The Justice Department on Friday charged two former top FBI officials with lying to Congress about their involvement in the agency’s investigation of Hunter Biden, according to a criminal complaint obtained by MS NOW.

Nikki Floris and Bradley Benavides both worked on the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, which has since been disbanded. The charges stem from a briefing they gave members of Congress about the task force’s investigation of Biden.

Hunter Biden is the son of former President Joe Biden. The congressional inquiry examined the FBI officials’ awareness of and participation in the bureau’s investigation, including issues surrounding the origins of Biden’s laptop.

Prosecutors accuse Floris and Benavides of supplying “materially false information about their awareness of and involvement in the FBI’s investigations into Hunter Biden,” according to the complaint. Prosecutors allege the statements were intended to impede the congressional probe.

The complaint says Floris claimed that she had not been involved in discussions about Biden while serving on the task force. Benavides said he first learned through Wikipedia that the FBI had obtained Biden’s laptop.

The allegations place the two former officials’ statements to Congress at the center of the case. The complaint specifically addresses what each official said about their knowledge of an investigation that had already generated intense public attention.

FBI Director Kash Patel responded to the charges in a post on X. “Lying to Congress by senior FBI officials strikes at the heart of our system,” Patel wrote.

Attorneys representing Floris sharply rejected the case against her. They called the accusations “nonsense charges” and accused the Justice Department of trying 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,” her attorneys said in a statement.

“Yet today, the DOJ has accused her falsely of a crime on the say-so of politicians, not on the facts,” the statement continued. “It’s no coincidence the government is filing these nonsense charges now, years later, on the eve of an election.”

A lawyer representing Benavides did not immediately respond to a request for comment from MS NOW. The source did not report any public response from Benavides to the allegations contained in the complaint.

Biden’s laptop has attracted extensive speculation since The New York Post published emails from its hard drive just weeks before the 2020 election. The emails purportedly showed evidence that Joe Biden was corrupt.

The Post reported that it had obtained a copy of the hard drive from Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor who was serving as President Donald Trump’s personal attorney at the time. Widespread suspicion followed that the emails were part of a Russian disinformation operation.

The latest charges did not come through an indictment issued by a Washington grand jury. That distinction comes as several cases pursued by the office of Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, have failed to produce indictments.

The criminal complaint instead serves as the basis for the allegations against Floris and Benavides. It focuses on statements prosecutors contend misrepresented their awareness of and roles in the FBI investigation of Hunter Biden.

Floris’ lawyers, meanwhile, framed the prosecution as both false and politically driven. Their statement emphasized her nearly 20 years of service as an FBI intelligence officer while arguing that politicians, rather than facts, were behind the accusation.

The case now centers on competing accounts of what the two former officials knew and how accurately they described that knowledge to Congress. Prosecutors allege deception, while Floris’ attorneys have mounted an unequivocal rejection of the government’s case.