congressman

The race for the 34th Congressional District in the core of Los Angeles was supposed to be a battle for the soul of the Democratic Party. The two dozen hopefuls vying for a spot in the top-two primary were full of self-proclaimed fighters ready to oppose President Trump and establishment Democrats.

Instead, it’s shaping up to be a contest between the powerful group of Latinos who make up a majority of the district’s voters and the small but politically potent Korean American community, as Assemblyman Jimmy Gomez and former city planning Commissioner Robert Lee Ahn grabbed the runoff spots that will determine L.A.’s next member of Congress.

“This is really ethnic politics 101,” said Matt Barreto, a UCLA professor of political science who helps run the polling firm Latino Decisions.

Ahn, an attorney and a relative unknown in the crowded primary field, surprised many with a victory that vaulted him ahead of multiple Latino candidates in a district where more than half the voters are Latino. If elected in the June 6 runoff, he would be the only Korean American member of Congress and the first in nearly 20 years.

But it wasn’t surprising to anyone who studies the intricacies of identity politics in Los Angeles, or to those who had been paying attention to Ahn’s aggressive focus on Korean American voters.

Ahn’s campaign staff spent dozens of hours registering voters at malls and outside restaurants in Koreatown, signing up hundreds of new voters. Ahn made his pitch at multiple Korean churches in the district, and a large portion of his donor base was from the Korean American community, which helped him raise more money than Gomez in the latter part of the campaign despite a deluge of cash Gomez received from political committees.

And when Virginia state legislator Mark Keam, also a Korean American, flew to Los Angeles to endorse Ahn, a bank of TV cameras from Korean American news stations was there.

Robert Lee Ahn raised the most money by far in latest campaign finance reports »

Daniel Hong, a 38-year-old who works in the film industry, voted for the first time Tuesday even though he’s been a citizen for about 20 years. Hong, who is Korean American, said he read numerous articles about Ahn and received multiple phone calls from his campaign.

“That was the first time anybody has ever reached out to me for my vote,” said Hong as he stood outside a polling place set up in a Korean Presbyterian church.

Deborah Choi, 62, said she voted for Ahn so “he can speak for Korean Americans here.” The first wave of Koreans immigrated to the U.S. “so many years ago,” Choi said, but their representation in the highest elected offices remains low. She hopes her 36-year-old son will one day run for office too.

Though county election officials have yet to process more than 13,000 ballots, the 41-year-old Ahn remains thousands of votes ahead of the third-place candidate, fellow former planning Commissioner Maria Cabildo.

With turnout expected to hover around 15% of registered voters, preliminary returns show Ahn’s strategy paid off big. The biggest strongholds of votes for Ahn centered on Koreatown, Westlake and Chinatown, while the 42-year-old Gomez was ahead in neighborhoods throughout the northeast part of the district.

In early absentee ballot returns headed into primary election day, Korean Americans made up nearly a quarter of votes even though they comprise just 6% of registered voters.

Few Korean Americans have come this close to winning a seat in Congress since 1998, when Republican Jay Kim of Diamond Bar lost to a primary challenger after three terms in office. (David Min, a UC Irvine professor, announced a challenge to GOP Rep. Mimi Walters of Orange County this week.)

“Korean Americans in Southern California have been hungry for political representation for a very long time,” said Taeku Lee, a professor of politics and law at UC Berkeley. Lee said the recent campaign that helped propel David Ryu, the first Korean American elected to the L.A. City Council, may have also helped the community learn on-the-ground skills that mobilized voters in the congressional race.

The symbolism of Ahn’s win was not lost on his supporters Tuesday night.

“It’s very significant,” said Jinha Park, a radiologist who attended Ahn’s election night party at a Mexican restaurant in Westlake. “The Korean American community has always felt voiceless at the federal level.”

The question now, as the two Democrats ready for what could be a costly runoff, is whether Ahn, the son of Korean immigrants, can broaden his appeal beyond the Korean American voters who are motivated to send him to Washington.

He faces a fierce challenge: While progressive candidates to his left spoke passionately about fighting for “sanctuary cities” that protect undocumented immigrants and single-payer healthcare, Ahn emphasized the “business sensibility” he would bring to the office and argued there was room to negotiate with Republicans on certain issues, an idea that could prove unpopular in a district where just 9% of voters are Republican, and where Bernie Sanders beat Hillary Clinton in last year’s presidential primary.

Ahn will also have to make a case to Latino voters, who make up more than half of registered voters in the district, why they should choose him over Gomez. The three-term assemblyman is the son of Mexican immigrants, has amassed dozens of establishment endorsements from Democratic elected officials, labor unions and environmental groups, and touted his progressive record in the Legislature.

Among his backers is Xavier Becerra, who rose to become the highest-ranking Latino U.S. congressman and vacated the seat to become California’s attorney general.

