a serious abuse of the criminal charging process.”
The docket now says the filings went in “in error,” CBS News reported. Assistant U.S. Attorney John Borchert told the court, “We are not afraid of a probable cause finding.”
The ruling didn’t end the case. The original false-statement complaint stands, and the hearing on it went ahead. The reporting doesn’t say whether prosecutors can bring the obstruction count again, for example through a grand jury.
What the FBI agent admitted on the stand
The government’s witness was Bryan Witt, an FBI agent from the Kansas City field office. He signed the complaint’s affidavit. He said the case reached his office in July, after Patel assigned it there, according to CBS.
Witt said the inquiry first looked at a 2020 FBI investigation in Albany into alleged Chinese election interference. It shifted to Floris and Benavides after agents read their 2023 House testimony. He said he worried the assignment would look “political” and called it a “huge distraction.”
Cross-examination exposed gaps. Witt said agents never interviewed Floris or the congressional staff with direct knowledge of the testimony, CBS reported. Agents could only send staff written questions.
He also conceded a point about Steve Castor, the Republican committee counsel the complaint cast as an eyewitness. Castor wasn’t present for Benavides’ testimony and hadn’t read the transcript.
On Wednesday, Witt said Patel and the FBI’s deputy director were “closely monitoring our progress.” Patel joined case-team video calls at least twice, he said. Floris’ lawyer Margaret Donovan argued Patel had “injected himself as a witness and almost a case agent.” Prosecutor Cory Jacobs said the case’s origins could be raised later, not at this stage.
Taken together, the testimony shows why the defense is attacking materiality. A false-statement charge needs a lie that mattered to the inquiry. So far, the government hasn’t asked the committee’s own staff whether these answers did.
The laptop fight behind the charges
The case reaches back to October 2020, when the New York Post reported on a laptop it tied to Hunter Biden. The Post said it got a copy of the hard drive from Rudy Giuliani. The DOJ says Hunter Biden left the laptop at a Delaware repair shop in 2019.
The charges grew out of a probe into whether investigators tried to “suppress or discredit” material on the laptop, ABC reported. The laptop has stayed a political flashpoint, as in Trump’s 2025 move to revoke the clearances of former intelligence officials who doubted the story.
The complaint centers on “Round River,” a task force counterintelligence operation, CBS reported. It collected informant reporting on Hunter Biden and other matters. The government alleges both defendants played down its role to impede the committee.
Hunter Biden was later convicted on gun charges and pleaded guilty to tax charges. His father pardoned him in December 2024.
NPR noted that grand juries have declined to indict in several politically charged cases under the second Trump administration. That history helps explain the questions about using a complaint here. The department faces scrutiny over other sensitive inquiries too, including reports that it is investigating Corey Lewandowski.
The judge will go line by line on Thursday
Faruqui said he wants to examine each alleged false statement line by line before deciding probable cause, CBS reported. That review was set for Thursday, Oct. 29.
Under federal court rules, a judge who finds no probable cause must dismiss the complaint. That “does not preclude the government from later prosecuting” the same offense. If Faruqui finds probable cause, the case moves on, and the defense plans to keep challenging how it was charged.
