A former FBI official who allegedly said she was running a “shadow government” inside the bureau may have helped shape media coverage that portrayed the Hunter Biden laptop story as Russian disinformation, according to a new criminal complaint and declassified documents, LifeZette reports.
The Department of Justice announced Friday that Nikki Floris, former chief of the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, had been arrested. The complaint says Floris blurred factual and damaging reporting about the Biden family by treating it as part of malign Russian influence before the 2020 election. It references an NBC journalist, and the events it describes align with reporting by Ken Dilanian, then NBC’s FBI reporter. The complaint does not prove Floris was Dilanian’s source, but it says she communicated with the media as NBC published a story matching the FBI’s narrative.
Floris and fellow defendant Bradley Benavides are scheduled to appear in federal magistrate court in Washington, D.C. Through her attorneys, Floris denied wrongdoing, saying the department accused her “falsely of a crime on the say-so of politicians, not on the facts.” NBC and Dilanian did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
According to the complaint, on Oct. 15, 2020, the day after a report disclosed material from a laptop Hunter Biden had left at a computer repair shop, Floris helped prepare the FBI’s response to press inquiries. She told a colleague she needed to know “if I can confirm FBI in possession of laptop,” and later forwarded to FBI leadership a message from an NBC reporter saying the network would report that the FBI was examining whether the New York Post’s material was tied to a foreign intelligence operation. Dilanian published a story that day citing two anonymous sources, writing that it “remains unclear” whether the emails were authentic.
Other outlets followed the NBC report, and by Oct. 29, 2020, the Daily Caller News Foundation had confirmed a key email on the laptop was authentic. The complaint says the FBI had obtained the laptop in December 2019 during a criminal investigation into Hunter Biden, and that Floris frequently communicated with the team overseeing that probe.
Documents declassified in July show Floris told a colleague in September 2020, “I am basically running a shadow government inside the FBI right now.” The documents also describe an operation she ran called “Round River,” which LifeZette says labeled damaging information about Biden, corruption and Ukraine from confidential sources as Russian disinformation. Court documents cite an FBI official who said a key purpose of the operation was “scrutinizing informant intelligence relating to the Hunter Biden investigations as potential disinformation.”
In August 2020, Floris and other FBI officials briefed Senate Republicans finishing a report on Hunter Biden’s foreign financial ties. Sens. Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson said the FBI offered no evidence while alleging their work was “a target of Russian disinformation.” Floris told the House Judiciary Committee in July 2023 that Hunter Biden had never been discussed within her division, but the complaint says documents, communications and witnesses disproved that statement.