Votes that went to the remaining Latino candidates in the primary made up more than 38% of voters at last count, and the district has sent a Latino to Congress for more than half a century.

“When [Ahn is] running against a guy named Gomez, as good as his outreach might be in the Latino community, Latinos’ gut and heart is going to be more with Gomez,” said UCLA professor Barreto.

Ahn dismissed the idea. “The notion that Latinos will only vote for a Latino … I think we’re really going to transcend that with our campaign,” Ahn said in an interview Wednesday. He appears to be positioning himself as an outsider, which would be similar to the campaign Ryu ran when he made his successful council run in 2015. Ahn called Gomez a “professional politician that is powered by special interests.”

Gomez’s camp shot back, saying voters will see through Ahn’s formidable fundraising and realize his credentials don’t match with the district.

“More than anything, he’s ideologically out of step with the district,” said Parke Skelton, a campaign consultant for Gomez. Skelton said Ahn, who changed his registration from Republican to Democrat in 2012, “has taken positions that really put him out of the mainstream Democratic base in this district.”

christine.maiduc@latimes.com

For more on California politics, follow @cmaiduc.

ALSO

Half the candidates in L.A.’s latest congressional race have their own immigrant story. With Trump, this contest is personal.

Results from L.A.’s congressional primary

Updates on California politics

Sign up for our free Essential Politics newsletter

WASHINGTON — Barney Frank, the longtime Democratic congressman and leading liberal who brought new visibility to gay rights and crafted the most significant reforms to the financial system in a generation, has died. He was 86.

Frank died late Tuesday, according to Jim Segel, Frank’s former campaign manager and close friend.

After representing broad swaths of Boston’s suburbs in Congress for 32 years, Frank and his husband moved to Ogunquit, Maine. He entered hospice there in April with congestive heart failure and is survived by his husband, Jim Ready, and sisters, the longtime Democratic strategist Ann Lewis and Doris Breay, along with brother David Frank.

A self-described “left-handed gay Jew,” Frank was known for his acerbic wit, combative style and focus on marginalized communities. He represented the party’s left wing while keeping close with Democratic leaders who sometimes frustrated progressives.

He is best known as a pioneer for LGBT rights. After decades of grappling with his sexuality, he publicly came out as gay in 1987, the first member of Congress to do so voluntarily. With his 2012 marriage to Ready, he became the first incumbent lawmaker on Capitol Hill to marry someone of the same sex.

But in an April interview as he entered hospice, Frank said he hoped he would be remembered for advocating a brand of politics that embraced progressive ideals without forcing them on voters prematurely. It is an approach he feared was being rejected as Democrats prepare for what could be a rollicking primary as they hope to retake the White House in 2028 and move past the Trump era.

“I hope I made the point that the best way to accomplish the improvements in our society that we need, particularly in making it less unfair economically and socially, is by conventional political methods,” Frank said. “The main obstacle to our defeating populism and going further in the right direction is that mainstream Democrats have to make it clear that we oppose that part of the agenda of our friends on the left that is politically unacceptable. They’re right about a lot of things but you have to have some discretion.”

“You should not take the most unpopular parts of your agenda and make them litmus tests,” he added. “And that’s what my friends on the left have been doing.”

Frank’s path to public life

Born in 1940 in Bayonne, N.J., Frank wrote in his 2015 memoir that he was drawn to public life after Emmett Till, a Black 14-year-old from Chicago, was lynched by white men in Mississippi. Frank would volunteer in Mississippi during the Freedom Summer of 1964, though he acknowledged the fast-talking style was a challenge in the Deep South.

“My direct organizing of Mississippi voters was limited by the fact that my accent [to this day more New Jersey than New England], my poor diction, and my rapid speech, especially when I got excited, rendered me largely incomprehensible to rural Mississippians of both races,” he wrote.

He entered politics in 1968 as an aide to Boston Mayor Kevin White before winning a seat in the Massachusetts House in 1972. Frank was elected to Congress in 1980, an otherwise dismal year for Democrats as the party lost dozens of seats in the U.S. House and Republican Ronald Reagan won the White House.

Frank’s pragmatic style surfaced early in his congressional career. He joined the liberal Democratic Study Group to help push then-Speaker Tip O’Neill (D-Mass.) to respond more aggressively to the Reagan administration. But Frank said he found himself more often agreeing with O’Neill’s less confrontational approach.

Years later, as Congress prepared to pass a massive tax overhaul package, Frank intended to vote “no,” opposed to the bill’s lowering of top tax rates. He changed his mind, however, when he worked out a deal boosting affordable housing tax credits.

“I was happy to sacrifice my ideological purity to improve legislation that was going to become law with or without me,” he wrote.

Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the California Democrat and former House speaker, called Frank an “idealist to the nth degree.”

