Ex-FBI official Floris, charged with false statements, repeatedly surfaces during weaponization era

The FBI official who led the bureau’s now-defunct Foreign Influence Task Force and surrendered to law enforcement on Friday under allegations she lied to Congress has surfaced across years of federal government weaponization.  

The ex-official, Nikki Floris, is charged by the Justice Department in connection to her involvement in the bureau’s probes into Hunter Biden. 

Republicans see the charges against Floris and Bradley Benavides, a former FBI section chief who served under her, as the first instance of accountability to stem from the Trump administration's review of alleged government weaponization. 

In particular, GOP Sens. Chuck Grassley, Iowa, and Ron Johnson, Wisconsin, say that Floris disrupted their congressional probe into alleged Biden family misconduct. 

“Floris and Benavides provided an unsolicited briefing to me and [Chuck Grassley] in August 2020 – then someone leaked it to the media to smear me,” Johnson wrote in a post to X. “There is much more to this story and more players involved. I certainly hope the [FBI] and [the Justice Department] use these charges to extract and expose the whole truth.” 

Floris and Benavides were leaders of the "shadow government," former senior FBI officer says

“It's amazing the fact that they tried to get involved in so much, and it's a good day now that they finally started bringing this accountability," Marshall Yates, former head of the FBI’s congressional affairs office, told the John Solomon Reports podcast on Friday. 

"And the leader of the ‘shadow government,’ self-described leader of the ‘shadow government,’ is facing that accountability. It's a very good step to draining the swamp."

Floris, a veteran FBI counterterrorism analyst, has popped up repeatedly in the Trump administration’s sprawling review of alleged weaponization of the federal government including in declassified documents released earlier this year. 

According to The Guardian, Floris’s legal team expressed outrage in a statement, saying “Nikki Floris is a patriot. She served our nation as a dedicated FBI intelligence officer for nearly 20 years. Yet today, the [Justice Department] has accused her falsely of a crime on the say-so of politicians, not on the facts. It’s no coincidence the government is filing these nonsense charges now, years later, on the eve of an election.”

The charges pack a punch

Floris and Bradley Benavides, a former FBI section chief who served under her, each surrendered and made their first appearance in federal court in Washington on Friday, Just the News reported. 

Prosecutors allege the pair made “materially false statements” to the House Judiciary Committee during its investigation of the task force’s involvement in the FBI’s various investigations involving Hunter Biden, whose father is former President Joe Biden. Among investigators' concerns were the first son's overseas business dealings while his father was vice president.

FBI Director Kash Patel said Floris led the task force, known as FITF, as deputy assistant director from mid-2019 through mid-2022. He said Benavides was its section chief from mid-2019 through the 2020 election. 

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

Floris’s attorney said she “served our nation as a dedicated FBI intelligence officer for nearly 20 years,” and accused the Justice Department of charging her “on the say-so of politicians, not on the facts.” 

To secure a conviction under federal law regarding perjury and making false statements to Congress, prosecutors must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the statement was made knowingly and willfully with an intent to deceive; was material to the committee's investigation or oversight duties; and false, fictitious or fraudulent.

A conviction is punishable by five years in federal prison per count (or up to 8 years if the offense involves specific matters like international or domestic terrorism or certain federal sex offenses), and in certain circumstances, fines of up to $250,000 for each offense.

In most circumstances, the statute of limitations for prosecution is five years and commences upon completion of the crime.

The House testimony at the core of the charges

The case centers on testimony Floris and Benavides gave the House Judiciary Committee a few months apart in 2023 during its investigation of the FBI’s handling of Hunter Biden's laptop. 

According to the Justice Department, Floris testified that she was not involved in discussions related to the laptop probe while she was at the FITF, which appears to conflict with the fact that she gave the defensive briefing to lawmakers.  

In a September 2023 transcribed interview, Benavides said that before the 2020 election, then-Executive Assistant Director John Brown asked him whether Russia could plausibly use a laptop attributed to Hunter Biden to inject false or corrupted information into U.S. politics, Just the News reported. 

Benavides said he answered yes, though he told lawmakers he did no research into the laptop beforehand and did not recall any follow-up. 

His successor as FITF section chief, Laura Dehmlow, told the committee a different story. She said task force members, herself included, knew by fall 2020 that the laptop had been corroborated. Asked who else at the task force knew the laptop was real, she said she “would certainly say that Brad Benavides was aware.”

Benavides disputed that account. “I don’t know what ‘real’ means, and I would need context for that,” he testified.

The 2020 Senate briefing that started it

Floris first drew public scrutiny from Republican lawmakers in 2022 over a briefing she delivered to Grassley and Johnson in their investigation into the Biden family. In August of that year, the senators asked Floris and Benavides to sit for transcribed interviews about what the senators called FBI interference in their probe of the laptop and the overseas business dealings.

The senators’ ire centered on an earlier Aug. 6, 2020, briefing. In it, Floris and Benavides gave the senators what the lawmakers called an “unnecessary” defensive briefing on behalf of the FBI and the intelligence community. The senators claimed the briefing was later leaked and used to falsely portray their investigation as advancing Russian disinformation.

“FBI officials initiated a scheme to downplay derogatory information on Hunter Biden for the purpose of shutting down investigative activity relating to his potential criminal exposure by labeling it ‘disinformation,’” Grassley and Johnson wrote in their letter.

Benavides later told House investigators that Floris, his boss, delivered the briefing herself. 

“She would have read verbatim the contents of the script,” he said. He testified that the material had not been corroborated by the FBI and had instead been routed to the bureau from other intelligence agencies through the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Round River: A scheme to label Trump officials, lawmakers, and others as “conduits” of Russian disinformation

The defensive briefings appear to be part of an earlier established operation, code named "Round River."

The task force Floris led was also at the center of Round River, the covert FBI counterintelligence operation that the Trump White House declassified in August. The operation was aimed at combatting malign foreign influence in the 2020 election. The operation began around December 2019, during President Trump’s first impeachment proceedings.

A declassified spreadsheet listed more than six dozen people and organizations tied to the Biden-Ukraine matter, labeling administration officials, lawmakers, and journalists as “conduits” of Russian disinformation, Just the News reported. 

Two of the alleged “conduits” on that list, Grassley and Johnson, were the senators whom Floris earlier briefed in August 2020.

Republican Sens. including Grassley, Johnson and South Carolina's Lindsey Graham and Rep. Jim Jordan, of Ohio, were labeled “conduits” of Russian disinformation, alongside Rudy Giuliani and Fox News. 

The Bidens, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were instead labeled “targets.” The task force, based at FBI headquarters, concurred with each assessment with a “no objection” sign-off. 

China and the ‘shadow government’ docs yield admission from Floris on 'shadow government'

Floris also makes an appearance in records about how the FBI handled an alleged Chinese election plot in 2020.

In July, Trump declassified hundreds of pages of documents on intelligence officials’ handling of Chinese activity around the 2020 election. 

Among them was a text message in which Floris wrote: “I’m basically running a shadow government across the FBI at this point,” Just the News reported. Patel cited the “shadow government” remark again in announcing Friday’s charges. 

The records showed Floris was among the officials who, on Sept. 25, 2020, pushed to recall an Intelligence Information Report which relayed a confidential source’s claim that the Chinese government was producing fake driver’s licenses to enable fraudulent mail-in votes for Joe Biden. 

Based on the emails, the bureau appeared concerned the report would undercut then-FBI Director Christopher Wray’s assurances to Congress that foreign meddling did not threaten the presidential race.