FBI documents unsealed Friday show Hunter Biden texted a threat to a Los Angeles sex worker after the 2020 election amid the laptop scandal, as bureau emails tracked the report.
An unidentified Los Angeles sex worker contacted the FBI several days after Hunter Biden publicly acknowledged federal scrutiny of his tax filings in December 2020. She reported a text she perceived as a threat from the president’s son.
The account appears in an FBI affidavit revealed Friday inside an unrelated criminal complaint against two former senior bureau officials. The New York Post detailed the material, including December 2020 email traffic among FBI employees about the report.
One month earlier, Joe Biden had defeated President Trump. Hunter was already deep in the laptop controversy that would dog the family for years.
The affidavit attributes this message to Hunter Biden:
"Don’t forget that I know where you are, you have an ankle bracelet and that the laptop was recording,"
The sex worker told investigators she had “intercourse with RHB in front of the laptop while facetiming with a third party.” She alleged Hunter failed to pay for sex yet pressed her over a period of time to send him money instead.
Investigators verified the financial transaction noted in the complaint. The affidavit does not pin down the exact date of the text itself.
Hunter’s attorney did not respond to a request for comment on the newly surfaced material.
Emails between FBI employees discussed the sex-worker report that same December. Nikki Floris, then a senior official on the bureau’s Foreign Influence Task Force, appears in that traffic.
One Floris message opened, “Per our chat last week,” and she forwarded details from a second bureau employee. The paper trail shows she knew about the Los Angeles escort report while Hunter’s tax problems and laptop files were live investigative issues.
In 2023 Floris testified before the House Judiciary Committee. She said she had not discussed the Hunter Biden probes with others at the bureau.
“I personally did not have any conversations,”
Federal prosecutors later charged Floris and another ex-senior FBI official with lying to Congress about their awareness of details in the Hunter Biden investigations. The complaint containing the sex-worker affidavit was unsealed Friday.
The laptop at the center of the scandal held tens of thousands of emails, thousands of photos, and dozens of videos and other recordings. Hunter repeatedly denied the authenticity of emails and photos from the hard drives.
FBI agents and federal prosecutors later attested in open court that the laptop evidence was reliable. Records also show Hunter paid more than half a million dollars for adult entertainment.
Prosecutors considered possible charges under the Mann Act, the federal law that bars transporting people across state lines for prostitution. They ultimately indicted him in 2023 on tax and gun-related felonies instead.
A federal jury convicted him in June 2024 of possessing a handgun while addicted to crack cocaine. In September he pleaded guilty to federal tax delinquency involving $1.4 million owed to the IRS.
At a plea hearing Hunter testified he had gotten sober from drugs and alcohol in June 2019, weeks after marrying Melissa Cohen. Joe Biden pardoned his son in December 2024, one month before leaving office.
The sex-worker report sat inside FBI channels in December 2020. Emails document that senior officials saw it. Congressional testimony years later claimed distance from those same conversations.
No separate criminal charge against Hunter for the alleged threat text is described in the newly unsealed material. The affidavit simply records what the woman reported and what the bureau’s own messages said at the time.
Taxpayers watched years of investigation, a gun conviction, a tax plea, and a last-minute pardon. The latest filing adds another documented episode from the same stretch of 2020, one more instance where the rules appeared optional for the well-connected and the cleanup fell to everyone else.
