Meet the FBI ‘shadow government’ that shut down the Hunter laptop story

How deep did the madness at the top of the FBI go?

The madness being the belief among so many top leaders that they were serving the country by abusing their official powers to secretly oppose sitting President Donald Trump — not just when he first took office, but all through his first term.

Bureau chief Kash Patel said Friday that Deputy Assistant Director for Counterterrorism at the FBI Nikki Floris is “on record privately claiming to be ‘running a shadow government’ during the 2020 election.”

Specifically, she and close colleague Bradley Benavides face charges of perjury before Congress in concealing how they abused the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force to help suppress reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop in advance of the election.

 Each testified in 2023 to knowing nothing about the laptop before The Post’s bombshells started landing Oct. 14, 2020.

Yet the affidavit filed in DC federal court alleges they discussed it in “briefings, emails, instant messages, and meetings” frequently in advance of the 2020 vote — discussions that somehow involved writing the laptop off as a Russian disinformation effort, when the FBI had verified its own copy of the computer’s contents the prior December.

The pair also staged a “confidential” briefing of Senate Republicans in August where they warned against trusting reports of Biden family corruption — a performance that somehow wound up leaking to the press and further feeding the liberal-media drive to shut down the scandals as “Russian disinfo.”

Another ex-FBI agent has told investigators that the two were in fact part of Round River, an agency working group focused on Hunter’s scandals and “the potential for Russian disinformation.”

Don’t forget: That summer was also when another FITF member, Elvis Chan, was warning social-media companies such as Facebook and Twitter that the Bureau suspected Moscow would launch a disinfo op centered on Hunter — priming them to censor The Post’s reporting long before it broke.

It sure looks like a “shadow government” operating in Trump’s fourth year in office, doing its best to oust him.

The nation can never know for sure whether this did turn that very close election — but either way the deep corruption of federal law enforcement still must be exposed completely and the whole FBI and Justice Department fully fumigated.