Sources: Venezuela wooed ex-congressman to ease sanctions
MIAMI — Venezuela’s socialist government tried to recruit then-Congressman Pete Sessions to broker a meeting with the CEO of Exxon Mobil at the same time it was secretly paying a close former House colleague $50 million to keep U.S. sanctions at bay, The Associated Press has learned.
An official at state-run oil giant PDVSA sent an email to the Texas Republican on June 8, 2017 seeking his help arranging a meeting between Venezuela’s oil minister and Darren Woods, then Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s successor at the helm of the Irving, Texas-based Exxon. The purpose: to lure Exxon back to Venezuela after a decade’s absence and inject much-needed dynamism into the OPEC nation’s collapsing oil industry.
The email, which was seen by the AP, has been shared with U.S. federal law enforcement looking into the person who allegedly instructed the PDVSA official to send the email to Sessions: former Miami Congressman David Rivera, according to two people familiar with the investigation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the politically sensitive matter.
Rivera at the time was collecting part of a whopping $50 million contract for three months of consulting work for an American unit of PDVSA — a business deal now being investigated by federal prosecutors in Miami because he never registered as an agent of a foreign government.
It’s not clear how Sessions, who is running again for
Congress this fall, acted on the request, though he did not reply directly to the email. In any case, Exxon rebuffed the sought-after meeting in Dallas, according to the two people.
But Sessions did engage in other mediation efforts in Venezuela over the next 15 months.
At the urging of a Venezuelan media mogul who would go on to become a top U.S. fugitive, he secretly traveled to Caracas in April 2018 for a meeting with President Nicolás Maduro. The businessman, Raul Gorrin, was present at the meeting and Rivera served as a translator, a third person familiar with the visit said, also on condition of anonymity.
A few months later Sessions phoned the socialist leader with Rudy Giuliani, the U.S. president’s personal lawyer, around the same time both men were involved in another shadow diplomatic effort to fire the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine. Both men’s interest in Venezuela and Sessions’ advocacy of a Trump-Maduro meeting came as a surprise to John Bolton, according to the former National Security Adviser’s new book on his time at the White House.
The AP first reported Sessions’ peacemaking trip to Caracas in 2018. The earlier email regarding Exxon and his connection to Rivera was not known at the time.
Sessions’ role in the ultimately futile back channeling, more extensive than previously believed, is now part of prosecutors’ examination of Rivera’s paid consulting and how the money he received from Venezuela — at least $15 million of the promised $50 million — was spent, the two people said.
While there is no indication Sessions benefited from Rivera’s consulting contract, the two men’s efforts overlapped, with the same interlocutors, and at times seemed aligned.