A former Florida congressman and political mentor to Secretary of State Marco Rubio was convicted Friday for his role in a secret $50 million campaign to lobby officials in Washington on behalf of the Venezuelan government.
A federal jury found David Rivera, a Republican from Miami who served one term in the House from 2011 to 2013, guilty on counts including failing to register as a foreign agent and conspiracy to commit money laundering. The jury also convicted an associate of Rivera’s, political consultant Esther Nuhfer, on related charges.
The former congressman was immediately taken into custody following the verdict. U.S. District Judge Melissa Damian concluded he was a flight risk with access to sizable funds and a potentially lengthy prison term in his future.
His seven-week trial, which played out in federal court in Miami, drew attention for what it revealed about Rivera’s efforts to influence officials in President Donald Trump’s first administration on behalf of former Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro. It also attracted interest for the number of bold-faced names appearing as witnesses.
Rubio testified before the jury early in the trial — the first time in more than four decades that a sitting Cabinet secretary has served as a witness in a criminal trial. Jurors also heard from Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Texas) and Brian Ballard, a top lobbyist and fundraiser for Trump.
Federal prosecutors alleged Rivera accepted the $50 million, three-month contract with a U.S. subsidiary of Venezuela’s state-owned oil company after his stint in Congress and sought to lean on his influential Washington connections to persuade Trump administration officials to ease sanctions and soften their stance toward Maduro’s regime.
Neither Rivera nor Nuhfer disclosed their lobbying work as required under federal law. Justice Department lawyers maintained that doing so would have proved politically embarrassing for Rivera, who built his political career, in part, on his fierce opposition to communist regimes.
Throughout the trial, Rivera insisted his contract was solely for persuading oil company ExxonMobil to return to Venezuela.
Any meetings he had with Washington officials over broader U.S. foreign policy were separate from that work and focused on supporting Venezuelan opposition leaders pushing for Maduro’s ouster, his attorneys said. They argued Rivera did not believe he needed to register as a foreign agent because his contract was with a U.S. subsidiary of a Venezuelan company, not a foreign entity.
In January, years after charges against Rivera were filed, U.S. military forces captured Maduro and brought him to New York on narco-terrorism charges. The former Venezuelan president rejected a request from Rivera’s attorneys to testify in the ex-congressman’s defense and remains in custody in New York awaiting his own trial.
Rivera’s attorneys did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the jury’s decision Friday.
Jason Reding Quiñones, the U.S. attorney in Miami whose office prosecuted the case, hailed the verdict.
“They took millions from the communist regime in Venezuela to secretly influence U.S. policy, and concealed it not just from the American government, but from their own close political allies and personal friends,” he said in a statement. “Foreign influence carried out in secret is corruption.”
For Rubio, the trial presented an awkward inconvenience. Though he was not accused of wrongdoing, the proceedings came as he is handling several international conflicts — including turmoil in Venezuela — as Trump’s top diplomat.
Rivera, 60, was instrumental in helping Rubio, 54 and a fellow son of Cuban immigrants, shoot to the top of Miami politics. Three decades ago, he got Rubio one of his first jobs working for Bob Dole’s 1996 presidential campaign.
As they continued their parallel climbs, Rivera later crafted the strategy that helped Rubio become speaker of the Florida House at age 34. The two got so close that they bought a house together in Tallahassee, and Rivera was reportedly present for the births of each of Rubio’s four children.
But their paths diverged once they reached Washington in 2010. Rivera lost reelection and two subsequent political races and then came under scrutiny from the Federal Election Commission in a campaign-finance investigation.
Rubio recounted during his testimony in March how Rivera sought a meeting with him in Washington in 2017 to discuss a secret plan to persuade Maduro to step down.
That week, Rubio delivered a speech on the Senate floor using some of Rivera’s talking points on Venezuela, in particular suggesting that the U.S. would not retaliate against any Venezuelan government officials who helped oust Maduro.
Rubio, then one of Florida’s senators and a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said he did not know at the time that his old friend had received a $50 million contract to represent “an entity controlled by the Venezuelan government.”
“It would have been shocking to me,” the secretary of state said. He would not have engaged in the meetings had he known his former friend had made such a deal, he told the jury, and said the meeting resembled past bids from “double-dealers” to oust Maduro that amounted to nothing.
“It was more of the same. I was frankly angry and frustrated,” Rubio testified. “Why would I waste my time with a stupid meeting?”
The testimony also touched on a 2017 assassination plot to kill Rubio launched by a top Maduro ally. Federal prosecutors sought to establish that Rubio learned of the plot from U.S. officials, while Rivera’s defense tried to make it clear that Rubio sought Rivera’s help in seeking more information on the threat.
Rivera’s defense attorneys leaned heavily on Rubio’s biography and on his and Rivera’s shared background as opponents of communism. At one point, one of Rivera’s lawyers presented the federal judge overseeing the trial with a copy of Rubio’s memoir, where Rivera is named early in the acknowledgments.
In addition to the case that led to his conviction Friday, Rivera also faces a related foreign lobbying indictment in federal court in D.C.
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