Former Miami Republican congressman David Rivera was sentenced Friday to 10 years in prison for secretly running a $50 million lobbying campaign on behalf of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro’s government, which is either the most ironic thing that has ever happened in Miami or a very close runner-up.
Rivera, 61, sat stone-faced as Judge Melissa Damian sentenced him after a jury found him guilty in May on all counts, including failing to register as a foreign agent and conspiracy to commit money laundering. The judge noted that Rivera would surely have been judged harshly by his many friends if the millions had come from the Cuban regime instead of its pals in Caracas. “Nobody would accept that’s ok and I don’t think this is different,” she said. “There’s no dispute this money came from the Maduro regime.” Hard to argue with the logic, even if Rivera’s attorneys are certainly going to try.
Maybe being a traitor to America and working with communists isn’t the best idea, and everyone is glad he was caught.
“Miss Clairol,” The “Bus Driver,” And A $50 Million Secret
According to prosecutors, Rivera was recruited by then-Venezuelan Foreign Minister Delcy Rodríguez, now Venezuela’s acting president, to use his Republican connections to soften the first Trump administration’s sanctions on Venezuela. To keep things discreet, Rivera allegedly set up an encrypted chat group called MIA, where members used imaginative code names. Maduro was the “bus driver.” Rep. Pete Sessions of Texas was “Sombrero.” Rodríguez was “The Lady in Red.” Their payments were “La Luz,” Spanish for “The Light.” And Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Rivera’s longtime friend and former Tallahassee housemate, was dubbed “Miss Clairol,” because rubio means blond in Spanish. Say what you want about these guys, they had a sense of humor.
Rivera and political consultant Esther Nuhfer allegedly worked to arrange meetings for Rodríguez in New York, Washington, Caracas, and Dallas, and brought Sessions into the mix. Sessions later tried to broker a meeting between Rodríguez and an ExxonMobil executive, and after a secret trip to Caracas to meet with Maduro, agreed to hand-deliver a letter from the Venezuelan president to President Trump. It’s just crazy how the David Rivera Venezuela lobbying case unraveled when Trump sanctioned Maduro and launched a “maximum pressure” campaign within six months of taking office.
Defense Says It Was Just A Paperwork Problem. The Judge Disagreed.
Rivera’s defense attorney Ed Shohat argued at sentencing that Rivera had no obligation to disclose the work, calling the $50 million contract with New York-based PDV USA, a U.S. affiliate of Venezuela’s state oil company PDVSA, a commercial arrangement focused on luring ExxonMobil back to Venezuela. “David Rivera does not deserve to die in prison because he failed to file a FARA registration,” Shohat said. The argument being, essentially, that this was all one big paperwork mix-up involving fifty million dollars and a foreign dictatorship.
Judge Damian was not buying it. “This is a classic money laundering case,” she said, rejecting Rivera’s motion to lower the federal sentencing guidelines range. Prosecutors noted that some of the money went toward maintaining Venezuelan media tycoon Raúl Gorrín’s luxury yacht, because apparently the cause of normalized relations with Maduro required some serious nautical support. Assistant U.S. Attorney Roger Cruz summed it up cleanly: “He used his position of trust and betrayed it consistently and repeatedly.”
Despite the verdict and the sentence, Rivera’s standing in Miami’s Cuban American community remains intact enough that supporters, including the former president of Florida International University and Miami-Dade County’s supervisor of elections, packed the courtroom to show solidarity. Sessions submitted a letter seeking leniency, read into the record by his chief of staff, praising Rivera’s decades of public service. Rivera’s attorneys have filed for a presidential pardon and plan to appeal the conviction.
Rivera also faces additional federal charges in Washington, D.C., in a related foreign lobbying case, so the legal fun is far from over. The whole saga is a useful reminder that the swamp has no party affiliation, a $50 million contract with a socialist dictatorship’s oil company is a strange look for an anti-communist stalwart, and in Washington and Miami, the code names are always more creative than the schemes themselves.
No chance this commie-sympathizer gets a pardon. He can beg until he’s blue in the face like a Democrat donkey, but Trump needs to make an example of this one.
