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public citizen
Trump Chief of Staff Wiles Subpoenaed in Foreign Lobbying Criminal Case
“This kind of entanglement shows exactly why a person with Wiles’ lengthy record of controversial corporate and foreign lobbying clients is too conflicted to be running the White House," said one advocate.
Feb 06, 2026
A court filing in a federal criminal lobbying case against a former Republican congressman confirmed what the government watchdog Public Citizen warned against as soon as President Donald Trump appointed Susie Wiles to be his chief of staff: that her "lobbying client list is both extensive and littered with controversial clients who stand to benefit from having their former lobbyist running the White House."
The court filing was submitted Thursday by the US Department of Justice (DOJ) and sought to "quash" a subpoena that was served to Wiles in December.
Wiles was called to testify as a witness in the case against former Rep. David Rivera (R-Fla.) and his political associate, Esther Nuhfer. They are accused of violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) by lobbying on behalf of the sanctioned Venezuelan businessman Raul Gorrín.
According to a grand jury indictment from December 2024, Rivera sought to lobby top US government officials to remove Gorrín from the Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List. He allegedly worked to conceal and promote Gorrín's criminal activities by creating fraudulent shell companies using names associated with a law firm and with a government official.
Rivera received over $5.5 million for his lobbying activities and did not register under FARA as required by law, according to the DOJ.
The Miami Herald reported late last month that Rivera and Nuhfer are "also accused of trying to 'normalize' relations between the [Venezuelan President Nicolás] Maduro regime and the United States while Rivera’s consulting firm landed a head-turning $50 million lobbying contract with the US subsidiary of Venezuela’s state-owned oil company."
Attorneys for Rivera subpoenaed Wiles at the White House, seeking to compel her to testify about her lobbying work for Ballard Partners on behalf of Globovision, a Caracas-based TV station owned by Gorrín.
As the Herald reported, Wiles worked at Ballard shortly after running Trump's presidential campaign in Florida. Due to her presidential ties she "brought an instant cachet" to the firm, where Gorrín was "hoping to gain access to the new Trump administration, which was threatening economic sanctions against the Maduro regime and Venezuela’s oil industry."
Gorrín was working with Ballard in an attempt to expand Globovision to the US as a Spanish-language affiliate—an aim that presented challenges due to the government sanctions and the Federal Communications Commission's limits on foreign ownership of US TV stations.
Rivera and Nuhfer's lawyers are seeking Wiles' testimony to show that her lobbying firm was trying to influence Trump, "on behalf of Gorrín, to bring about a regime change in Venezuela."
The subpoena document said the defendants' lawyers want to question Wiles on her "extensive communications" regarding Ballard's work with Gorrín and efforts to help the businessman gain access to Trump.
They are also seeking similar testimony from Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who as a senator met privately with Rivera, Nuhfer, and Gorrín at a hotel in Washington in 2017, according to the Herald.
In the court filing, the DOJ said Wiles had "no apparent connection to any of the allegations in the superseding indictment concerning defendants’ activities as unregistered agents of the government of Venezuela."
Public Citizen noted Wiles' work with Ballard in November 2024 when it published the report Meet Susie Wiles’ Controversial Corporate Lobbying Clients, which revealed 42 lobbying clients the chief of staff had between 2017-24.
The client list was "extensive and littered with controversial clients who stand to benefit from having their former lobbyist running the White House," said Public Citizen on Friday.
In addition to Gorrín's TV station, Wiles' represented a waste management company that resisted removing nuclear waste from a landfill, a tobacco firm that sought to block federal restrictions on its candy-flavored cigars, and a foreign mining private equity firm seeking approval to develop a gold mine on federal public lands.
Jon Golinger, Public Citizen's democracy advocate, said Friday that the subpoena in the Rivera case raises even more questions about Wiles' potential conflicts of interest.
“This kind of entanglement," he said, "shows exactly why a person with Wiles’ lengthy record of controversial corporate and foreign lobbying clients is too conflicted to be running the White House."
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Experts Warn That MAHA Bait-and-Switch by RFK Jr. and Trump 'Means Big Money for Big Wellness'
"They sell consumers their own version of the grift."
Feb 05, 2026
Government watchdog Public Citizen on Thursday issued a report outlining the major conflicts of interest held by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his allies in the Make America Healthy Again, or MAHA, movement.
In particular, the report focuses on Kennedy and three key allies: Wellness influencer Dr. Casey Means, who is President Donald Trump's nominee to be US surgeon general; her brother Calley Means, a senior adviser to Kennedy at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS); and the siblings' business partner Dr. Mark Hyman.
Public Citizen centers its report on these individuals' ties to the wellness industry, which "encompasses nutritional supplements and fitness products, and increasingly overlaps with non-science-based health beliefs."
Taken as a whole, the report says, "MAHA's influence in US healthcare means big money for Big Wellness."
Among other things, the report noted that Casey Means owns a metabolic testing company that "may have already benefited from Secretary Kennedy’s promotion of wearable health tracking devices."
The report states that Dr. Means "has also potentially violated [Federal Trade Commission] rules on influencer marketing by failing to adequately disclose sponsorship relationships in dozens of web and social media posts" that promote assorted wellness products.
