Sources: Venezuela wooed Texas Republican to ease sanctions

1 / 2US Venezuela CongressmanFILE - In this Feb. 24, 2011 file photo then Rep. David Rivera, R-Fla., talks during a freedom for Cuba march in Miami. Venezuela's socialist government tried to recruit former 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.

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.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.

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. The five-sentence message sent to Sessions' personal email address, which starts with the word “eagle," is short on specifics. But it makes reference to earlier correspondence, also seen by the AP, in which Exxon General Counsel and Vice President Randall Ebner mentioned a willingness to discuss new business after the settlement around the same time of a long-running arbitration stemming from Venezuela's takeover of an Exxon-run oil field in 2007.

Sessions is looking to return to Congress if he can win a mid-July runoff in a heavily Republican district near his native Waco different from the seat he held for 11 terms until he was ousted in 2018. Gorrín at the time was trying to broker a soft exit for Maduro while paying Ballard Partners — Trump’s former Florida lobbyist — to explore expansion opportunities in the U.S. for his TV network Globovision. Along the way, he traveled to Washington to discuss Venezuela's future with U.S. lawmakers and managed to get his photo taken shaking hands with Vice President Mike Pence in Florida.

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