Miranda Devine: FBI agents finally face accountability after trying to smother the Hunter Biden corruption scandal

Two of the FBI agents most closely identified with the FBI’s politicized operation to smother the Hunter Biden corruption scandal are facing their first taste of accountability.

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Nikki Floris and Bradley Benavides were charged Friday with allegedly lying to Congress about Hunter Biden’s laptop.

“I don’t have any knowledge of said laptop,” Floris testified to the House Judiciary Committee in 2023 when asked about Hunter Biden’s MacBook, which the FBI seized in December 2019.

Yet she had been intimately involved in every aspect of the FBI’s handling of the laptop from the start, prosecutors allege in stunning detail.

Floris had been the deputy assistant director of the FBI and “functional head” of the bureau’s Foreign Influence Task Force, which ran a covert operation before the 2020 election called “Round River,” specifically to collect all derogatory reports about Hunter Biden from FBI informants and falsely flag them as “Russian disinformation.”

Benavides was the Section Chief of FITF, and he and Floris were “active participants in regularly classified briefings they hosted for the FBI agents and prosecutors on the Hunter Biden case, prosecutors allege.

Yet Benavides also professed ignorance when he testified to the House Judiciary Committee, claiming he only became aware of the FBI’s possession and investigation of Hunter’s laptop because he read a “Wikipedia article” while preparing his testimony.

Prosecutors allege the pair requested frequent briefings from the Hunter Biden case team.

After The Post broke the story about the laptop in October 2020, they convened multiple meetings to handle the fallout, even writing talking points for FBI Director Chris Wray.

Every week, Post columnist Miranda Devine sits down for exclusive and candid conversations with the most influential disruptors in Washington on ‘Pod Force One.’ Subscribe here!

In August 2020, Floris and Benavides were the FBI agents who conducted a bogus “defensive briefing” for Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson when the Republican senators were conducting a financial investigation into millions of dollars paid to Hunter Biden by corrupt Ukrainian energy company Burisma when his father was the vice president.

Grassley and Johnson have always said the briefing was a political setup designed to discredit their investigation by smearing it as Russian disinformation — and, sure enough, details were later leaked to The Washington Post.

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A few weeks after that briefing, Floris confided to a colleague: “I’m basically running a shadow government across the FBI,” as revealed in a recently declassified internal FBI chat from Sept. 25, 2020.

They knew plenty

Benavides had known since as early as March 2019 about allegations that Hunter Biden had received millions of dollars from foreign entities when his father was vice president.

He was one of four FBI agents sent to Brussels to interview Gal Luft, the Israeli-American professor who tipped off the FBI that Hunter and his uncle Jim Biden were receiving corrupt payments from Chinese energy company CEFC.

“Benavides was one of the four FBI agents who were in Brussels in March 2019,” Luft told me on Friday.

“Benavides sat right in front of me and asked me questions. He seemed quite knowledgeable about CEFC operations and personalities . . .

“Most of the details about the corruption were in the hands of the FBI and SDNY months before the laptop. In fact, they knew about it before Biden even announced his candidacy [in April 2019]. Why didn’t the FBI give Biden a defensive briefing?”

Instead, just before the November 2022 midterm elections, Luft was indicted on charges of acting as an unregistered foreign agent, violating US sanctions on Iran and making false statements. He was arrested in Cyprus and is currently on bail awaiting extradition.

Meanwhile, Floris left the FBI last May for a lucrative job at Microsoft, where she joined her former mentor Lisa Monaco, the deputy AG who directed most of the lawfare against Trump and his allies during the Biden years.

Benavides retired from the FBI in 2022 and was also parachuted into a plum job at Amazon as a senior risk manager.

But accountability has a funny way of showing up when you have given up all hope that justice will be served.

Just when we had resigned ourselves to accepting that the Big Guy and his deep state accomplices had gotten away with their coverup, US Attorney Janine Pirro and FBI director Kash Patel delivered an October surprise that looks like being the start of something far bigger.

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As Luft says: “Karma is a bitch.”