“The goals, the vision, the promise of it all,” she recalled in an interview. “Nobody could ever surpass what he brought to the table in that regard.”

Making history in Congress

Through his early years in Washington, Frank led something of a double life.

Privately, he socialized in the city’s gay circles and had relationships but did not publicly acknowledge his sexuality. The media at the time rarely reported that someone was gay unless that person was involved in a scandal. When Frank in 1987 invited a reporter to his office to formally ask whether the congressman was gay, Frank responded, “yeah, so what?”

Other elected leaders, perhaps most notably San Francisco’s Harvey Milk, had come out years before. Members of Congress, including Rep. Gerry Studds (D-Mass.), were previously outed through scandal.

Frank’s approach made him the most prominent gay leader in national politics for much of the 1980s and 1990s. He helped secure AIDS funding and pressed the Democratic Clinton administration, unsuccessfully, to lift a ban on gays serving in the military.

But there were low points, too, most notably an overwhelming 1987 House vote to reprimand him for poor judgment involving a male prostitute he hired in 1985. Rep. Newt Gingrich of Georgia, the Republican whip at the time, pressed for the more severe punishment of censure, which was rejected by a large margin.

Frank became something of a punch line among conservative Republicans, with House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas) calling him “Barney Fag” in 1995. Armey said he misspoke and later apologized from the House floor.

Along the way, Frank became known as one of the most quotable lawmakers in Congress.

Regarding abortion, he said Republicans believed “life begins at conception and ends at birth,” criticizing the party’s push to curb social programs. After Ken Starr released a report describing President Clinton’s relationship with Monica Lewinsky in sometimes intimate detail, Frank said it required “too much reading about heterosexual sex.”

Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) entered Congress the same year as Frank and he recalled his former colleague: “You may get a blow, but it was softened by the humor that came with it.”

Presiding over a financial overhaul

By 2007, Frank was the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, where he would leave his lasting policy mark as the U.S. economy careened toward collapse. He worked with the Republican Bush administration to pass a rescue package, providing vital support to financial institutions but spurring a populist revolt that still courses through American politics.

Once the initial crisis eased, Frank helped develop the most significant reform legislation since the New Deal. Working with then-Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), the Dodd-Frank Act would enhance consumer protections, impose new capital requirements for banks and boost the ability of regulators to monitor risk.

“Barney and I shared a fantastic relationship,” Dodd said. “I had many good moments in those 36 years in Congress, but none more significant, joyful, or productive than those almost two years working with Barney on our banking bill.”

During President Trump’s second term, his Republican administration has worked to roll back many of the legislation’s provisions, arguing they were too onerous.

Frank faced his toughest reelection campaign in years in 2010 as the tea party wave swept over American politics. He opted against running again in 2012, though remained engaged in politics long after leaving Congress and was a fierce critic of Trump.

Asked for his prediction on who might succeed Trump, Frank said “unfortunately I won’t get to vote for it.”

Sloan writes for the Associated Press.

Rep. Xavier Becerra isn’t worried that he has less money and fewer endorsements than other candidates running for mayor of Los Angeles. He isn’t worried because the lessons he has gleaned from his 11 years in public office are that Things Work Out. Opportunities Arise. The Underdog Surprises People.

If you lived a life shaped by luck and discipline and powerful patrons, a life that propelled you, after one term as a state assemblyman, to become a respected member of Congress, you might feel the same way.

At age 43, driven less by a determined vision than by a strict work ethic and influential allies, Becerra has accumulated a fair share of political success, particularly considering he had no ambition for public office until about a decade ago.

As chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, he forged strong relationships with Capitol Hill leaders and President Clinton. He won a plum assignment on the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, the first Latino so named. Colleagues from both parties regard him as sharp and fair-minded.

This time around, however, happenstance and hard work may not be enough. The mayor’s race is testing Becerra’s political acumen and his sunny string of luck. The candidate once perceived as the “favorite son” among up-and-coming Latino leaders is jousting for recognition in a crowded field. Even former allies such as County Supervisor Gloria Molina say they are puzzled that he is running.

Becerra has been slow to develop a compelling message for his candidacy. He has infuriated some Latino leaders who fear that he will split community support with fellow candidate and former Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa, preventing either one from winning. He has come under fire for his role in President Clinton’s controversial commutation of a drug trafficker’s sentence.

Becerra’s involvement in the commutation flap was a jarring contrast to the most persistent image of the congressman–that of a clean-cut, above-the-board legislator, a man some colleagues admire as the “Boy Scout” of politics.

Becerra’s mother, Maria Teresa, has a favorite story about her son. One Sunday morning when he was about 8 years old, he tired of waiting as she readied his three sisters for Mass at their south Sacramento church.

“Vamos, Mama,” he said. “Mass starts in 10 minutes.”

