"Looks good!"
Two words and an exclamation point. That's how Nikki Floris, head of the FBI's Foreign Influence Task Force, signed off on talking points that let the FBI director hint Hunter Biden's laptop might be Russian disinformation.
The FBI had the laptop. It had been sitting in an evidence locker for ten months.
Three years later, the House Judiciary Committee asked Floris whether her task force had ever discussed Hunter Biden. "No. At least not with me," she said. "I personally did not have any conversations."
Federal prosecutors say that was a lie. Floris, 46, and Bradley Benavides, 56, her section chief through the 2020 election, are each charged with making false statements to Congress. The charge carries up to five years in prison. The evidence against them comes mostly from their own emails.
The New York Post broke the laptop story on October 14, 2020. Within hours, an FBI email chain titled "Ny post… morning answer?" was making the rounds, and both of them were on it. The next day, Floris asked whether the bureau could confirm "FBI in possession of laptop."
It could have. The FBI had taken the laptop on December 9, 2019, as evidence in a criminal investigation of Hunter Biden for tax and money-laundering offenses.
That same evening, a message from NBC News landed with Floris. NBC was about to report that the FBI was investigating whether Hunter's emails were "linked to a foreign intelligence operation." Floris forwarded it up to FBI leadership.
At 8:42 p.m., NBC's Ken Dilanian published the story, citing "two people familiar with the matter." He told readers that "it remains unclear whether the emails cited by the Post are authentic or have been doctored."
The FBI could have cleared that up with a phone call to its own evidence room.
The next day, the task force drafted talking points for Director Christopher Wray's call with Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee. If Warner asked whether the laptop was "part of a Russia disinformation effort," Benavides suggested Wray could say anyone reading the story "could be concerned." The FBI had never concluded anything of the kind.
"This is good...you could add another if asked," Benavides wrote.
Then the question went to Floris: "Nikki, thoughts???"
"Looks good!"
Three days later, 51 former intelligence officials signed a public letter saying the laptop had "the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation." Five days, start to finish, from the Post's story to the most famous letter of the 2020 campaign.
By then, the story had already been choked off online. Twitter blocked users from sharing the Post's story and locked the newspaper out of its own account. Facebook throttled it. Mark Zuckerberg later explained on Joe Rogan's podcast that the FBI had warned Facebook to brace for "some kind of dump" of Russian propaganda. The FBI unit that met regularly with social media companies was the Foreign Influence Task Force.
Floris had laid the groundwork months earlier. On August 6, 2020, she and Benavides helped prepare "defensive briefings" for Sens. Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson that "focused on potential Russian disinformation." Grassley later said the briefing was leaked to paint the senators' Biden investigation as a Russian operation. According to the complaint, the task force's "Round River" operation was flagging informant reporting on Hunter Biden as Russian disinformation, and both officials signed off on a Round River report.
In September 2020, Floris described her job to a colleague in her own words: "I am basically running a shadow government inside the FBI right now." That line stayed buried until documents were declassified this July.
Benavides got his turn before the committee in September 2023. He ran the section that flagged Hunter Biden reporting as Russian disinformation and helped script the FBI director's answer about the laptop. He told the committee he'd picked up some of the details of the laptop investigation from Wikipedia while getting ready for the hearing.
Wikipedia. His own agency had the laptop in an evidence locker.
In June 2024, President Biden's own Justice Department put that laptop in front of a jury in Delaware as evidence in Hunter's gun trial. An FBI agent testified it was real.
U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro's office in Washington brought the case against Floris and Benavides. This week, prosecutors tried to add an obstruction charge, saying the lies helped the pair dodge questions and impeded the House investigation into the Bidens. Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui struck the new filing because it reached the docket unsigned. "Why today on this one case have you changed the entire history of how you charge cases?" he asked.
Assistant U.S. Attorney John Borchert answered for the government: "We are not afraid of a probable cause finding."
The original charges stand, and the judge has yet to rule on probable cause. That original complaint says Floris "personally participated in scores of conversations about Hunter Biden." The amended version shortened it to just "conversations." Either way, the number she gave Congress was zero.
Her lawyers call the case "a serious abuse of the criminal charging process" and complain it was unsealed two weeks before the midterms. Floris's legal team is suddenly very concerned about government agencies doing things right before an election.
The Foreign Influence Task Force no longer exists. Attorney General Pam Bondi shut it down in February 2025.
Floris told Congress she'd had no conversations about Hunter Biden. Her answer on the director's laptop talking points is still on file: "Looks good!"