Two former FBI intelligence officials who specialized in foreign election interference were charged on Friday with making false statements about their roles in investigating the origins of Hunter Biden’s laptop in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election.

Nikki Floris and Bradley Benavides surrendered on Friday and made their first appearance in federal court in Washington DC. Floris’s legal team expressed outrage at the development coming from the US Department of Justice, the parent agency of the FBI.

“Nikki Floris is a patriot. She served our nation as a dedicated FBI intelligence officer for nearly 20 years. Yet today, the [justice department] has accused her falsely of a crime on the say-so of politicians, not on the facts. It’s no coincidence the government is filing these nonsense charges now, years later, on the eve of an election,” her attorneys said in a statement.

The case was filed 10 days before the 3 November midterm elections and marks the latest in a series of high-profile and politically charged investigative actions the justice department has undertaken in the run-up during the height of campaigning ahead of the vote.

The prosecution, a rare justice department criminal case against a former employee, revisits a tangled and bizarre saga that roiled the final weeks of the 2020 race, in which Joe Biden, Hunter Biden’s father, beat Donald Trump but Trump refused to accept the result and tried numerous ways to overturn it – which ended up in his second impeachment, accused of inciting an insurrection attempt on 6 January 2021, and criminal charges that were ultimately dismissed after Trump’s 2024 election victory.

Friday’s court proceedings also came amid a broader, backward-looking effort by the FBI director, Kash Patel, who before taking over the nation’s premier law enforcement agency was a harsh critic of it, to scrutinize high-profile episodes from the bureau’s recent past that for years have animated Trump’s conservative base.

The revelation of the laptop’s existence in October 2020 injected a thorny storyline in the race between Trump and Biden.

The laptop’s contents were publicized by the New York Post, which said it had obtained from Trump ally Rudy Giuliani a hard drive of a computer dropped off by Hunter Biden at a Wilmington, Delaware, repair shop. The laptop contained emails that appeared to show discussions of the younger Biden’s foreign business dealings.

The peculiar circumstances of the laptop’s discovery raised concerns among Democrats and former intelligence officials about the possibility of Russian disinformation, particularly when the Trump administration’s own intelligence community was assessing that Russia was attempting to interfere on Trump’s behalf in the election and as Giuliani had traveled abroad looking for dirt on the Bidens.