A Very Important Trial ‘About Nothing’ That Demands Marco Rubio’s Presence

MIAMI — A trial that kicked off this week in Florida has all the makings of an international spectacle thanks to the involvement of an unlikely witness: Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

The top Trump administration official is taking time amid the U.S. and Israel’s war with Iran to testify in court about a friend — a former Republican congressman accused of enriching himself by illegally lobbying for Venezuela’s socialist government — in a case that relies on a foreign influence law that President Donald Trump himself has panned after it took down several of his closest advisers.

Contradictions abound in the criminal trial of David Rivera, a South Florida politician who built his career espousing the rigid anti-left stance of Miami’s Cuban American community, in large part because of the Trump administration’s shifting stance on the law Rivera is accused of breaking.

What was already a convoluted criminal case involving Latin American petro politics, shell companies and shadowy meetings has taken on a completely different dimension in just the last few weeks.

The seemingly untouchable background villain in this saga, Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, has since been snatched by U.S. security forces in an overnight raid and is now in a Brooklyn federal jail. And the state-owned oil and gas company, Petroleos de Venezuela, or PDVSA, has gone from being a repeatedly sanctioned economic pariah to benefiting from sanctions eased by a Trump administration desperately seeking to counter a global energy shortage as a result of its war with Iran.

But the case’s 15 jurors have instead been told to focus on the granular details of a simple question: Did Rivera and his political fundraiser associate, Esther Nuhfer, secretly lobby the first Trump administration as part of a $50 million deal?

Both are accused of taking money from a PDVSA subsidiary to influence the first Trump administration in what prosecutors have described as a crime of “greed and betrayal.”

Then-Rep. David Rivera leaves a 2012 House Republican Conference meeting at the Capitol Hill Club. (Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call via AP Images)

Rivera is represented by Ed Shohat, who rose to national prominence when he defended the “Henry Ford of cocaine,” former Colombian drug lord Carlos Lehder. Addressing jurors during opening statements on Monday, Shohat appealed to their common sense.

“Does it make any sense whatsoever that Nicolás Maduro would go to a complete stranger ... and offer him a three-month contract to normalize relations with the United States?” he asked, later pointing out, “David Rivera is a lifetime champion of opposing communism in Cuba and socialism and communism in Venezuela.”

Recalling the comedic premise of the TV show “Seinfeld,” Shohat said “this case is a case about nothing.”

“The government is dead wrong ... imagine that! Our U.S. government and our DOJ being wrong,” Shohat said.

His passing reference to the current American political upheaval drew muted chuckling from the gallery.

Nuhfer’s defense lawyer, Margot Moss, stressed that Rivera’s associate wasn’t even on the contract and, despite her involvement, was never in direct contact with Venezuelan officials or state industry administrators.

Halfway through her speech, Moss drew near to the jury box and brought her voice to a barely audible whisper.

“The idea that the government is suggesting that she was a Venezuelan spy is just crazy,” she said.

However, federal prosecutors are adamant that Rivera and Nuhfer capitalized on their relationships with Trump’s inner circle and looked for clients willing to pay top dollar to tap their access to the White House during his first administration.

Roger Cruz, an assistant U.S. attorney, spent over an hour describing what he called “a secret political influence campaign” that ultimately netted only $20 million that was divvied up among the participants after Rivera and Nuhfer set up meetings with Rubio, then a U.S. senator for Florida; Kellyanne Conway, then a counselor to the president; and Rep. Pete Sessions of Texas, who has historically received outsized contributions from the oil and gas industry.

Cruz argued that neither one filled out the proper paperwork with the Justice Department identifying themselves as foreign agents of Venezuela’s anti-American government because if the truth got out about who they represented, he said, “it would have ruined their politics, their ability to even meet with politicians, and no money would have been generated under that contract.”

Unstated, however, was the elephant in the courtroom: With this case, the DOJ is aggressively cracking down on what could be described as the kind of grift that the second Trump administration has been accused of harboring. Trump came under fire last year for accepting a $400 luxury jet — dubbed by critics as “Bribe Force One” — from the Qatari government. Soon after the gift, the White House announced a bilateral economic deal with the country. According to The Wall Street Journal, the Trump family’s cryptocurrency startup World Liberty Financial also quietly received a $500 million investment tied to an Abu Dhabi royal for 49% of the company, just before the United Arab Emirates scored a diplomatic deal to access highly regulated American computer chips used in AI infrastructure. Neither of those deals have led to DOJ investigations, despite persistent calls from Democrats in Congress.

Attorney General Pam Bondi disbanded the Foreign Influence Task Force on her very first day in office, as part of the second Trump administration’s pull back on prosecutions of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA — the law that landed Trump officials like Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn in hot water during the president’s first term. However, the current DOJ has kept this Biden-era case alive against Rivera, who was always seen by the Trump camp as a political liability even as far back as 2016, when the campaign avoided the scandal-plagued Republican insider. (Rivera was once hit with one of the largest ever fines from the Federal Election Commission.)

But FARA’s moral clarity and usefulness is only in question outside the courtroom. Here, on the 10th floor of a federal building in downtown Miami, the federal prosecutors are singing its praises.

“FARA is essentially a transparency law. The American public, the American press, the American people and politicians you are trying to influence should know why you are there in front of them,” Cruz said, switching to an analogy better understood by Floridians living in the hottest real estate market in the country for years now.

“Like a real estate agent, you want to know if they’re representing the seller ... if they have skin in the game,” he said. “All it took was a simple form.”

All eyes will be on the expected Tuesday morning testimony from Rubio, who has held more official posts within the Trump administration than perhaps any other person. Since taking over as secretary of state, Rubio has been handed roles as acting national security adviser, the nation’s acting archivist and acting administrator of the dismantled U.S. Agency for International Development. He’s expected to testify about what happened during a meeting with Rivera nearly eight years ago — and whether he knew that Rivera was representing Venezuelan interests.

During the final moments in court on Monday, prosecutors said they had made special arrangements so that Rubio and his large security team could be in court first thing Tuesday morning — and even told the judge they’d hoped to limit public entry to prevent the appearance of “hecklers and political activists.”

Judge Melissa Damian refused to make special exceptions, saying, “I’m not going to curtail members of the public from having the ability to come in here.”