The Department of Justice on Friday charged two former top FBI officials with lying to Congress about their involvement in the agency’s investigation into Hunter Biden.

The charges against Nikki Floris and Bradley Benavides, who worked on the FBI’s now-disbanded Foreign Influence Task Force, stem from a brief they gave to members of Congress about the task force’s investigation of Biden, the son of former President Joe Biden.

According to a copy of the criminal complaint obtained by MS NOW, prosecutors accuse Floris and Benavides of providing “materially false information about their awareness of and involvement in the FBI’s investigations into Hunter Biden,” including about the origins of Biden’s laptop, in an attempt to impede the congressional probe.

Floris said she was not involved in discussions about Biden while on the task force, the complaint states, while Benavides said he first learned on Wikipedia that the FBI had obtained Biden’s laptop.

“Lying to Congress by senior FBI officials strikes at the heart of our system,” FBI Director Kash Patel said on X.

Floris’ attorneys slammed the “nonsense charges” against her and accused the DOJ of seeking to “push a false narrative for a shot at political points.”

“Nikki Floris is a patriot. She served our nation as a 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,” her attorneys said in a statement. “It’s no coincidence the government is filing these nonsense charges now, years later, on the eve of an election.”

A lawyer for Benavides did not immediately respond to MS NOW’s request for comment.

Biden’s laptop has been the subject of great speculation since The New York Post published, just weeks before the 2020 election, emails from the laptop’s hard drive that purportedly showed proof that Joe Biden was corrupt.

The Post said that it obtained a copy of the hard drive from President Donald Trump’s then-personal attorney, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani. But there was widespread suspicion that the emails were part of a Russian disinformation operation.

Notably, the charges against Floris and Benavides did not come from an indictment by a grand jury in Washington, where several cases brought by U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro’s office have failed to result in indictments.

Fallon Gallagher contributed to this report.

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