Mike Rogers résumé includes consulting for businesses with shady foreign interests

When former Rep. Mike Rogers left Congress in 2015, his net worth was estimated at $655,000. Today, he is worth $13 million. This 2,000% increase is the result of lucrative consulting gigs for big corporations, some of which did business with corrupt foreign governments.

Rogers is now the Republican candidate for Michigan’s open U.S. Senate seat. His Democratic opponent is Rep. Elissa Slotkin. It is expected to be a competitive race.

According to Rogers’ 2023 financial disclosures, he served on the board or as a consultant for at least 23 organizations and companies. He reported an income of $2 million and an additional $1.2 million earned through investments in various mutual funds.

One of the companies that Rogers listed was Telefónica, a Spanish telecommunications company that is also one of the largest wireless providers in Venezuela. From 2018 to 2023, Rogers was on the company’s Technical and Security Advisory Committee. In 2023, Rogers was paid $20,731 for this work.

Between 2016 and 2021, Telefónica reported that more than a million of its Venezuelan customers had their phones tapped by autocrat Nicolás Maduro’s government. Telefónica is legally required to comply with government directives in the countries where it operates. As such, the Venezuelan government requested which phone lines it wanted monitored and Telefónica made that surveillance possible.

Another organization Rogers worked for was IP3 International, a nuclear technology company. The company was formed in 2016 with the purpose of persuading policymakers to support the construction of nuclear reactors in the Middle East, particularly in Saudi Arabia. IP3 did this by pushing for less stringent regulations on Saudi Arabia’s nuclear program. If enacted, this could have enabled Saudi Arabia to develop nuclear weapons.

IP3 arranged a meeting in 2019 between President Donald Trump and nuclear industry experts to discuss the plan. The plan was reportedly backed by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and disgraced general Michael Flynn. The ​​United States House Committee on Oversight released a report on the matter, based in part on testimony from whistleblowers within the White House.

Ultimately, the Trump administration did not pursue IP3’s proposal.

Rogers also did work for AT&T. He was hired by the telecommunication giant in 2016 to be their Chief Security Adviser. At the time, AT&T was trying to broker a deal with Huawei, a Chinese cell phone manufacturer. 

In Congress, Rogers led an investigation that concluded Huawei was an arm of the Chinese government, had stolen trade secrets from American corporations, and could potentially spy on Americans. Other findings were classified out of national security concerns.

Rogers has said that if elected he will defend U.S. interests.

“Getting our country back on track starts with putting the interests of the American people over the interests of our foreign adversaries like China & Iran,” Rogers wrote on social media in 2023. “And when I’m in the Senate, that starts on DAY ONE.”

An Emerson College poll from August showed Slotkin leading Rogers by six percentage points.