MIAMI — Former Venezuela President Nicolas Maduro said Thursday he doesn’t want to be a witness for former Congressman David Rivera at his national-security trial in Miami, pointing out that he faces trial himself on narcoterrorism charges in New York.

Maduro’s defense attorney indicated in a letter filed Thursday in federal court that Maduro “will exercise his constitutional right under the Fifth Amendment to remain silent and respectfully declines to testify” at the trial of Rivera and political consultant Esther Nuhfer.

Both are charged with working as unregistered agents in 2017-18 for the Venezuelan government while Maduro was president and face trial in March.

Maduro attorney Barry Pollack wrote Nuhfer’s lawyer, David O. Markus, who authored a motion to compel Maduro’s testimony with a subpoena if he refused to be a witness for the defense.

“Particularly in light of the conduct of the United States government related to the case against him in the Southern District of New York, Mr. Maduro must vigorously assert and protect his rights under the United States Constitution,” Pollack wrote. He added that U.S. military forces “abducted” Maduro on Jan. 3 and “brought him by force” to New York to face federal drug-trafficking charges. He’s being held at a federal lock-up in Brooklyn.

“Accordingly, on behalf of Mr. Maduro, I ask that you withdraw your motion ... and that ... you inform the Court that Mr. Maduro opposes the motion,” Pollack wrote Markus.

Markus expressed disappointment, in a comment laced with reality and wit.

“We are disappointed that Maduro is staying silent because he would have exonerated us,” Markus told the Miami Herald in a statement on Thursday. “Of course, there is a simple solution if the government wants the truth — they could immunize his testimony here. That would not affect his New York case. But our optimism that they will do so is flatter than Venezuelan oil prices.”

In a previous court filing, prosecutors Harold Schimkat and Roger Cruz did not take a position on the “ultimate underlying merits” of the Maduro subpoena. But they said the defense motion was “deficient because it does not proffer how Mr. Maduro would potentially testify and provides no basis to know whether Maduro might even be willing to testify in this matter or have information material and favorable to the defendants.“

Last week, lawyers for Rivera and Nuhfer filed a motion to subpoena the former president. They said “the testimony of Mr. Maduro is material and necessary at this trial.” But they also asked Pollack about his client’s willingness to be a witness before taking the next step.

The defense team, which includes Rivera’s attorneys Ed Shohat and David Weinstein, has already 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 to quash the defense subpoena for Wiles.

The prosecutors, citing evidence in the case, said in a court filing that Wiles “does not appear to have interacted at all with Rivera or Nuhfer with respect to the unlawful lobbying scheme ... and, as such, her anticipated testimony is not relevant to their activities and certainly would not be ‘material and favorable’ to the defense.”

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, the defendants were trying to develop an exit strategy for Maduro so he could be replaced by an opposition leader 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, who was serving in his first term, but their efforts were 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 PDVSA’s Citgo refinery business in Houston.

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 and brought to the United States, had “ordered” 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.

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