"Public Citizen’s review of Dr. Means’ website, newsletter, and social media feeds found that for the almost two dozen companies from which Dr. Means reported receiving affiliate fees, Dr. Means disclosed her financial relationship inconsistently and ambiguously," the report says. "In total, she failed to disclose her financial relationship 79 out of 140 (56%) times she promoted affiliated products."
Calley Means, meanwhile, comes under scrutiny for his company TrueMed, which Public Citizen said "relies on a legally dubious business model." The report also criticizes Means for regularly promoting "dangerous and false health information," including attacks on fluoridated water and Covid-19 vaccines, and the promotion of drinking raw milk.
And Mark Hyman, states the report, "oversees a wellness empire that stands to benefit significantly from HHS policies under Kennedy."
Eileen O’Grady, a researcher in Public Citizen’s Congress Watch division, acknowledged the appeal of many MAHA influencers' sales pitch, stating that "they accurately identify that much of the US healthcare system is beholden to corporate interests like Big Pharma and the insurance industry."
However, O'Grady said that what the Means siblings and Hyman are peddling isn't much different than what they criticize in the US healthcare system.
"They sell consumers their own version of the grift," she explained. "Excessive testing, unproven and underregulated health supplements, and assurances that only their products hold the key to better health. While MAHA influencers reap the benefits of lucrative sponsorship contracts and, in some cases, political appointments, regular Americans are once again being cheated."
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Under Pressure From Trump, Venezuela's Leader Signs Bill Opening Oil Industry to Privatization
"Trump is deploying drone and gunboat diplomacy to coerce Venezuela into serving up its oil resources to Big Oil," said one US watchdog group.
Jan 29, 2026
Venezuelan scholars and a US watchdog group were among those expressing concern on Thursday after Venezuela's government caved to pressure from President Donald Trump and signed a bill opening up the South American country's nationalized oil industry to privatization.
After US forces abducted Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores—who have both pleaded not guilty to federal narco-terrorism charges—the Trump administration installed the deposed leader's former deputy, Delcy Rodríguez, as acting president.
On Thursday, Venezuela's National Assembly—which is led by the acting president's brother, Jorge Rodríguez—approved and Delcy Rodríguez signed legislation that "promises to give private companies control over the production and sale of oil and allow for independent arbitration of disputes," according to the Associated Press.
As AP reported:
Rodríguez's government expects the changes to serve as assurances for major US oil companies that have so far hesitated about returning to the volatile country. Some of those companies lost investments when the ruling party enacted the existing law two decades ago to favor Venezuela's state-run oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela SA, or PDVSA.
The revised law would modify extraction taxes, setting a royalty cap rate of 30% and allowing the executive branch to set percentages for every project based on capital investment needs, competitiveness, and other factors.
It also removes the mandate for disputes to be settled only in Venezuelan courts, which are controlled by the ruling party. Foreign investors have long viewed the involvement of independent courts as crucial to guard against future expropriation.
Malfred Gerig, a sociologist from Central University of Venezuela, said on social media that the Rodríguez siblings' United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) "has just approved the most anti-nationalist and damaging oil law since, at least, 1943. The absolute surrender of the state as an oil producer and a sudden conversion of the property rights of the Venezuelan nation into private rights of foreign companies."
Victor Lovera, an economics professor at Andres Bello Catholic University in Caracas, said that "it must be really fucking tough for the Rodríguez siblings to end up as the empire's lapdogs and open up the oil sector, taking us back to the 1970s, before the nationalization of oil. All just to cling to power for a few more months."
Trump—who returned to office a year ago with help from Big Oil's campaign cash—has made clear that his aggressive policy toward Venezuela is focused on the country's petroleum reserves, which critics have blasted as a clear effort to further enrich his donors and himself.
"Trump is deploying drone and gunboat diplomacy to coerce Venezuela into serving up its oil resources to Big Oil," said Robert Weissman, co-president of the US watchdog group Public Citizen, in a Thursday statement.
"Imperfectly, Venezuela has for most of the last century sought to manage its oil and gas reserves to advance its national interest, rather than that of outside investors," he noted. "Brutal sanctions and the threat of still more military action from the Trump regime are now forcing Venezuela to turn from that history and make its oil available to Big Oil at discount rates and to agree that investor disputes should be resolved at corporate-friendly international tribunals."
"This is imperial policy to benefit Big Oil, not Americans—and certainly not Venezuelans," Weissman stressed. "Even still, US oil companies are likely to be reluctant to invest heavily in Venezuela without US government guarantees—a likely next step in Trump’s oil imperialism, unless Congress moves proactively to block it."
Both chambers of the US Congress are narrowly controlled by Trump's Republican Party, and they have so far failed to pass war powers resolutions aimed at stopping more military action in Venezuela and the administration's bombings of boats allegedly smuggling drugs in international waters—all of which some American lawmakers and other experts have argued are illegal.
When Trump's secretary of state and acting national security adviser, Marco Rubio, testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee—on which he previously served—on Wednesday, he insisted that the president wasn’t planning for any more military action in Venezuela, but would take it, potentially without congressional authorization, in "self-defense."
Rubio also laid out how the United States intends to continue controlling Venezuelan oil and related profits, telling senators that Venezuela's government will submit periodic budgets, and as long as they comply with preset restrictions, the Trump administration will release funds from a US Treasury blocked account.
After the legislation passed Thursday, the Trump administration began easing sanctions on Venezuela's oil industry, with the Treasury issuing a general license authorizing certain activities involving Venezuelan-origin oil.
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