Who does Ex-Miami Rep. David Rivera want legal help from? An indicted Venezuelan lawyer

Former Congressman David Rivera was arrested in December on charges of failing to register as a foreign agent for Venezuela when his consulting company signed a $50 million contract with a state-owned oil company to promote its interests in the United States.

But seven months later, the once-influential Miami politician has still not entered his plea to an indictment, which is normally a formality done in short order.

In Rivera’s case, U.S. prosecutors immediately froze his bank accounts and real estate assets after his arrest, preventing him from hiring his high-profile defense attorney Edward Shohat on a permanent basis, a dispute that might be resolved by mid-August so that Rivera can finally be arraigned and prepare for trial.

But as that particular problem drags on, Rivera’s case has taken another curious turn: Shohat, who is representing him as a temporary lawyer, has asked a federal judge to let his client meet with another attorney in Venezuela.

That attorney happens to be facing conspiracy, corruption and money laundering charges in Miami himself. The lawyer, Raul Gorrin, who was indicted in 2018, is better known as a TV media mogul with political connections to Venezuelan presidents and has significant real estate investments in the Miami area — all of which have been frozen by the feds, too. Gorrin is also considered a “fugitive” by prosecutors in Miami. The request comes with other significant legal hurdles as well. Rivera would need to have his U.S. passport returned, which was seized, and have a court-ordered nighttime curfew lifted to make the trip.

In a new court filing, Rivera argues that he wants to consult with Gorrin, saying he can both help him with his unregistered-foreign agent case and with a related civil business dispute in New York. Rivera says he hired Gorrin as a lawyer in 2017, but U.S. authorities allege that Gorrin was actually a subcontractor on Rivera’s high-paying consulting deal with Venezuela’s state-owned oil company, PDVSA — the contract that is at the heart of the criminal case against Rivera.

Then there is this: Gorrin appears on the government’s list of “potential witnesses” that Rivera is not allowed to contact as a special condition of the defendant’s $200,000 bond. Rivera’s temporary lawyer, Shohat, is asking U.S. District Judge Darrin Gayles to clarify that thorny issue and others to allow his client to visit Caracas.

Shohat’s argument boils down to a claim that Rivera has a constitutional right to counsel under the Sixth Amendment to consult with Gorrin, who is accused in a Miami indictment of embezzling hundreds of millions of dollars from the Venezuelan government in a foreign-corruption and money-laundering scheme with two former national treasurers and then moving some of that money to South Florida. Both Venezuelan treasurers were convicted in South Florida and sent to prison.

Rivera, who last served in Congress a decade ago and was elected as a Republican Committeeman in Miami-Dade County in 2020, provided a statement Tuesday to the Miami Herald saying he has every right to meet with Gorrin, claiming that he is not a fugitive, as U.S. prosecutors assert, because he left for Venezuela in early 2018 before he was indicted later that year.

“As far as I know, my constitutionally protected Sixth Amendment right to counsel does not apply solely to lawyers inside the United States,” Rivera said. “I think I should be able to choose my lawyers, not the government.”

“Gorrin is a treasure trove of information and documents that will both humiliate the government and destroy its case,” he added. “They have no idea what’s coming, and Gorrin is critical to that.”

The U.S. Attorney’s Office declined to comment, but is expected to respond in a court filing to Rivera’s request to travel to Venezuela to consult with Gorrin.

Rivera, who says he’s considering a bid for the State House in Florida but won’t specify the Miami-area district, was charged in December along with his former Miami-Dade political consultant, Esther Nuhfer. An indictment charged them with conspiring to commit offenses against the United States, failing to register as foreign agents as part of their consulting work for Venezuela’s oil subsidiary, PDV USA, and money laundering.

As Venezuela’s economy was crashing in 2017, the country’s state-owned oil company hired Rivera for a costly public relations campaign to prop up the Venezuelan firm in the United States and to prevent U.S. sanctions. In just a few months, Rivera’s business, Interamerican Consulting, collected $20 million from Venezuela’s U.S. subsidiary, PDV USA, but its $50 million contract with the former politician abruptly ended when he was accused of doing little work, according to a lawsuit in New York that was filed before the federal indictment in Miami.

Court documents in both the civil and criminal cases 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 Venezuelan firm. The three recipients of the proceeds were his Venezuelan lawyer, Gorrin, his consulting associate, Nuhfer, and a formerly convicted drug trafficker, Hugo Perera. Perera, a Miami developer, introduced Gorrin to Rivera. Both Perera and Gorrin — who have not been charged in the indictment with Rivera and Nuhfer — came to known each other because they owned homes on exclusive Fisher Island.

In the past, Rivera has defended his actions by saying he was really working for the U.S. subsidiary of Venezuela’s state-owned oil company — not directly as a consultant for the Venezuelan government in the United States. But the indictment says Rivera and Nuhfer were actually lobbying for the Venezuelan government in an effort to normalize relations between the South American country and the United States, prevent more economic sanctions against President Nicolas Maduro’s government, and resolve a legal dispute between an unnamed U.S. oil company and Venezuela.

According to the indictment, Rivera and Nuhfer met with an unidentified U.S. senator in Washington, D.C., to discuss the normalization plan in 2017, but to no avail because Maduro’s government ultimately would not make a commitment to such a deal.

Additionally, the indictment says, Rivera collaborated with Gorrin, who owns a TV station in Caracas, an insurance company and other businesses, to arrange a meeting between Congressman Pete Sessions of Texas and President Maduro in Caracas. On April 2, 2018, the indictment says, Rivera, Gorrin 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 President Donald Trump, but their efforts were ultimately unsuccessful.