“Si, hijo,” she responded. “Paciencia.”

But Becerra couldn’t wait. Not willing to risk being late, he walked out the door and down the seven blocks to church by himself.

The entire truth about that Sunday may be a little less saccharine.

“I probably didn’t want to go to a later Mass and miss football,” Becerra said recently, laughing.

Hard Work and Good Grades

The only son among four children, Becerra always got good grades. He broke up fights in high school. He helped his father do construction work as a teenager, quick to handle the heavy labor.

Even then, he succeeded with a combination of chance and by-the-books meticulousness.

Take golf.

It was not the obvious sport for the son of a construction worker growing up in a one-bedroom house. But an elementary school friend’s father was an avid player, and gave his son a set of golf clubs. The two boys putted around in the friend’s backyard after class. When they grew older, they played at a small public course nearby, sharing a single set of clubs.

Finally, Becerra’s father scraped together enough money to buy him a cheap set of Kmart clubs. But he didn’t have enough to pay for lessons. So Becerra mastered golf much as he would tackle politics: by cramming.

He went to the library and checked out golf books. He cut the weekly golf tips column out of the Sacramento Bee. Finally, by his senior year at C.K. McClatchy High School, he made the varsity golf team.

During high school, Becerra also mastered a very different hobby: poker. He became so good that years later, during a trip to Las Vegas with his parents, a casino offered him a job as a dealer.

While he gained command of some subjects with focus and diligence, chance also set him on his course to college.

One day in high school chemistry class, a friend who had botched an exam tossed aside his application to Stanford University. Becerra picked it up and, on a whim, filled it out. He didn’t know where the campus was until he and his mother drove there to enroll him in the fall of 1976.

The son of Mexican immigrants–his mother grew up in Guadalajara and his father, Manuel, was born in Sacramento but raised in Tijuana–Becerra would become the first in his family to graduate from college.

Close friend Arturo Vargas, who met Becerra at Stanford, said he “always had a clean-boy image, almost to a fault.”

“On campus, people tended to drink beer and be rowdy,” said Vargas, now the executive director of the National Assn. of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, based in Los Angeles. “The time I knew him, he was more likely to drink milk.”

Another college acquaintance said he was “the straightest Chicano I knew. It looked like his short-sleeved shirts were ironed.” (They were.)

When his girlfriend–now wife–Carolina Reyes was downstairs in the lounge of the Casa Zapata dorm leading meetings of the Chicano activist organization MEChA, Becerra was more likely to be upstairs studying. Friends encouraged him to take a greater leadership role on campus, but Becerra was intent on getting into law school. (He did, graduating from Stanford Law in 1984.)

“I was the grandiose one who wanted to conquer the world, and he did too, but he wanted to do it step by step,” said Reyes, now an obstetrician.

After working for Legal Aid in Massachusetts while his wife attended Harvard Medical School, Becerra came back to Sacramento to work for state Sen. Art Torres, who had been his boss during a post-college fellowship. He moved to Los Angeles in 1986 to run Torres’ district office.

Soon, he met Eastside political operative Henry Lozano, chief of staff for the venerable Rep. Edward Roybal, the dean of local Latino politics. One day on the golf course, Lozano asked Becerra, so when are you going to run?

He wasn’t.

“I’m a policy guy,” Becerra told Lozano.

A few years later, Lozano and other Eastside community leaders invited Becerra–by then a deputy attorney general–to meet. They posed the question again, more specifically: Will you run for the open state Assembly seat in the San Gabriel Valley?

“I guess we were considered kingmakers,” said Frank Villalobos, a longtime Eastside activist who was at the meeting. “When we asked someone, it was pretty much considered giving them el dedazo.”

El dedazo, literally the fingering from a powerful person: It’s your turn.

New Generation of Latino Leaders

Becerra looked stunned. He thought they were kidding, until he realized no one was laughing. He’d have to talk to his wife, he said.

“My vision was I was going to be the right-hand person that an elected official counts on to do the memos, to advise,” he said. “You know, the one you always see in the movies whispering in the ear of the official, and then all of a sudden the eloquent question comes out.”

But once planted, the idea took root.

A group known as the “macho dogs”–Lozano, Villalobos, future city Councilman Mike Hernandez, future Assembly Speaker Bob Hertzberg and Molina’s husband, Ron Martinez–put together his campaign.

Torres, Becerra’s old boss, loaned staff and helped Becerra raise money. They challenged the candidates being backed by two other powerful Latinos. (Later, Molina, then an assemblywoman, endorsed Becerra and brought on her political team.)

The fresh-faced, Stanford-educated Becerra fit the image voters were seeking, weary as they were of scandal in the wake of state Sen. Joseph Montoya’s political corruption conviction.

Becerra’s victory kicked off a new era in Latino politics, a rise in young, polished college graduates who offered a different mold of leadership than many of their roughhewn elders.

