Trump's Justice Department hits two ex-FBI officials with a new obstruction charge over Hunter Biden's laptop hours before their court hearing

From the Newshound archive · first published 27 October 2026.

The superseding complaint — filed in the small hours of Tuesday, shortly before the defendants were due in court — adds an obstruction of Congress charge on top of the existing false-statement count. Nikki Floris and Bradley Benavides, both former senior counterintelligence officials, are alleged to have misled House Judiciary Committee staff in 2023 about what they knew of the FBI's Hunter Biden investigations and its now-defunct Foreign Influence Task Force.

Floris led the Foreign Influence Task Force from mid-2019 to mid-2022; Benavides served as a section chief through the 2020 election.

Floris's lawyers called the midnight filing 'unsigned and unsworn', adding: 'In our combined decades of DOJ service, we have never seen anything like this.'

The charges, brought via criminal complaint rather than a grand jury indictment, land less than two weeks before November's midterm elections.