MIAMI — When Secretary of State Marco Rubio testifies as a key witness Tuesday at the Miami federal trial of his friend, David Rivera, the former Florida senator will be asked about statements he gave to FBI investigators concerning two meetings he had with Rivera in 2017 when they discussed a plan to oust socialist Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

Rubio will also be asked about an alleged threat to his life that year by Maduro’s right-hand man in Venezuelan politics.

His testimony in the federal criminal trial will be extraordinary, if not surreal, given that Rubio is among the highest-ranking officials in the Trump administration advising the president on consequential global matters, including the U.S. war against Iran.

Rivera, 60, a former Miami-Dade Republican congressman, and another defendant face trial on charges of acting as unregistered foreign agents for the Venezuelan government when Maduro was in power almost a decade ago. Opening statements begin Monday before the 12-person jury, which was picked last week and is notable for its lack of registered Republicans.

At the time of their meetings in July 2017, Rubio later told FBI agents, he was “unaware” that Rivera had a $50 million consulting contract with the U.S. subsidiary of Venezuela’s national oil company, PDVSA — a lobbying deal at the core of the federal case against Rivera and Miami-Dade political consultant Esther Nuhfer. Rubio, who has not been accused of any wrongdoing, told investigators that he “would never have had the meetings with Rivera [regarding] Venezuela had he known about the contract.”

In December 2020, when Rivera was under investigation, Rubio told FBI agents in a teleconference interview that he and Rivera had met at the senator’s residence in Washington, D.C., on July 9, 2017. They discussed how Rivera’s contact, wealthy Venezuelan businessman Raúl Gorrín, could broker Maduro’s exit because he was believed to be close to both the president and his political opponents.

“Rivera told Senator Rubio that Gorrín had persuaded Maduro to accept a deal whereby Maduro would hold free elections and step aside,” says an FBI report summarizing Rubio’s statement on the 2017 meeting with Rivera. “Rivera stated that he wanted Senator Rubio to deliver a message to the White House on behalf of President Maduro.”

In making his pitch, Rubio said, Rivera showed the GOP senator an online bank account containing a “substantial amount of money” — money that Gorrín would use “to support the opposition in Venezuela.”

On July 11, 2017, Rubio spoke with President Donald Trump about a potential solution to the Venezuelan crisis and delivered a speech on the Senate floor about U.S. interests in a peaceful transition of power in the country. The following day, the senator met with Rivera, Gorrín, Nuhfer and others at the Marriott Hotel off Connecticut Avenue rather than Rubio’s office “due to counterintelligence concerns.”

According to Rubio’s FBI statement, he thought the meeting was going to be about Gorrín’s role to obtain a letter from Maduro indicating his willingness to hold democratic elections in Venezuela and to arrange to have that letter delivered to President Trump. At the time, Trump was considering sanctions against Maduro, other senior officials and Venezuela’s state-owned oil company, PDVSA.

“The meeting was supposed to cover the topics of the letter and Venezuelan openness to a peaceful transition of power,” according to Rubio’s statement to the FBI. But the senator told investigators, including the case’s lead federal prosecutor Harold Schimkat, that it was “one of the strangest meetings [he] had ever participated in because it ‘made no sense.’ “

“Gorrín only spoke about the problems of Venezuela and ‘how bad things were,’ but nothing was said about a potential deal,“ according to the summary of Rubio’s FBI statement.

One of the Venezuelan opposition leaders, Henry Ramos Allup, participated in the hotel meeting by phone from New York and also spoke about the country’s dire economic conditions under Maduro.

Rubio said the meeting was “the only time” that he and Gorrín spoke, leaving him wondering why the Venezuelan tycoon flew from Miami, where he owned a waterfront home, to Washington “just to say how bad things were in Venezuela.”

Rubio told investigators that if Gorrín ultimately delivered a letter from Maduro promising democratic elections, that would be a “good thing,” but if it didn’t materialize, he would push for sanctions against the president and others in his regime. Rubio said he and Rivera discussed potential sanctions against certain high-ranking Venezuelan officials, including Maduro, whom they referred to as “the bus driver,” his former job before he entered politics during the socialist revolution of his predecessor, the late President Hugo Chavez.

After receiving mixed messages from Gorrín, Rivera arranged for Rubio to deliver a speech promoting the plan for a peaceful transition of power on Gorrín’s TV station, Globovision, in Caracas. Rubio gave the speech on July 31, 2017 — the very day the Trump administration issued the “first wave” of sanctions against Maduro and his government.

“Discussions with Rivera died off after July,” Rubio’s FBI statement said.

$50 million contract

Rivera and co-defendant Nuhfer, the political consultant, are accused of failing to register as foreign agents with the U.S. Attorney General in March 2017 when Rivera’s consulting company signed the $50 million contract with the Houston-based subsidiary of Venezuela’s national oil company, PDVSA, which operates as CITGO. The contract was ostensibly for promoting CITGO’s expansion in the United States, including resolving oil-drilling disputes with U.S. behemoth Exxon, whose holdings had been nationalized by Venezuela.

Both Rivera and Nuhfer counter that they were working directly for the U.S. subsidiary of Venezuela’s state-owned oil company, PDV USA —not for PDVSA itself — and therefore they didn’t have to register as foreign agents for the Venezuelan government and didn’t break the law. Rivera’s consulting firm received $20 million from PDV USA before the U.S. subsidiary ended the contract after a falling out in 2017, and Rivera shared that income with Nuhfer and two other associates, including Gorrín.

