Rubio’s testimony looms at trial of ex-Florida congressman and his Venezuelan deal

A political storm stretching from Washington to Venezuela has inundated the federal case of former Miami-Dade Congressman David Rivera.

For months, Rivera, a Republican, and a political associate were headed for trial in Miami in February on charges of working as unregistered foreign agents for the Venezuelan government of Nicolás Maduro, the vilified president who was seized by the U.S. military in early January on charges of trafficking cocaine to the United States.

But then, defense lawyers for Rivera and consultant Esther Nuhfer said the timing of their trial on Feb. 9 was so bad that they urged a federal judge on Friday to delay it at least 90 days, citing the difficulty of picking an impartial jury in Miami-Dade with a large Venezuelan diaspora that despises Maduro.

Moreover, the lawyers said they needed the delay to subpoena key high-profile witnesses because prosecutors had decided not to call them at trial after months of planning to do so. They are: Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a former Republican senator from Miami and colleague of Rivera’s; GOP Texas Congressman Pete Sessions; and former White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, who served in the first Trump administration.

The lawyers also wanted to subpoena Susie Wiles, the current White House chief of staff who once represented a politically connected Venezuelan businessman later indicted on corruption-related money laundering charges in the United States. Wiles was not on the government’s original witness list.

“This Court must allow the sensational conflict with Venezuela to at least come to a simmer, and it must allow Defendants the time necessary to secure the appearances of four critical defense witnesses,” attorneys Ed Shohat and David O. Markus urged U.S. District Judge Melissa Damian in a court filing.

The lawyers added at the start of Friday’s hearing that they also planned to subpoena Maduro, who is being held along with his wife, Cilia Flores, at a New York City detention center as they await trial on drug-trafficking charges.

Will call Rubio as witness, prosecutor says

Then, the lead federal prosecutor, Harold Schimkat, made a dramatic disclosure: the government had changed its mind again and planned to ask Rubio and possibly Sessions and Conway to testify as witnesses, but not Wiles. At that point, Judge Damian denied the defense’s request to delay the trial, saying the original indictment was more than 3 years old and both sides should be ready by now.

But Shohat revealed more dramatic news: his law firm, Jones Walker LLP, had a conflict of interest regarding his subpoena for Rubio’s testimony at Rivera’s trial and his team needed to hire an “independent” counsel to take over that part of the case. Shohat did not offer an explanation, but said it would be “impossible” for the new defense lawyer, Julie Holt, to get up to speed by the start of trial on Feb. 9.

As a result, recognizing Rivera’s constitutional right to effective counsel, the judge postponed the trial until March 16 so that Holt could prepare for her examination of Rubio and possibly Wiles, if she ends up testifying. Holt, a Yale Law School graduate, is a former state and federal public defender.

On Friday, Rubio could not be immediately reached for comment.

The last-minute defense move to delay the trial, which was made before the U.S. military seizure of Maduro on Jan. 3, was expected given President Donald Trump’s constant criticism of Maduro as the head of a “narcostate,” allowing drug traffickers to ship tons of Colombian cocaine from Venezuela through the Caribbean and Mexico to the United States.

In a recent letter sent to the State Department seeking Rubio’s testimony, the defense lawyers asserted he and the other witnesses will present an “opposite” portrayal of the defendants as depicted in their indictment — that instead of secretly lobbying on Maduro’s behalf to “normalize” relations between the United States and Venezuela, Rivera and Nuhfer were trying to remove the president from power in 2017.

They also disclosed that they attempted to have the indictment dismissed in a December meeting with U.S. Attorney Jason Reding Quinones and other prosecutors in his Miami office “rather than put the Secretary in the position of having to testify.”

At Friday’s hearing, Schimkat, the prosecutor, said he believed “it would be prudent to have a cooling-off period” and delay the trial. He then revealed that his team planned to call Rubio as a government witness, saying: “I don’t see how he adds anything to their case.”

In a statement, Rivera, a Republican who served as a Miami-Dade congressman for one term from 2011 to 2013, said that the “Biden-era prosecutors who brought this case didn’t want Marco Rubio to testify because they knew his testimony exonerates us.”

“Everything Marco and I worked on together in 2017 was meant to remove Maduro from power, including meetings with opposition leaders and compiling names of Venezuelan officials and oligarchs to sanction,” Rivera said.

$50 million contract for Rivera

The government’s case against Rivera and Nuhfer is convoluted, fraught with contradictory claims and behind-the-scenes politics.

During the Biden administration in late 2022, the defendants were charged with conspiring to commit offenses against the United States and failing to register as foreign agents for Venezuela during the Maduro regime. The charges are rooted in Rivera’s highly lucrative consulting contract for $50 million with the U.S. subsidiary of Venezuela’s national oil company, PDVSA, in March 2017 — a lobbying deal that ostensibly aimed to rebuild PDV USA’s Citgo refinery business in Houston.

Rivera landed the contract with the help of Nuhfer, who introduced him to Miami developer Hugo Perera, who in turn introduced him to Raul Gorrin, a lawyer by training who owned a TV station in Caracas and was close to Maduro and other Venezuelan political leaders.

The indictment accuses Rivera and Nuhfer of conspiring to “unlawfully enrich themselves by engaging in political activities in the United States on behalf of the Government of Venezuela ... in an effort to influence United States foreign policy toward Venezuela.”

