The Florida Network Is on Trial

By Rachel Hurley March 12th, 2026 Updated September 29th, 2026

Marco Rubio’s best friend is charged with lobbying for Maduro. Rubio has to testify against him.

Marco Rubio is the U.S. Secretary of State. He’s also going to have to sit down in a Miami federal courthouse and testify against his best friend of 20 years in a national security trial involving a $50 million Venezuelan lobbying scheme. That’s the situation right now. And somehow it’s not all over the news.

Here’s the background, because this cast of characters requires some setup.

David Rivera is a former South Florida congressman who shared a house in Tallahassee with Rubio back when they were both young Florida legislators. They were so inseparable people called them Batman and Robin. Rivera was the Robin who handled the dirty work - the “enforcer” who helped Rubio whip votes for the speakership. After Rivera’s one term in Congress ended in 2013, he launched a consulting firm called Interamerican Consulting, registered to his Miami home address.

In 2017, that firm signed a $50 million contract with PDV USA - the American subsidiary of Venezuela’s state-owned oil company, PDVSA. Prosecutors say the whole thing was a cover for a secret campaign to cozy up to the incoming Trump administration on behalf of Nicolas Maduro’s government. Rivera’s firm took in about $20 million before the contract fell apart. He was arrested in 2022, indicted again in 2024, and his trial starts March 16 in Miami.

Now here’s where it gets good.

Rivera’s defense strategy is to argue that everyone else was doing the same thing he was doing - and that if he’s a foreign agent, so is Trump’s current chief of staff. To prove it, his lawyers have subpoenaed Marco Rubio, who as a senator met privately with Rivera and sanctioned Venezuelan media tycoon Raúl Gorrín at a Washington hotel in 2017. They also subpoenaed Susie Wiles, Trump’s current White House chief of staff.

Wiles was a partner at Ballard Partners, a Florida lobbying powerhouse, when she personally registered to lobby the White House on behalf of Globovision - a Venezuelan TV network owned by Gorrín. Federal lobbying records show Ballard was paid $800,000 for that work. Gorrín has since been charged by the U.S. Justice Department in an alleged $1.2 billion money laundering scheme and sanctioned by the Treasury Department. Wiles lobbied for access to the Trump White House for a guy who was eventually sanctioned by the Trump administration. That’s not a minor detail.

Rivera’s lawyers pointed out there are roughly 400 pages of documents connecting Wiles’ firm to the key players in this case. A federal magistrate judge wrote last month that “no one disputes that Ballard Partners registered under FARA and dealt with Gorrín openly” - and said the defense didn’t need Wiles to make that point. FARA is the Foreign Agents Registration Act - the same law Rivera is on trial for allegedly violating. The judge let Wiles avoid testifying anyway, and on March 8th a district judge upheld that ruling.

Wild - right?

The court documents also show Rivera tried to arrange a private jet ride and meeting with Kellyanne Conway in June 2017 - the day she happened to be in Miami for a Republican fundraiser. According to the indictment, they never got the meeting with Conway. There’s also Pete Sessions, a Texas congressman, who Rivera allegedly roped in to set up a meeting with Venezuela’s foreign minister and Exxon executives. Sessions then flew to Caracas in April 2018, sat across from Maduro, and agreed to personally hand-deliver a letter from Maduro to President Trump. Oil executive Harry Sargeant, who’s been working back channels between Washington and Caracas - though Trump says he has no authority to act for the U.S. - is in the documents too.

It was a charm offensive for Maduro’s government, led by a Venezuelan oligarch the U.S. would later sanction - at the exact same time the Trump administration was publicly calling Maduro a dictator. The lobbying ultimately failed - Trump went the other direction and recognized the opposition. But not before Gorrín got a photo with Vice President Mike Pence at a Florida event.

Now Rubio is scheduled to testify as a government witness - meaning prosecutors think his testimony helps their case against Rivera. That’s his best friend of two decades. Rivera’s lawyers, for their part, argue that the whole point of the Rivera-Rubio meetings was to undermine Maduro, not help him. If that’s true, the government’s case has a hole in it. If it’s not true, Rubio helped facilitate exactly what he built his entire political career railing against.

Either way, the Secretary of State is about to testify in a foreign influence trial while the White House chief of staff won’t have to - because Trump’s own DOJ fought to keep her off the witness stand.

The thing that should bother everyone regardless of politics is the structure of it. A Florida lobbying network with direct access to the White House was being paid by a Venezuelan oligarch who the U.S. would later sanction for money laundering. That same network is now running the country. The trial that could shine a light on how that works starts in four days.

Sources

Correction, September 28th, 2026: This essay first said the White House chief of staff’s related documents sit under seal - the court record shows about 400 pages of her emails and calendar entries were turned over to the defense - and that the Justice Department is controlled by Rubio’s administration, when it’s Trump’s. It also quoted Kellyanne Conway saying she flew commercial and had no part in this; that line is gone, and according to the indictment, Rivera never got the meeting with her. And it said oil executive Harry Sargeant is advising Trump on Venezuela - Trump said in February that Sargeant has no authority to act for the U.S.

Update, September 28th, 2026: A few lines now match the court record more closely - Rivera’s firm took in about $20 million, the defense argument named Susie Wiles, the magistrate judge used the Ballard line as a reason to quash her subpoena, a district judge upheld that on March 8th, and the charm offensive line now says who ran it - and a dead source link now goes to the court’s order.