Former Congressman David Rivera Gets 10 Years for Secret Venezuela Lobbying
A Miami jury convicted the former South Florida Republican in May of failing to register as a foreign agent and laundering millions tied to a $50 million contract with Venezuela’s state oil company.
David Rivera, a former Republican congressman from South Florida, was sentenced Friday to 10 years in federal prison for secretly lobbying U.S. officials on behalf of Venezuela’s government and laundering millions of dollars connected to the work.
U.S. District Judge Melissa Damian imposed the sentence in a Miami courtroom. A jury convicted Rivera, 61, in May of failing to register as a foreign agent and conspiracy to commit money laundering. He has been held without bond since the verdict.
The case centered on a $50 million contract Rivera and political consultant Esther Nuhfer signed with a U.S. affiliate of PDVSA, Venezuela’s state oil company. Prosecutors said the pair used the contract to lobby Washington on behalf of then-President Nicolás Maduro’s government in 2017 and 2018, during Donald Trump’s first term in office, without registering under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
Prosecutors said Rivera lobbied then-Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida and Rep. Pete Sessions of Texas, and helped arrange meetings between U.S. policymakers and senior Venezuelan officials, including Maduro and then-Foreign Minister Delcy Rodríguez. Trial evidence showed the pair used coded language in text messages to describe their activities, according to the Justice Department. Prosecutors said Rivera and Nuhfer received about $20 million from the contract before it was terminated.
The defense said Rivera was working to help Venezuela’s opposition remove Maduro from power, not to advance the government’s interests. His lawyers called the work commercial and said it was exempt from the registration requirement. Prosecutors had asked for more than 20 years in prison. The defense asked for no more than one year.
“There is no dispute this money came from the Maduro regime”
Damian told Rivera he had betrayed his life’s mission. “There is no dispute this money came from the Maduro regime,” the judge said, according to CNN. She said he would surely have been judged harshly by his many friends had the millions come from the Cuban regime instead of its allies in Caracas.
Rivera, a longtime friend of Rubio, who is now secretary of state, represented South Florida in the House from 2011 to 2013. Rubio and Sessions were among the officials who testified at the trial that they felt betrayed when they learned of the consulting contract, according to CNN.
What happens next
Rivera’s lawyers plan to appeal the conviction and applied for a presidential pardon in June, according to CNN. He also faces additional federal charges in Washington, D.C., in a related foreign lobbying case. Nuhfer, his co-defendant, was sentenced to five years in prison in August.
Rivera was charged in 2022, during the Biden administration. Defense lawyers noted that Trump has deemphasized foreign-agent registration cases since taking office in January 2025, according to Reuters.