Two years later, Roybal decided to retire from Congress after 16 terms.

The power brokers, including Molina, approached Becerra again. This time, he had the support of both the powerful county supervisor and Roybal.

Becerra moved into the district, sleeping on his friend Villaraigosa’s couch for a few nights before he found an apartment. Fending off criticism that he was a carpetbagger, he won a tough primary against school board member Leticia Quezada and handily beat his Republican opponent that November.

Last fall, he won reelection with 83% of the vote.

Becerra’s relationship with Villaraigosa–and their competition on the ballot–has served as a tense undercurrent to the mayor’s race. Becerra resisted efforts last year by Molina and Henry Cisneros, the former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, to broker a compromise so that only one Latino would be in the race.

Becerra has repeatedly told supporters that he refused to cut a deal with Villaraigosa because he doesn’t believe in el dedazo.

But isn’t that exactly how he got into office?

He laughed at the question.

“Those were tiny dedos,” he said. “What they offered wasn’t enough to push me over the finish line.”

Others disagreed.

“He’d be nowhere if Gloria Molina hadn’t put him in office,” said one Latino leader and longtime associate who did not want to be identified.

When pressed, Becerra acknowledged he got help.

“I am where I am because of others,” he said. “What I’m saying is I’ve never been part of the establishment.”

‘Not the Best at Playing the Game’

Whatever the origins of his success, Becerra thrived in Congress. His diligent attention to detail earned praise from members of both parties. A fluent Spanish speaker, he has spent much of his time pressing issues affecting his Latino constituency, such as restoring benefits to legal immigrants and defending bilingual education.

“He’s sort of one of the few young dynamic Latino leaders in the House,” said Amy Walter, a congressional analyst for the Cook Political Report. “He’s very intelligent and well-respected, even by Republicans I talk to.”

Although he has succeeded in climbing the Washington ladder, Becerra has also, on occasion, dramatically demonstrated his political naivete.

“I understand the politics,” Becerra said. “I’m not the best at playing the game.”

In 1993, the freshman legislator took on Dan Rostenkowski, then the powerful chairman of the Ways and Means Committee–which Becerra was trying to join.

Rostenkowski wanted to cut welfare benefits to legal immigrants, to fund an extension of unemployment benefits. Becerra and other Hispanic Caucus members objected. They negotiated with House leaders to preserve the payments to blind, elderly and disabled legal immigrants.

An amended bill was drafted with Rostenkowski’s reluctant approval. But before it went to the floor for a vote, Becerra made a fatal mistake. During a weekly Democratic whip meeting, he rose to thank the leadership for supporting the bill. Rostenkowski, still frustrated at the change, growled at him.

Becerra could have stopped talking at that point. But he didn’t.

Breaching House protocol, the young congressman took on the veteran chairman, arguing that legal immigrants had every right to be in the country.

What ensued was an almost unheard of shouting match, as Becerra continued to raise his voice over the chairman’s bellows. Later, on the floor, Rostenkowski lambasted the amended bill as damaging to jobless Americans. The compromise failed. The next day, the original plan passed and was signed into law.

“I learned a lot from that,” an unrepentant Becerra said recently. “There were people who said to me afterward, ‘Xavier, if you just kept your mouth shut, you had it. You had won.’ I said, ‘Why do we have to win that way?’ ”

Becerra’s actions also backfired in late 1996, when he took a four-day educational trip to Cuba just as he was bidding to become chairman of the Hispanic Caucus.

Predictably, his trip set off a firestorm of criticism in the Cuban exile community. The three Cuban American legislators were furious he had visited the island and not denounced Fidel Castro’s regime.

Becerra was eventually elected chairman of the caucus, but its two Cuban American Republicans resigned from the group, ending its bipartisan clout.

Over time, Becerra did develop some political prowess: Under his guidance, the caucus successfully lobbied to win back some of the benefits for legal immigrants cut in 1994, and pushed Clinton to include more Latinos in his administration.

But questions about his political judgment persist, most recently centering on the case of convicted drug dealer Carlos Vignali. Becerra, who has received nearly $14,000 in political donations from Vignali’s father, Horacio, wrote a letter to Clinton in November asking for a review of Vignali’s conviction. He also called a White House counsel–on Clinton’s last night in office–to inquire about the status of the case. Vignali’s sentence was commuted the next day.

His involvement, along with that of other Los Angeles leaders, contributed to the firestorm of controversy that flared over the pardons and commutations granted by Clinton.

Surprised by the criticism, Becerra said that it did not occur to him that he might be seen as using his political leverage on behalf of a donor. He was merely trying to get information, he said. He insists that he never asked Clinton outright to give Vignali clemency–merely to see if his 15-year sentence was too harsh.

