FBI emails unsealed Friday describe Hunter Biden texting a Los Angeles sex worker a message she called a threat after the 2020 election amid the laptop scandal.
Federal records detail a December 2020 tip in which an unidentified Los Angeles sex worker told the FBI that Hunter Biden sent her a text she took as a threat, complete with claims that he knew her location and that a laptop had been recording.
The material surfaced in an affidavit tied to an unrelated criminal complaint against two former senior FBI officials, and it lands squarely in the same stretch of time when Hunter publicly acknowledged federal scrutiny of his tax filings and the laptop fight was already underway.
The New York Post reported that the woman reached out several days after that tax acknowledgment. She alleged he had failed to pay for sex and had pressured her over a period of time to send him money instead.
The affidavit quotes the message attributed to Hunter Biden, also referenced in the paperwork as RHB.
"Don't forget that I know where you are, you have an ankle bracelet and that the laptop was recording,"
Investigators noted her account that she had intercourse with him in front of the laptop while FaceTiming a third party. The filing also states that the financial transaction noted in the complaint was verified by the investigative team. The exact date of the alleged threat itself remains unclear in the records.
Internal FBI emails from December 2020 show awareness of the escort report inside the bureau. Nikki Floris, a former senior official who served on the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, the unit that tracks foreign meddling and influence operations, forwarded material from a second bureau employee with a short note.
Floris wrote, “Per our chat last week,” as she passed the information along.
That paper trail collides with her later sworn account. In 2023 testimony to the House Judiciary Committee, Floris said she personally did not have conversations about the Hunter Biden probes with others at the bureau.
"I personally did not have any conversations,"
Prosecutors now say she lied to Congress about how much she knew. The affidavit rolled out as part of the case against Floris and another ex-senior official, a development already tracked as ex-FBI leaders faced charges over the Hunter Biden laptop fight and related congressional testimony.
Hunter Biden’s attorney did not respond to a request for comment on the newly public material.
The same laptop referenced in the text sat at the center of years of political combat. The hard drives held tens of thousands of emails, thousands of photos, and dozens of videos and other recordings. Hunter repeatedly denied the authenticity of emails and images pulled from those drives. FBI agents and federal prosecutors later attested in open court that the laptop evidence was reliable.
Records and public accounts have long shown heavy spending on adult entertainment, more than half a million dollars in the characterization used in the coverage, and a pattern of romantic and sexual entanglements mixed with money.
Fox News carried Greg Gutfeld’s rundown of that pattern, including his account that Hunter slipped a legal assistant thousands of dollars under the table during an involvement in 2018 and 2019, and that she was one of at least four women tied to him while on his payroll, a group that included his sister-in-law Hallie, her sister, and London Roberts.
Federal prosecutors once weighed possible charges under the Mann Act, the federal law that targets transporting people across state lines for prostitution. They did not bring those counts. In 2023 they indicted him on tax and gun-related felonies instead.
A federal jury convicted Hunter in June 2024 of possessing a handgun while addicted to crack cocaine. In September he pleaded guilty to federal tax delinquency for failing to pay the IRS $1.4 million.
In December 2024, then-President Joe Biden pardoned his son, one month before leaving office, a move that closed the criminal cases and left the public record unfinished. Hunter has since described that clemency in blunt terms, including when he called his father’s pardon a bad turn for the Constitution and for the country.
He has also talked about pressing his father to exit the 2024 race, part of the same family drama that kept the Biden name locked to questions of judgment and protection. Weeks before he claimed sobriety in June 2019, he married Melissa Cohen; that timeline has been part of his public narrative ever since.
The new affidavit does not allege a fresh charge from the sex-worker tip. It does show the FBI logged a perceived threat, verified a related money trail claim, and circulated the report while Floris was in the email chain, the same period when the laptop war was already a national fight. Readers following the bureau fallout have also seen task force leaders surrender on the lying-to-Congress counts.
Interest in further scrutiny of powerful Democratic family networks has not vanished either, including reporting on how Trump set aside PAC money ahead of possible investigations.
A tip about a threat text, a laptop that supposedly recorded the encounter, and senior FBI names in the email traffic were sitting in federal files while the public was told to look away. Pardons can end cases. They cannot erase the paper.