Ex-FBI officials charged in the case about Hunter Biden's laptop are due back in court

WASHINGTON (AP) — Two former FBI officials charged with lying to Congress about their participation in investigations involving Hunter Biden , the son of former President Joe Biden, are due back in court Tuesday in a case their lawyers have described as baseless and politically motivated.

The prosecution of Nikki Floris and Bradley Benavides, announced Friday, is the latest in a series of splashy and politically charged investigative actions the Justice Department has undertaken in the run-up to next week’s midterm elections.

The case accuses the former officials of falsely playing down their knowledge about a laptop the Justice Department says Hunter Biden abandoned at a computer repair shop in 2019. But beyond that, it represents a Trump administration broadside against a since-disbanded FBI task force that was 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.

Defense lawyers are expected to challenge the case at a preliminary hearing Tuesday in Washington's federal court, including by highlighting the unusual fact that the ex-FBI officials were charged via a criminal complaint signed by a magistrate judge rather than an indictment voted on by a grand jury. 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 prosecution, a rare Justice Department criminal case against a former employee, revisits a tangled saga that roiled the final weeks of the 2020 race after the New York Post revealed the existence of a laptop it said had been dropped off by the younger Biden at a Delaware computer repair shop about a year earlier.

The Post said it had obtained a hard drive of the laptop from Rudy Giuliani, a close ally of President Donald Trump, and reported on some of the contents of the computer, including emails that appeared to show some of Hunter Biden's foreign business dealings.

The curious circumstances of the laptop’s discovery raised concerns among Democrats and former intelligence officials about the possibility of Russian involvement, particularly when the Trump administration’s own intelligence community had assessed that Moscow was attempting to undermine the candidacy of Democratic nominee Joe Biden, who went on to defeat Trump in 2020, and as Giuliani had traveled abroad looking for dirt on the Bidens.

But Trump's then-national intelligence director, John Ratcliffe, quickly sought to quell speculation about the laptop's provenance by 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 and investigated the younger Biden on gun and tax charges that later resulted in felony convictions . President Joe Biden pardoned his son in late 2024.

The FBI officials under scrutiny, Floris and Benavides, were leaders of the Foreign Influence Task Force, which was established in the first Trump administration to police influence campaigns staged by Russia and other nations aimed at sowing discord, undermining democracy and spreading disinformation.

In that capacity, the FBI officials briefed Republican Sens. Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson in August 2020 as the lawmakers were doing their own investigation into Hunter Biden’s work in Ukraine. News of the briefing leaked, and the senators lashed out at the FBI, saying their efforts to scrutinize the Biden family had been discredited and falsely linked to Russian disinformation.

The criminal complaint accuses them of lying to lawmakers in 2023 by denying contemporaneous knowledge of the Biden laptop or participating in internal FBI conversations about it. Their lawyers have denied any allegations of wrongdoing.

The task force was disbanded in February 2025 by then-Attorney General Pam Bondi.