Becerra entered the Los Angeles mayor’s race with a few advantages, some shrewdly obtained. He has won convincingly in a district that ranges from Boyle Heights west to Hollywood. Facing minimal competition in his last reelection campaign, he spent almost $860,000–including almost $400,000 on television ads–to boost his name recognition citywide just as the mayoral election approached. It may have paid off: A recent Los Angeles Times poll put Becerra in the thick of a many-candidate tussle for second place behind the front-runner, City Atty. James K. Hahn.

But Becerra’s campaign has suffered from a central disadvantage. Having been fingered by fate for so long, Becerra has found it difficult to answer the most basic of questions: Why is he running?

As recently as December, almost a year after he entered the race, he told Times reporters that he had not yet come up with a message for his candidacy. “I have to figure that out,” he said.

More recently, he said his interest in becoming mayor grew after he battled with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and Los Angeles Unified School District over their federal funding.

“It was real frustrating and I thought, we have to do better than this,” he said. “The more it became clear that no one was stepping forward who I felt inspired by, the more I started thinking about it. It’s worth a shot.”

(Friends also confirm that his wife, an obstetrician at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, wanted him to return to Los Angeles so he could spend more time with their three young daughters.)

Not the Only Golden Boy

After casting about for a campaign theme, Becerra eventually sought to tie his disparate proposals together under the rubric of “neighborhoods first.” But his specific ideas tend to resemble mom-and-apple-pie bromides.

He talks about getting every child a library card, about making the Los Angeles Zoo the best in the nation, about making sure everyone has a good school, grocery store, fire station and place to worship near home.

During mayoral forums, while the other candidates draw specific rationales for their candidacies, Becerra repeats his neighborhoods theme religiously, often redundantly.

“We have to do the little things right,” he tells audiences. “Some people say, that’s small thinking. But there’s no way I can think about these big things until we start to get the little things right.”

Some wonder aloud why Becerra is running. He has raised the least money of the top six candidates in the April 10 primary election, and had only about $600,000 on hand at the end of February, compared to Hahn’s $2.2 million. Villaraigosa’s presence on the ballot further complicates Becerra’s chances.

“At one time, he was the golden boy of Hispanic politics in Los Angeles, and now he’s finding out there’s others who have a claim to that title,” said Sergio Bendixen, a Miami-based political analyst and pollster who has experience in California campaigns.

While some say his political path has been made easier by influential champions, Becerra insists that his lack of sheer ambition means he is not overly enticed by the power that accompanies elected office.

“I don’t covet it,” he said. “I fear people who must have it, whatever it takes.”

He brushes aside criticism that he is ill-positioned for victory. People had the same doubts about his prospects when he first ran for office, he said.

His sunny analysis of the toughest race of his career: “We have nowhere to go but up.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Xavier Becerra

* Born: Jan. 26, 1958, in Sacramento.

* Education: Stanford University, bachelor’s degree in economics (1980); Stanford University Law School (1984).

* Personal: Married to Carolina Reyes, obstetrician at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Three daughters: Clarisa, 7, Olivia, 5, and Natalia, 3.

* Party: Democrat

* Career: Member of the U.S. House of Representatives, 1993-present; state assemblyman, 1990-1992; deputy attorney general, 1987-1990.

* Strategy: Becerra is counting on the support of nearly 78,000 people who voted for him in his congressional bid in November. His campaign hopes to win more votes by pushing his “Neighborhoods First” theme in small community meetings. He is also working to shore up Latino support with frequent appearances in Spanish-language media.

*

Times researcher Maloy Moore contributed to this story.

About This Series

The Times today presents the first of six profiles of the major candidates for mayor of Los Angeles. The articles will appear in the order in which the candidates will appear on the ballot.

Mérida, May 7, 2026 (venezuelanalysis.com) – A federal jury in Miami found former US Congressman David Rivera guilty on charges related to an undisclosed lobbying campaign on behalf of the Venezuelan government of Nicolás Maduro.

The guilty verdict was issued on Friday, May 1. Rivera was convicted of acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign government, conspiracy to commit money laundering, and tax evasion. The final decision concluded a six-week trial that featured testimony from Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a former roommate and close friend of the defendant.

Rivera, a Republican who represented Florida’s 25th district in the US House of Representatives from 2011 to 2013, was accused by the Justice Department of securing a $50 million contract to secretly lobby senior US officials to improve relations and ease sanctions on Caracas during the first Trump administration.

The indictment, unsealed in 2022, alleged that the former congressman and an associate, political consultant Esther Nuhfer, manipulated political connections to advance the interests of the Maduro government at a time when Washington was ramping up regime-change efforts against the Caribbean nation.

“The ultimate goal of these efforts was to garner political support in the United States for a normalization of relations,” prosecutors argued, detailing how Rivera allegedly tried to arrange meetings for then-Foreign Minister Delcy Rodríguez, now Venezuela’s acting president, with White House officials and members of Congress.

