Former Miami congressman, a Cuban American Republican, takes millions from Maduro oil | Opinion
He knows, like the best of charlatans who use pain and loss for political gain, how to play the game of conning Cuban and Venezuelan exiles.
Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the most anti-Communist of them all?
Why Cuban American Republican David Rivera!
Everyone who runs against me is a Commie.
Everyone who thinks differently than me is a Commie.
Everyone who criticizes or investigates me is a Commie.
Hammering this message in strategic spaces on Cuban radio and television, the man who would become known for campaign ethics violations and wild political schemes rose, becoming first a Florida state representative, and later, a one-term congressman.
But campaign shenanigans are child’s play compared to the role Rivera is now playing — caught in bed with the enemy for cash, a $50 million consulting contract with a subsidiary of Venezuela’s state-owned oil company to clean up its tattered image in the United States.
The $50 million image consultant
Here’s the ultimate anti-Communist, anti-Castro politician quietly using in 2017 his Interamerican Consulting firm (two employees, he and his sister) to purportedly help a key industry run by dictator Nicolás Maduro, whose regime has accumulated dozens of punitive sanctions from the U.S. government.
This, while Rivera’s friend and former Tallahassee housemate, Republican Senator Marco Rubio, was scoring headlines as the evolving point man for President Donald Trump’s get-tough-on-Maduro policy.
Political immorality, political chicanery, political hypocrisy at its best — and there’s still so much more to learn about Rivera-gate.
If this were Watergate, the lawsuit filed against Rivera by PDV USA Inc., a U.S. subsidiary of Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A., known as PDVSA, to recover the initial $15 million paid to him for what amounted to five pages of reports, would merely be the break-in.
A scoop by the New York Times this time brought the contract to the limelight.
Like burglary, not registering as an agent of a foreign government is a crime. It’s one of the crimes the five Cuban spies arrested in 1998 were convicted of, along with espionage and conspiracy to commit murder.
Rivera link to opposition denied
Caught with his hands in Maduro’s cookie jar, Rivera told the Times and the Miami Herald that the money went to the opposition and he named leader Leopoldo López, an excuse quickly debunked by his spokeswoman and other outraged Venezuelans.
They point out that López, who took refuge in the Spanish embassy in Caracas, was imprisoned, incommunicado, and being tortured in a Venezuelan prison when Rivera inked the contract and received payments.
That Rivera would hint that Venezuela’s widespread and brave grassroots opposition and uprising was fueled by money only adds another layer of indignity.
Rivera’s defense is also that he engaged with PDVSA with the knowledge of the Trump administration. He named the National Security team and the State Department as entities that knew what he was doing.
He also tried to involve in his scheme “the Citgo 6,” five American citizen executives and a U.S. legal resident jailed in Venezuela since November 2017.
As of this writing, the Trump administration wasn’t commenting on the case.
Rubio, a prolific Twitter user who when this scandal broke was tweeting about a coronavirus suicide prevention hotline as if Rivera and his disgraceful use of Venezuela for personal gain had nothing to do with him, has yet to address Rivera in the public forum.
But pressed by reporters on Capitol Hill, Rubio said Wednesday: “I only know what has been reported today in the New York Times. But if the facts are as they have been reported, it would be deeply disappointing news.”
Still, we need to hear more from the senator, who is reportedly in line for one of two high-profile jobs, leading either the Senate Foreign Relations Committee or the Intelligence Committee.
Whatever the case, something stinks in this Cubazuela drama, part political thriller, part patio soap opera.
Nobody pays $50 million for a public relations job.
Not even to a half-baked former congressman whose only claim to fame is his impressive record of beating several state and federal investigations into campaign finance scandals — and his access to high-placed GOP friends.
To several of those Republicans, running for local, state and federal office in Miami-Dade, Rivera has donated money via Interamerican Consulting. Only one so far, Commissioner Esteban “Steve” Bovo, has returned the money.
Using foreign, socialist Maduro money to finance Florida GOP campaigns, way to go for the anti-Communist patriot.
Mirror, mirror on the wall, whose the sleaziest of them all.
Rivera!
This story was originally published May 15, 2020 at 6:00 AM.
