MIAMI — Defense attorneys for former Miami-Dade Congressman David Rivera and a political consultant have made their first move to subpoena former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro as a witness at their trial on charges of operating as unregistered foreign agents for his government, according to paperwork filed Thursday in Miami federal court.

Maduro was seized by the U.S. military in early January and brought to the United States to face drug-trafficking charges in New York, where the former Venezuelan leader is being held at a detention center in Brooklyn.

Lawyers for Rivera and colleague Esther Nuhfer argued in the filing that “the testimony of Mr. Maduro is material and necessary at this trial,” which is scheduled to begin with opening statements on March 23 in Miami. “It is expected that Maduro would not be called until the defense case started sometime in mid-April.”

The paperwork, filed by Nuhfer’s lawyers David O. Markus and Margot Moss, indicated that they have spoken with Maduro’s defense attorney, Barry Pollack, about subpoenaing the former Venezuelan strongman. Pollack requested that no action be taken “before giving him a reasonable opportunity to discuss the subpoena with his client.”

Technically, to start the process, the defense lawyers have asked U.S. District Judge Melissa Damian to issue a writ of habeas corpus for Maduro’s testimony. Late Thursday, Damian ordered prosecutors with the U.S. Attorney’s Office to respond to the defense request by Friday. If she grants it, Maduro’s testimony would certainly heighten the political drama of a federal case already rife with intrigue.

The defense team, which includes Rivera’s attorneys Ed Shohat and David Weinstein, has also issued subpoenas to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the former Florida senator, and President Donald Trump’s White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles, a former lobbyist with the influential Tallahassee-based firm Ballard Partners. While federal prosecutors recently said they plan to call Rubio as a government witness, they filed a motion on Thursday to quash the defense subpoena for Wiles.

Defense lawyers said they’re seeking to call Maduro, Rubio and Wiles to show that Rivera and Nuhfer were not acting as unregistered agents for the Venezuelan government to “normalize” relations with Maduro’s regime, as an indictment alleges. Instead, at meetings in 2017 and 2018, they 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.

According to the indictment, Rivera collaborated with politically connected Venezuelan businessman Raul Gorrin to arrange a meeting between Texas Congressman Pete Sessions, a Republican, and 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 then-President Trump, but their efforts were ultimately unsuccessful.

The Biden administration brought the criminal case in late 2022, when Rivera and Nuhfer were charged with conspiring to commit offenses against the United States and failing to register as foreign agents for Venezuela during the Maduro regime. The charges are rooted in Rivera’s $50 million consulting contract with the U.S. subsidiary of Venezuela’s national oil company, PDVSA, in March 2017 — a lobbying deal that ostensibly aimed to rebuild PDV USA’s Citgo refinery business in Houston.

Rivera landed the contract with the help of Nuhfer, who introduced him to Miami developer Hugo Perera, who in turn introduced him to Gorrin, a lawyer by training who owned a TV station in Caracas and was close to Maduro and other Venezuelan political leaders.

The indictment accuses Rivera and Nuhfer of conspiring to “unlawfully enrich themselves by engaging in political activities in the United States on behalf of the Government of Venezuela ... in an effort to influence United States foreign policy toward Venezuela.”

It also says Venezuela’s interim president, Delcy Rodriguez, who replaced Maduro after he was seized by the U.S. military last month, had “ordered” the Citgo executives in 2017 to hire Rivera’s company, Interamerican Consulting, to compensate him and Nuhfer for their lobbying on behalf of the Venezuelan government.

The indictment further accuses them of trying “to conceal these efforts by failing to register under [federal law] as agents of the Government of Venezuela and by creating the false appearance that they were providing consulting services to PDV USA.”

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 — and therefore he didn’t need to register as a foreign agent.

Rivera has also said that his work for PDVSA’s subsidiary in the United States had nothing to do with his separate lobbying efforts that aimed to remove Maduro from power and replace him with an opposition leader.

Meetings with Rubio

According to the indictment, Rivera and Nuhfer arranged meetings with an unidentified U.S. senator — Rubio —on two occasions at a private residence and hotel in Washington to discuss the U.S.-Venezuelan normalization plan in June 2017. Gorrin also attended the meeting at the hotel, though he’s not identified in the indictment.

But Gorrin ultimately informed Rivera and Nuhfer that Maduro “refused to agree to hold free and fair elections in Venezuela in exchange for reconciliation with the United States,” according to the indictment.

Rubio is not identified in the indictment by name, but has confirmed to the Miami Herald that he met with Rivera in 2017 and discussed Maduro. Rubio has not been accused of any wrongdoing.

The defense lawyers say in a recent letter seeking Rubio’s testimony that their clients’ meeting with Rubio was the “opposite” of how prosecutors described it in the indictment.

“We confidently believe that the evidence [in this case] proves the opposite of what the government has alleged,” Shohat and Markus wrote in their Dec. 15, 2025, letter to the State Department’s legal adviser seeking Rubio’s testimony. “Specifically, then Senator Rubio and Mr. Rivera were focused only on their support for the Opposition [political leaders] in Venezuela, on Sanctions against the Maduro government and on removing Maduro as head of state in Venezuela.

“The overwhelming evidence is that then Senator Rubio and Mr. Rivera were never about improving Maduro’s relations with the United States,” they wrote. “The prosecutors in this case have it completely wrong and backwards.”

Wiles’ lobbying for Venezuelan media mogul

Gorrin, who once owned multimillion-dollar waterfront homes in Cocoplum and Fisher Island, also hired the Washington lobbying firm, Ballard Partners, in 2017 to help him expand his Caracas TV station Globovision into the cable market in the United States. The retainer was for $50,000 a month.

Brian Ballard and colleague Wiles, Trump’s current chief of staff, handled his account, according to a recent letter sent by the lawyers for Rivera and Nuhfer to the White House seeking her testimony.

According to the lawyers, Ballard set up a meeting between Gorrin and then-Vice President Mike Pence in 2017 at a political event in Doral with members of the Venezuelan diaspora, who despised Maduro. They also said that Wiles communicated in emails with Gorrin, Ballard and several others regarding the lobbying firm’s representation.

Ballard ended its representation of Gorrin in August 2018 after the Miami Herald published a story revealing that he was under federal criminal investigation for a massive money-laundering scheme stemming from bribing top Venezuelan officials. He was indicted that November, but he remains a fugitive still living in Venezuela.

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