Republican candidate made fortune from company helping Nicolas Maduro spy on Venezuelans

Republican U.S. Senate candidate Mike Rogers was a member of an advisory board at Telefonica, a cell phone service provider operating largely in Latin America which admitted in 2022 to collaborating with the Venezuelan government — then led by the now-deposed Nicolas Maduro — to spy on its citizens.

Rogers, a former Congressman who represented a mid-Michigan district from 2001 to 2015, sat on the company’s cybersecurity and technical innovations board for more than five years, earning nearly $100,000 in compensation as a result, according to public financial disclosures filed during his 2024 run for the U.S. Senate and his most recent bid.

When asked, Rogers’ campaign claimed that it was the first the former representative knew of the connection between Telefonica and the Maduro regime, despite the incident being widely reported by both a Spanish news outlet and The Washington Post.

Rogers’ campaign also said that his work with the board largely focused on advising Telefonica’s cybersecurity division on technical items and threats from China.

The campaign further blamed Democrats working against him for drawing a connection to him and Maduro that it claims did not exist, and chalked it up to “fake news about a former House Intelligence Chair and national security expert having ties to the very regime he has outspokenly condemned, and celebrated the downfall of.”

“Mike merely served on a technology advisory board, where he advised on how to stop the Chinese Communist Party from infecting the company’s networks,” said Rogers spokesperson Alyssa Brouillet. “This is nothing more than a flailing attempt to distract from the fact that the Michigan Democrat candidates are out-of-touch with working people and consistently trailing Mike Rogers by every barometer.”

The campaign was asked to provide Michigan Advance with a job description outlining Rogers’ role with the company showing that his work was focused solely on China.

An offer letter from Telefonica outlining Rogers’ role states that he would provide the board with “input, ideas and expert advice about Telefonica’s security decisions as requested by the company from time to time” according to the board’s specific charter.

The offer letter does not, however, specifically note that Rogers’ input and expertise was solely focused on Chinese security and network threats.

Whether Rogers knew the extent of the company’s collaboration with the Venezuelan government while he worked for Telefonica between April 2018 and October 2024 remains an open question, but what is certain is that Rogers has not publicly denounced the collaboration between Telefonica and the former Maduro regime.

The Advance asked Rogers’ campaign if it would do so now.

Brouillet said that Rogers believes any company that conspires with a criminal regime should be held accountable.

Rogers has, in the inverse, publicly praised President Donald Trump taking military action to depose Maduro, extradite him to the U.S. and put the former dictator up on drug trafficking charges in New York.

Rogers has a history of positioning himself as a major critic of Maduro

Maduro came into power following Hugo Chavez’s death in 2013 and remained the head of state until the U.S. government, under the Trump regime, took action against Maduro earlier this month.

On the day Maduro was captured, Rogers made a public statement praising Trump’s action.

“President Trump sent a loud and clear message: don’t mess with the US. Any foreign adversary who tries to kill Americans will pay the price. Bin Laden learned that lesson when I served as House Intel Chair,” Rogers said in a statement. “Today, Maduro was held accountable for endangering our nation with deadly poison. More Americans have died from drug overdose since 2018 than in World War I, World War II, & the Vietnam War combined. The crisis has to stop. Thankfully, President Trump is taking bold action to keep our communities safe. Our borders are secure, murders in US cities are down with drug interdiction and deportation of criminal illegal aliens, and waterborne drugs running into the US are down over 90%. Now, we’re bringing narcoterrorists to justice.”

A search of Rogers’ social media pages shows that he was quick to criticize both Maduro, in 2019, and former President Joe Biden, in 2024, over crime and immigration issues.

Rogers, as a featured guest on WOOD 106.9 FM, stated his belief that the world was better off without Maduro in power.

In 2019, Rogers posted to X, then Twitter, an article from insightcrime.org detailing criminal connections between Maduro and drug traffickers — an early pretext for charging Maduro with the crimes he now faces in the U.S. The article exposes what a former head of Venezuelan military intelligence witnessed in his time working for the regime, which included top figures in Maduro’s political orbit allowing drug traffickers to move freely in and out of Venezuela.

“This is the real Venezuela,” Rogers wrote in that post.

In 2024, Rogers criticized former President Joe Biden in a series of posts on X, saying the former president should declare the Tren de Aragua criminal gang a terrorist organization. Rogers brings up Maduro again in one post, as well.

It’s past time Joe Biden declares Tren da Aragua for what it is: An international criminal organization, terrorizing Americans.
Maduro is emptying his prisons and flooding America with dangerous criminals through our wide open border. Enough is enough.
— Mike Rogers (@MikeRogersForMI) March 18, 2024

An interview with Rogers conducted by former congressman Dave Camp for the University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy notes that the podcast was a vehicle to share his insider knowledge of foreign policy, federal police work and security insights.