The indictment, filed in Miami, says Rivera and Nuhfer were actually lobbying for the Venezuelan government to “normalize” relations between the socialist South American country and the United States.

Delcy Rodriguez involved, feds say

It also says Venezuela’s interim president, Delcy Rodriguez, who replaced Maduro after he was seized by the U.S. military earlier this month, had “ordered” the Citgo executives in 2017 to hire Rivera’s company, Interamerican Consulting, to compensate him and Nuhfer for their lobbying on behalf of the Venezuelan government.

The indictment further accuses them of trying “to conceal these efforts by failing to register under [federal law] as agents of the Government of Venezuela and by creating the false appearance that they were providing consulting services to PDV USA.”

Rivera has defended his actions by saying he was really working for the U.S. subsidiary of Venezuela’s state-owned oil company — not directly as a consultant for the Venezuelan government in the United States — and therefore he didn’t need to register as a foreign agent.

Rivera has also said that his work for PDVSA’s subsidiary in the United States had nothing to do with his separate lobbying efforts that aimed to remove Maduro from power and replace him with an opposition leader.

Meetings with Rubio

According to the indictment, Rivera and Nuhfer arranged meetings with an unidentified U.S. senator in Washington — Rubio —on two occasions at a private residence and hotel to discuss the U.S.-Venezuelan normalization plan in June 2017. Gorrin, the wealthy Venezuelan businessman, also attended the latter meeting, though he’s not identified in the indictment.

But Gorrin ultimately informed Rivera and Nuhfer that Maduro “refused to agree to hold free and fair elections in Venezuela in exchange for reconciliation with the United States,” according to the indictment.

According to their lawyers, Rivera and Nuhfer met with Rubio, then the Republican senior senator from Florida, who decades ago had purchased a home with Rivera when the two were serving in Florida’s House of Representatives. Rivera and Rubio served in the Florida House throughout most of the 2000s.

Rubio is not identified in the indictment by name, but has confirmed to the Miami Herald that he met with Rivera in 2017 and discussed Maduro. Rubio has not been accused of any wrongdoing.

The lawyers say in a recent letter seeking Rubio’s testimony at trial that their clients’ meeting with Rubio was the “opposite” of how prosecutors described it in the indictment.

“We confidently believe that the evidence [in this case] proves the opposite of what the government has alleged,” Shohat and Markus wrote in their Dec. 15, 2025, letter to the State Department’s legal adviser seeking Rubio’s testimony. “Specifically, then Senator Rubio and Mr. Rivera were focused only on their support for the Opposition [political leaders] in Venezuela, on Sanctions against the Maduro government and on removing Maduro as head of state in Venezuela.

“The overwhelming evidence is that then Senator Rubio and Mr. Rivera were never about improving Maduro’s relations with the United States,” they wrote. “The prosecutors in this case have it completely wrong and backwards.”

During this period, Rivera had also tried to arrange a meeting with Rubio and Conway, the influential adviser in the first Trump administration, but it never happened.

On a parallel track, according to the indictment, Rivera later collaborated with Gorrin to arrange a meeting between Sessions, the Texas Republican, and Maduro in Caracas. On April 2, 2018, the indictment says, Rivera, Gorrin and Sessions met with Maduro and other Venezuelan politicians to discuss normalizing relations between the United States and Venezuela. As part of the meeting, Sessions agreed to carry a letter with that proposal from Maduro to President Trump, but their efforts were ultimately unsuccessful.

Wiles’ lobbying for Venezuelan media mogul

Gorrin, who once owned multimillion-dollar waterfront homes in Cocoplum and Fisher Island, also hired the Washington lobbying firm, Ballard Partners, in 2017 to help him expand his Caracas TV station into the cable market in the United States. The retainer was for $50,000 a month. Brian Ballard and colleague Wiles, Trump’s current chief of staff, handled his account, according to a letter sent by the lawyers for Rivera and Nuhfer to the White House seeking her testimony.

According to the lawyers, Ballard set up a meeting between Gorrin and then-Vice President Mike Pence in 2017. They also said that Wiles communicated in emails with Gorrin, Ballard and several others regarding the lobbying firm’s representation.

They asserted that Wiles’ testimony will prove that the Ballard firm was lobbying to expand Gorrin’s TV business in the United States and had “nothing whatever to do with the normalization of relations for the Venezuelan government of President Maduro.”

Ultimately, the Trump administration imposed strong sanctions against PDVSA and a handful of top members of Maduro’s administration in 2018. Maduro himself was indicted in New York on drug-trafficking charges stemming from his alleged role in a Venezuelan cartel. Gorrin was also indicted in Miami on money-laundering charges stemming from foreign corruption involving Venezuela’s national oil company in 2018 and again in 2024.

In the end, Rivera’s high-paying lobbying deal with Venezuela’s U.S. subsidiary, PDV USA, went from bad to worse. In 2020, the subsidiary’s lawsuit accused Rivera of barely doing any work for his $50 million contract and sought to recover the $20 million it had paid him before cutting him off three years earlier.

Court documents in both the civil and federal cases revealed that Rivera diverted more than half of his PDV USA income — $13 million — to the three subcontractors in Miami who supposedly provided “international strategic consulting services” for the Venezuelan firm. Those subcontractors were Gorrin, Nuhfer and Perera, records show.

This story was originally published January 16, 2026 at 11:08 AM.