In a highly unusual move, Secretary of State Marco Rubio will testify in a criminal trial on Tuesday, March 24. If my research is correct, the last sitting presidential cabinet member to take the stand in a criminal trial was Labor Secretary Raymond Donovan in 1983.
What didn’t take much research for me to find out is that the MSM is kind of burying the lede with headlines about how Rubio is set to testify at the trial of his “former roommate,” like this AP article here entitled “Rubio to testify in trial of former roommate accused of secretly lobbying for Venezuela.”
These so-called journalists are giddily playing up that angle like there’s some sort of personal guilt by association, even though there are no charges against Rubio, and there is no evidence that he knew anything about the situation.
(I don’t know about you, but I’ve had one roommate in my life in college, and I have no idea what she is involved with now. I actually just looked her up on Facebook out of curiosity, and the first thing I saw was her Black Lives Matter banner. We are not the same. Do not judge me — or Rubio or anyone else — by people we associated with that many years ago, but I digress.)
So, here’s the actual situation: David Rivera, who is a former Miami-area congressman, was, according to prosecutors, “a hired gun” for Nicolás Maduro, “leveraging Republican connections from his time in Congress to push the White House to abandon its hard line on Venezuela’s socialist government.”
Here’s more from the AP. Note how they slide the roommate line in there, even though it has nothing to do with the paragraph:
Rivera, who at one time had been Rubio’s roommate in Florida, allegedly persuaded then Foreign Minister Delcy Rodríguez — now Venezuela’s acting president — to award him a $50 million lobbying contract to be paid by state oil company PDVSA. As part of the alleged foreign influence campaign, prosecutors say Rivera was aided by Texas Republican Rep. Pete Sessions and a convicted Cali cartel associate as he sought meetings with the White House and Exxon Mobil on Maduro’s behalf.
Rivera, of course, denies this and says he was “working directly for the U.S. subsidiary of Venezuela’s state-owned oil company… not for PDVSA itself.” It’s a complex case, but that’s the gist of it. Both sides initially wanted Rubio to testify — prosecutors for obvious reasons and the defense so they could try to prove that Rivera was trying to oust Maduro too. The prosecution won out.
Rubio is not a target here — he’s actually making the federal government’s case. He’s already told the FBI that he knows nothing about any of this.
According to the Miami Herald, Rubio will “be asked about statements he gave to FBI investigators concerning two meetings he had with Rivera in 2017 when they discussed a plan to oust socialist Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.”
Those meetings, which were based on an idea from Venezuelan businessman Raúl Gorrín that Maduro might agree to free and fair elections, were unproductive, and Rubio even called one of them “one of the strangest meetings [he] had ever participated in because it ‘made no sense.'” Here’s more from the Herald:
Rubio told investigators that if Gorrín ultimately delivered a letter from Maduro promising democratic elections, that would be a ‘good thing,’ but if it didn’t materialize, he would push for sanctions against the president and others in his regime. Rubio said he and Rivera discussed potential sanctions against certain high-ranking Venezuelan officials, including Maduro, whom they referred to as “the bus driver,” his former job before he entered politics during the socialist revolution of his predecessor, the late President Hugo Chavez.
After receiving mixed messages from Gorrín, Rivera arranged for Rubio to deliver a speech promoting the plan for a peaceful transition of power on Gorrín’s TV station, Globovision, in Caracas. Rubio gave the speech on July 31, 2017 — the very day the [first Donald] Trump administration issued the ‘first wave’ of sanctions against Maduro and his government.
After that, Rubio says the discussions came to an end. He also says he never would have met with Rivera if he’d known about the $50 million contract. Ultimately, the lobbying scheme failed, thanks to Trump’s sanctions.
And yes, Rubio and Rivera did live together back in their state legislator days, but according to several mutual friends, any sort of relationship they had was “frayed” and basically nonexistent years before any of this Maduro stuff happened.
Either way, bringing something that happened twenty years ago into the story is just a weak and pathetic attempt to, as usual, go after the Trump administration. Rubio has been one of the staunchest supporters in the United States of dismantling the regime in Venezuela and getting rid of Maduro. If he wasn’t, I don’t believe Maduro would be sitting in a federal detention center in Brooklyn right now.
Want to support conservative media? You can do so by becoming a PJ Media VIP member. It’s less than $20 for the entire year, and you get some cool perks too. We can’t wait to have you!