Much of his work with the boards he served on in his post-congressional life centered around the same insider knowledge. Still, Rogers’ campaign said that it had first heard about Telefonica’s connection to Maduro, through its business in Venezuela, when the Advance had asked for a comment in the course of reporting this story.

The Telefonica-Maduro connection was widely reported in 2021

Telefonica’s security and cybersecurity advisory council was created in 2018, which the company said would reinforce its digital and comprehensive security strategy, as well as play a role in protecting its own assets and the data of its customers.

The council included Rogers, and highlighted his work with the FBI but also as a member of the U.S. House Intelligence Committee.

Public records show Rogers served on Telefonica’s Ingenieria Y Seguridad committee for six years. It was one of several boards he sat on after leaving the U.S. House of Representatives in 2015, each focused on cybersecurity and data intelligence, which falls in line with Rogers’ experience as chair of the House Intelligence Committee and as a special agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Multiple financial disclosure reports filed for his Senate campaigns, the first of which he narrowly lost to now-Sen. Elissa Slotkin, are accessible to the public on the Senate’s online database. They show Rogers received $94,241 as board compensation from Telefonica Ingenieria Y Seguridad.

Compensation that he received from the board between 2018 and 2022 is not publicly available.

A copy of Mike Rogers’ offer letter for an appointment to Telefonica’s Ingenieria Y Seguridad committee, which included a description of his duties with the board. | Provided by the Rogers for U.S. Senate campaign.

Telefonica, based in Madrid, Spain, has business throughout Latin America, working with different subsidiaries to provide region-specific cell phone services.

One of those regions is Venezuela, operating as Telefonica Movistar. In 2022, Telefonica released a transparency report that revealed a wide swath of data interceptions into the private communications of Venezuelan Telefonica Movistar customers at the behest of Maduro’s security agencies, according to the watchdog group Ve Sin Filtro.

The report said that the company, in 2021, worked at the behest of the Maduro regime to intercept those communications against 1.5 million customers in Venezuela, more than 20% of both telephone and internet lines offered by Telefonica Movistar. Calls were tapped, text messages were monitored and the locations of customer phones were handed over to Venezuelan authorities, Ve Sin Filtro reported. The interceptions also included the capturing of customer internet traffic.

Other nations within the region that were included in the report also had data interception within their home countries, but at a much lower rate than what Venezuela had acquired.

In some cases, specific internet pages were blocked and accounts hacked, which rang true in the case of a Venezuelan human rights organization. Some of these requests came from the National Telecommunications Commission, or CONATEL, which is the Venezuelan government’s regulatory body over telecommunications within its borders.

The watchdog group noted that data interceptions performed by telecoms on orders from their regulating governments can be key ways for law enforcement to investigate serious crimes, but the wide array of interceptions performed by Maduro’s regime pointed more toward systemic abuse of human rights standards and judicial due process.

Ve Sin Filtro reported that agencies that were able to access who a user was calling, how long the calls lasted, what the subscriber’s data showed, included the military, Venezuela’s public ministry, its main criminal investigation agency, police forces, and its National Experimental Security University.

“Nowhere does it mention that the orders come from courts or come with the approval of judges, as they do in other countries, which means there isn’t evidence of the validation of courts for these interventions as it is required by Venezuelan law, with particular exceptions such as the case of emergencies and flagrant crimes, in which the CICPC can make a direct request,” the group said, referring to Telefonica’s transparency report. “But even in these cases the prosecutor must be notified and it must be included in the file.”

Spanish newspaper El Pais reported on the document, noting that the admission fell in line with what human rights organizations have called massive surveillance of the Venezuelan people over the course of the last decade. It also noted that human rights defenders in Venezuela believed the espionage targeted opposition politicians and activists.

The Washington Post also reported on the company’s report and findings, writing that the incursions included wire taps but also the censoring of content like news websites, political commentary portals, and even streaming media websites like SoundCloud. Three human rights organizations were blocked by Telefonica and the Maduro regime and two websites providing VPN, or virtual private network, services. People in restrictive nations often use private networks to access internet service or webpages that are censored in their regions, and have played a key role in pushing out social media content during times of protest or revolution.

The Post also interviewed Miguel Henrique Otero, president of El Nacional, one of Venezuela’s last remaining independent newspapers, when it wrote about the issue in 2022.

He said it was clear to him and other like-minded Venezuelans that Telefonica was complicit in following orders from the Maduro regime to violate human rights, without justification or due process.