The conviction rested on a series of meetings and communications in 2017. The lobbying efforts proved unsuccessful as the Trump administration introduced its “maximum pressure” sanctions campaign beginning in August 2017.

One of the main highlights of the trial was the testimony of Secretary of State Marco Rubio. In an unusual move for a sitting cabinet member, Rubio took the stand in a Miami federal courthouse on March 24 to detail his interactions with Rivera.

According to reports, Rubio testified that Rivera approached him in July 2017 with an urgent plan. Rivera claimed to be working with Venezuelan media magnate Raúl Gorrín on an alleged scheme to convince Maduro to voluntarily resign and step down as president in exchange for guarantees for himself and his inner circle.

“He provided me with insight into some of the key phrases that regime insiders would have wanted to hear to know this was serious,” Rubio told the jury, referencing talking points he later used in a Senate floor speech about non-retribution. “No vengeance, no retribution.”

However, Rubio, who was serving as a Florida Senator at the time, insisted he was unaware that Rivera had been hired by the Maduro government to lobby. He claimed to have been “skeptical” of the plan, which he eventually labeled a “total waste of my time” after Gorrín failed to produce a promised letter from Maduro to Trump. Had he known Rivera was working directly for Caracas, Rubio stated, he never would have agreed to deliver a rare televised address to Venezuela on Gorrín’s Globovisión network.

The back-channel talks reportedly collapsed as the Trump administration escalated unilateral coercive measures and regime-change efforts.

Rivera’s defense team, led by attorney Ed Shohat, claimed that their client had not acted as a foreign agent but rather as a “promoter of democracy.” They contended the contract focused on commercial work, specifically luring Exxon Mobil back to Venezuela, which they argued is generally exempt from the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).

Furthermore, Rivera latched onto Rubio’s testimony to argue that his actions were aimed at ousting Maduro. “Marco Rubio made it abundantly clear today that everything we worked on together in 2017 was meant to remove Maduro from power in Venezuela,” Rivera said in a statement following Rubio’s testimony.

The former congressman was taken into custody immediately after the verdict and faces a potentially lengthy prison sentence. He also faces additional federal charges in Washington, D.C., related to a separate foreign lobbying case.

Rivera’s trial came amid a fast-tracked rapprochement between Washington and Caracas. Diplomatic relations, which had been severed in 2019 after Trump recognized self-proclaimed “Interim President” Juan Guaidó as Venezuela’s legitimate leader, were reestablished in March.

The White House also recognized Rodríguez as Venezuela’s “sole leader” and lifted personal sanctions against her. Rodríguez took over the Venezuelan presidency after US special forces kidnapped Maduro on January 3.

The Trump administration has also seized control over the South American country’s oil revenues and has sought to force the return of Western corporations into Venezuela’s energy and mining sectors under privileged conditions.

Venezuelan authorities have not commented on Rivera’s trial and conviction. A government social media account labeled a report from investigative portal La Tabla on the alleged Maduro resignation plan as “fake,” but officials offered no further explanations.

Edited by Ricardo Vaz in Caracas.

May 1 (UPI) — Former U.S. Rep. David Rivera, R-Fla., was found guilty on Friday of being paid to secretly lobby elected U.S. officials to ease sanctions against Venezuela.

Rivera and a co-conspirator were each found guilty of taking payment from Nicholas Maduro to try to repair ties between the South American nation and the United States but never registering as an agent of a foreign country, The Miami Herald and NBC News reported.

A 12-person jury found the former Miami-Dade congressman and consultant Esther Nuhfer guilty of lobbying Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Rep. Pete Sessions, R-Texas, and attempting to set meetings up for Delcy Rodriguez, Venezuela’s then-foreign minister and current acting president.

Rivera was also found guilty of conspiring to commit money laundering and tax evasion.

Rivera had long been friends with his former roommate Rubio and became friends with Sessions when he was in Congress, and after Maduro gave him a $50 million contract he attempted to leverage those relationships.

Both Rivera and Nuhfer were caught having not registered themselves of lobbying for the federal government on behalf of another nation.

The convictions come after a 5-week trial that saw Rubio, who was in the Senate in 2017, when he met with Rivera and was told a plan to convince Maduro to step down was afoot.

Rivera denied that he was working on behalf of Maduro and the Venezuelan government, insisting that he was working to overthrow the now-deposed ruler rather than to promote his interests.

Nuhfur was released on bond ahead of her sentencing, while Rivera was judged to be a flight risk and will remain in jail until he is sentenced.

Rivera also still faces charges in another foreign lobbying case, as well.

MIAMI — A former Miami congressman and longtime friend of U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio was convicted Friday in connection with a secret $50-million lobbying campaign on behalf of Venezuela during the first Trump administration.

