Hunter Biden, son of former President Joe Biden, seen in July 2024 in Washington, DC.

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The Justice Department has charged two former FBI staff with making false statements to Congress in connection with the bureau’s investigations into Hunter Biden and his laptop computer forward of the 2020 presidential election.

Bradley Benavides and Nikki Floris each face a single felony rely stemming from testimony before lawmakers in 2023. The pair, who held senior positions on the FBI’s now defunct Foreign Influence Task Force, both turned themselves in and made their preliminary court docket look Friday morning in Washington, D.C.

The new prosecution is the newest politically fraught case to be introduced by the Justice Department since President Trump returned to the White House. It dredges back up the weird saga surrounding former President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, and his numerous authorized troubles that featured all through the 2020 presidential marketing campaign.

Hunter Biden’s laptop computer was the topic of intense scrutiny after The New York Post reported weeks before the 2020 presidential election that the gadget was deserted at a Delaware restore store in 2019, and then obtained by President Trump’s former private lawyer Rudy Giuliani.

Republicans have lengthy accused the FBI of mishandling the laptop computer and the investigations into the youthful Biden. Hunter Biden was convicted of federal gun costs and later pleaded responsible to separate tax offenses. (Joe Biden signed a full and unconditional pardon for his son in December 2024.)

In a assertion on X, the U.S. lawyer for Washington, D.C., Jeanine Pirro, said Floris and Benavides “allegedly lied to Congress about their roles in the FBI’s Hunter Biden investigations, with one claiming they only learned about it from Wikipedia — despite evidence showing their involvement in helping shape the public narrative about Hunter Biden’s laptop right before the election.”

Prosecutors charged Benavides and Floris by felony grievance, which means prosecutors have yet to safe an indictment from a grand jury. Under the second Trump administration, grand juries in the nation’s capital and other cities have refused on several events to return indictments in high-profile, politically charged instances.

At a court docket listening to Friday morning, Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui famous that both of the defendants have “sparkling backgrounds” in federal legislation enforcement and were longtime devoted public servants. He also famous that charging them by felony grievance for conduct that is “quite old” is uncommon.

Court listening to deliberate next week

Benavides, 56, and Floris, 46, are due back in court docket for a preliminary listening to on Tuesday.

In a assertion, Floris’ attorneys called her a “patriot” who served as “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. It’s no coincidence the government is filing these nonsense charges now, years later, on the eve of an election,” they added.

The Post reported Hunter Biden’s laptop computer confirmed wrongdoing by then-Democratic nominee Joe Biden, who subsequently won the election. Some of the information on the laptop computer was later ascertained to belong to Hunter Biden. House Republicans subsequently launched an impeachment inquiry into President Biden, focusing on Hunter Biden’s enterprise dealings at the time his father was vp. But no proof has ever been introduced that Joe Biden financially gained from his son’s enterprise actions.

The grievance alleges that Benavides and Floris both had real-time information of the Hunter Biden investigations, including into his laptop computer, in their high posts on the Foreign Influence Task Force.

But in interviews with the House Judiciary Committee in 2023, both of them allegedly lied about their information and involvement in these investigations.

Those purported false statements were materials to the committee’s investigation, the grievance says, because they allowed both Benavides and Floris to “escape” further questioning about Hunter Biden, which hindered the panel’s investigation.