Former U.S. Rep. David Rivera of Florida was sentenced on Friday to 10 years in federal prison for secretly lobbying on behalf of Venezuela's government during President Trump's first term, work that prosecutors said ran through a $50 million consulting contract tied to the country's state oil company.
Jurors convicted Rivera, 61, on every count in May after a seven-week trial, finding him guilty of failing to register with the Justice Department as a foreign agent and of conspiring to launder money, among other charges. The Republican, who represented a Miami-area district for a single term after winning election in 2010, has been held without bond since the May 1 verdict. His co-defendant, the political consultant Esther Nuhfer, was sentenced to five years, the Associated Press reported.
Judge Melissa Damian, who imposed the sentence in downtown Miami, rejected the defense's view that Rivera's offense came down to a missing form. "There's no dispute this money came from the Maduro regime," she said, according to the BBC. "This is a serious offense," she said in court, in remarks reported by the Associated Press. "It's not about not filing a piece of paper." She also denied Rivera's motion to lower the federal sentencing guidelines range, calling the matter "a classic money laundering case."
Prosecutors said Delcy Rodríguez, then Venezuela's foreign minister and now its acting president, recruited Rivera to lean on Republican contacts from his House days and push the Trump administration toward a softer line on Venezuela, including relief from sanctions. Rivera's one-man consulting firm held a three-month, $50 million contract with PDV USA, a New York-based affiliate of the state oil company PDVSA, and prosecutors argued that the contract served as cover for the lobbying. The work took place in 2017 and 2018, according to prosecutors.
According to the government, Rivera and Nuhfer tried to sway prominent Republicans, among them Marco Rubio, then a senator and now secretary of state, and Rep. Pete Sessions of Texas, without telling them about the contract. Prosecutors also alleged that the pair tried to lobby Kellyanne Conway, then a senior White House adviser, the BBC reported. Rubio, who once shared a Tallahassee home with Rivera when both served in Florida state government, was not implicated in the wrongdoing. He and Sessions testified that they learned of the contract only later.
Jurors saw messages from an encrypted chat group called MIA that, according to prosecutors, Rivera set up with Raúl Gorrín, a Venezuelan media magnate who served as his main conduit to Maduro's government. Members used code words, and Maduro was the "bus driver." Prosecutors also said Rivera and his associates backdated documents and drew up sham agreements to hide the work, including one used to justify a $3.75 million wire transfer to a South Florida company that maintained Gorrín's yacht.
The defense has maintained throughout that Rivera believed the law did not require him to register. His lawyers say the contract concerned an effort to bring ExxonMobil back to Venezuela, commercial work generally exempt from the Foreign Agents Registration Act, and that his meetings with Rubio and Sessions came after the contract ended and were aimed at replacing Maduro with leadership friendlier to Washington. "David Rivera does not deserve to die in prison because he failed to file a FARA registration," defense attorney Ed Shohat said at Friday's hearing. Rivera spoke for about 20 minutes, denying that he had been two-faced and asking for leniency because of his age and health.
Jason A. Reding Quiñones, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida, said after the sentencing that Rivera "betrayed the South Florida community he once represented, a community made in part of people who fled a communist regime." He added: "This was not some paperwork violation, or a simple mistake." Brett Skiles of the FBI's Miami field office said: "Operating illegally and covertly on behalf of a foreign government has consequences."
The jury also found that properties Rivera owned in Doral and the Florida Keys should be forfeited to the government, and Damian has yet to rule on the government's request that he forfeit $20 million in criminal proceeds. Rivera's lawyers plan to appeal and applied in June for a presidential pardon, the AP reported, and he faces separate federal charges in Washington in a related foreign lobbying case.
Rivera was charged in 2022, during the Biden administration, in an 11-count indictment. The outreach at the heart of the case quickly came apart: within six months of taking office, Trump sanctioned Maduro, called him a "dictator" and launched a "maximum pressure" campaign to unseat him.