Jurors found Republican David Rivera and an associate, Esther Nuhfer, guilty on all counts, including failing to register as a foreign agent with the Justice Department and conspiracy to commit money laundering as part of their work for former President Nicolás Maduro’s government.

The seven-week trial offered a rare glimpse into Miami’s role as a crossroads for foreign influence campaigns aimed at shaping U.S. policy toward Latin America, one highlighting the city’s reputation as a magnet for corruption and anti-Communist crusaders among its sizable exile population.

It included testimony from Rubio, Texas Congressman Pete Sessions and a top Washington lobbyist — all of whom testified that they were shocked to learn belatedly of Rivera’s consulting contract with a U.S.-based affiliate of Venezuela’s state oil company, PDVSA.

In an 11-count indictment unsealed in 2022, prosecutors alleged that Rivera was tapped by then Foreign Minister Delcy Rodríguez — now Venezuela’s acting president — to work Republican connections from Rivera’s time in Congress to get the first Trump administration to abandon its hard-line stance and ease crippling sanctions on Venezuela.

As part of the charm offensive, prosecutors alleged, Rivera and Nuhfer, a political consultant, manipulated influential friends, including Rubio and Sessions, like “pawns on a chess board.” The goal: to try to normalize relations with the new Trump administration at a time when the Maduro government was buffeted by serious accusations of human rights violations.

“As long as the money kept coming in, they didn’t care from where,” prosecutor Roger Cruz said of the defendants during closing arguments.

‘Massive secret’ threatened to damage Rivera’s political career

But the two held onto the “massive secret” and didn’t disclose their lobbying work as required, for fear it would have ended Rivera’s political career as an anti-Communist stalwart, Cruz said.

To hide his work, prosecutors allege, Rivera also set up an encrypted chat group called MIA — for Miami — with his main conduit to the Maduro government: Venezuelan media tycoon Raúl Gorrín, who was subsequently charged in the U.S. with bribing top Venezuelan officials.

Members of the group used playful code words to discuss their activities: Maduro was the “bus driver,” Sessions “Sombrero,” Rodríguez “The Lady in Red,” and millions of dollars “melons,” according to copies of text messages presented to the jury.

“It was all about la Luz,” Cruz said, referring to the Spanish word for light, which Rivera and others repeatedly used to discuss payments from Caracas.

Attorneys for Rivera and Nuhfer said the two acted in good faith and believed they were under no requirement to disclose their work. The three-month, $50-million contract with Rivera’s one-man consulting firm, they say, was focused exclusively on luring oil giant ExxonMobil back to Venezuela — commercial work that is generally exempt from the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

Wholly distinct from that consulting work, they say, were Rivera’s meetings with Rubio and Sessions, which occurred after the consulting contract had expired and was focused on ushering in leadership in Venezuela that would be less hostile to the U.S.

“He was working every possible angle to get Nicolás Maduro out,” defense attorney Ed Shohat said during closing arguments. “There was not a word in the chats about normalizing relations.”

Nuhfer’s attorney, David Oscar Markus, likened the government’s case to the 17th century Salem witch trials, presuming ill intent that was belied by the flimsiest of evidence.

“My client does not have a dark heart,” he said.

Exxon meetings for Rodríguez

Prosecutors said Rivera used the contract with New York-based PDV USA as cover for illegal lobbying.

Once exposed, the partners tried to hide the work — backdating documents and coming up with sham agreements like one to justify a wire transfer of $3.75 million to a South Florida company that maintained Gorrín’s luxury yacht.

The political activity included setting up meetings for Rodríguez in New York, Caracas, Washington and Dallas. As part of the effort, the two roped in Sessions, who later tried to broker a meeting for Rodríguez with the CEO of ExxonMobil that had succeeded Trump’s then-secretary of State, Rex Tillerson. After a secret meeting in Caracas with Maduro, Sessions also agreed to deliver a letter from the Venezuelan president to Trump.

The outreach quickly unraveled, however. Within six months of taking office, Trump sanctioned Maduro and labeled him a “dictator,” launching a “maximum pressure” campaign to unseat the president.

However, nearly a decade later, Rodríguez has emerged as the second Trump administration’s trusted partner after the U.S. military’s ousting of Maduro.

Before being elected to Congress in 2010, Rivera was a high-ranking Florida legislator. During that time, he shared a Tallahassee home with Rubio, who eventually became the Florida House speaker.

Rivera has previously faced controversy, including allegations that he secretly funded a Democratic spoiler candidate in a 2012 congressional race. Last year, federal prosecutors dropped the case after an appeals court threw out a sizable fine imposed by a lower court. Rivera was also investigated — but never charged — for alleged campaign finance violations and a $1-million contract with a gambling company while serving in the Florida legislature.

Goodman writes for the Associated Press.