However, federal prosecutors say a high-ranking Venezuelan official close to Maduro arranged the highly profitable contract between Rivera’s consulting firm, Interamerican, and PDV USA as a cover so that Rivera, Nuhfer and others could be compensated for lobbying to gain political support for Venezuela to “normalize” relations with the United States. They accuse Rivera and Nuhfer of deliberately not registering as foreign agents for Venezuela so they could lobby U.S. government officials such as Rubio without their knowledge.

As part of that scheme, prosecutors say, Rivera and Nuhfer sought to prevent sanctions against Maduro and other high-ranking officials in Venezuela.

Lobbied Rubio

In June 2017, Rivera, Nuhfer and others joined forces to lobby Rubio, then the Republican U.S. senator from Miami, and lawyer Kellyanne Conway, a White House advisor to then-President Trump, according to an indictment. Rivera and Nuhfer were unable to meet with Conway, but they did arrange the two meetings with Rubio.

According to the indictment, Rivera also collaborated with Gorrín to arrange a meeting between Texas Congressman Pete Sessions, a Republican, and Maduro in Caracas.

On April 2, 2018, the indictment says, Rivera, Gorrín 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 then-President Trump, who was serving in his first term, but their efforts were unsuccessful.

Both sides wanted Rubio to testify

Rubio’s testimony has been a source of fierce contention between the prosecutors and defense since Rivera and Nuhfer were charged in late 2022 with conspiring to defraud the U.S. government, failing to register as foreign agents for Venezuela’s government and money laundering.

At first, Schimkat, the lead prosecutor, said he was going to call Rubio as a government witness, but then he changed his mind — only to reverse course this year after the defense subpoenaed Rubio at the State Department.

Defense lawyers said they were seeking to call Rubio to show that Rivera and Nuhfer were not acting as unregistered agents for the Venezuelan government to normalize relations with Maduro’s regime, as the indictment alleges. Instead, they say, at the meetings with Rubio and Sessions in 2017 and 2018, the defendants were trying to develop an exit strategy for Maduro so he could be replaced by an opposition leader in Venezuela who would be supported by the United States.

In their move to subpoena Rubio, the defense lawyers, Edward Shohat, David Weinstein, David O. Markus and Margot Moss, pointed out that Rivera came to the former senator’s aid when Rubio learned that Maduro’s right-hand man in the Venezuelan National Assembly, Diosdado Cabello, was plotting to kill him in 2017.

In a letter to the State Department in December, the defense team highlighted that Rubio requested Rivera’s help in reaching out to Gorrín, the politically connected Venezuelan, about the threat to the former senator’s life — signaling that Rivera was not collaborating with Maduro’s government, but rather fighting it.

“It shows Mr. Rivero acted to save the life of a friend, Sen. Rubio,” Shohat said at a court hearing on Friday.

Rivera served in Congress between 2011 and 2013 after spending the previous decade as a state legislator when Rubio was the House speaker between 2006 and 2008. During that period, Rivera and Rubio shared a home in Tallahassee. In his statement to the FBI in 2020, Rubio described Rivera as a “loyal guy.”

During Friday’s hearing, Schimkat, the prosecutor, brought up Rubio’s statement to the FBI, which not only delved into allegations about Rivera but also Cabello’s alleged assassination plot.

“Senator Rubio advised he was informed about the assassination plot through intelligence reports,” the FBI summary of his statement in July 2017 says, without mentioning how the sensitive information was provided. “Senator Rubio wished to inform the various agencies of background.”

On a parallel track, the defense team also wanted to call Venezuela’s former president, Maduro, after he had been seized by U.S. military forces in early January to face drug-trafficking charges in New York. But Maduro, through his lawyer, said he refused to be a witness for the defense, saying he would invoke his constitutional right to remain silent if he were compelled to testify.

Susie Wiles’ involvement

The defense team also wanted to call White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles because she had been a lobbyist for the influential Tallahassee-based firm, Ballard Partners, in 2017 and 18 when it was representing Gorrín, who wanted to expand his Caracas TV station into the U.S. market.

But U.S. District Judge Melissa Damian, along with a magistrate judge, granted the prosecution’s request to quash the defense subpoena for her testimony.

Magistrate Judge Edwin Torres said “the Chief of Staff has become the second most powerful and important person in the operation of the Federal Government” and that requiring her to testify for two days “would disrupt Ms. Wiles’ work duties.”

Besides Rubio, another central witness for the government is Miami real estate developer Hugo Perera, who came to know Rivera through Nuhfer and then introduced the former Miami-Dade congressman to Gorrín. Both Perera and Gorrín owned homes on exclusive Fisher Island.

In turn, Gorrín provided access to Maduro and another top official, Delcy Rodríguez, who prosecutors say ordered the U.S. subsidiary of Venezuela’s national oil company to hire Rivera’s consulting firm as a lobbyist in the United States. Rodriguez replaced Maduro as president of Venezuela after his ouster by the U.S. government.

Miami connections

Court documents in both the criminal case and a parallel civil lawsuit revealed that Rivera diverted more than half of his PDV USA income — $13 million — to three subcontractors in Miami who supposedly provided “international strategic consulting services” for the U.S. subsidiary of Venezuela’s national oil company. The three recipients of the proceeds were Gorrín, Nuhfer and Perera.

Perera “is the star witness” for the government because he was an insider with access to Gorrín, Markus said at the court hearing on Friday. Markus noted that Perera received about $5 million from Rivera for making introductions but was not charged with him and Nuhfer. “The star witness is not Marco Rubio.”

Gorrín, who is not charged in Rivera’s case, was indicted by a Miami federal grand jury on foreign corruption and money laundering charges in 2018. He was also charged in another Miami money laundering case in 2024. In court papers, prosecutors describe Gorrín as a “fugitive.”

Gorrín appears on the witness list for the defense in the Rivera-Nuhfer case, but he’s highly unlikely to show up at their trial.

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