Steven Donziger, a lawyer who recently received the support
of 29 Nobel laureates and thousands of lawyers around the world, helped
the indigenous people of Ecuador’s Amazon win a historic judgment in
2011 against Chevron. Since then, Chevron has joined forced with U.S.
judge Lewis A. Kaplan to abusively target Donziger in New York in a
series of unprecedented legal actions that have wiped out his assets.
The corruption has depleted Donziger’s resources, and stopped Steven’s
ability to earn a living – to the point where Donziger seeks donations
for his legal defense.
Now, Chevron is being formally accused by Donziger’s attorneys of
owning legal officials. Calls for the reinstatement of the lawyer’s
illegally revoked law license now stretch to over 475 lawyers, legal
organizations and human rights groups, according to the International Association of Democratic lawyers.
Donziger has been defended by NGOs, politicians and even rock legend
Roger Waters of Pink Floyd, all calling for the reinstatement of his law
license as this writer previously reported.
Chevron has claimed that Donziger is a “threat to the public
interest,” arguing that his law license should be revoked. More like
Donziger is a “threat to corporate interest,” as Pink Floyd Rock
legendary musician Roger Waters has said.
He’s a huge help to the public interest, in my view. He
presents something of a threat to corporate America, which is why he’s
being demonized and vilified, which is why his license is being
suspended.
Several other people have spoken out about what’s going on with Donziger, and some have even testified at his hearing.
“In my work I’ve met a lot of people in pursuit of
accountability, and Donziger is right up at the top of those. He has
done an unbelievable job.” – Simon Taylor, founder of Global Witness“All evidence to the contrary that Steven is a threat to the public.” – Public interest attorney Zoe Littlepage
“He’s a completely honorable man representing people grievously
harmed. What he and his family have gone through is unbelievable. He’s
been attacked and demonized to distract the American courts and world
public from the fact that Chevron committed a crime and owes the people
of Ecuador for a cleanup.” – Rex Weyler, co-founder of Greenpeace
It has been some time since Activist Post last updated
readers about the case against Steven Donziger. New legal documents have
surfaced, filed by Donziger’s attorneys, accusing judges of being
bought and paid for by the corporate oil giant Chevron.
This is something this writer also made note of in a series of
articles questioning the case, asking why Donizger had his law license
revoked when it was other corrupt parties that deserved disbarment and
not the lawyer who fought for the Amazonian Ecuadorian people (here, here and here).
Activist Post has been covering the story of Steven Donziger since last year when this reporter first learned
about the judicial abuses and deplorable actions of NY District Court
Justice Lewis Kaplan in favor of Chevron. For the past almost 10 months,
Donziger has been forced under house arrest with an electronic bracelet
on his ankle for defending the Ecuadorian Amazonian people against big
oil’s environmental damages.
Last year in August, Activist Post reported that
Donziger faced house arrest after Judge Kaplan ordered a Special
Prosecutor to indict Donziger, as well as yank his passport, punishing
him even further.
I will quickly summarize previous stories in this corrupt saga and give the reader some background information.
For over a decade, New York lawyer and activist Steven Donziger, of
Donziger and Associates, has been fighting Chevron after the oil giant
bought out Texaco. However, just when we think we’ve seen it all in the
Chevron case, NY District Court Justice Lewis Kaplan seeks to prove we
ain’t seen nothing yet. Judge Kaplan wants Amazonian lawyer, Steven
Donziger, destroyed, at all costs!
Amazon Watch reports:
On September 17th, I (Paul Paz y Miño) testified on
behalf of Donziger at a formal bar licensing hearing in New York, where
for the first time witnesses were able to address the facts of Chevron’s
fraud in bringing its retaliatory civil RICO (“racketeering”) case
designed to try to undermine the legitimate $9.5 billion judgment won by
Ecuadorian communities in 2011.Several witnesses at the hearing explained how Chevron and its
lawyers at the infamous Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher firm – led by Randy
Mastro, former deputy mayor to Rudy Guiliani – engaged in unethical and illegal acts to
target Donziger based largely on the testimony of a corrupt witness who
was paid at least $2 million by the company and who later admitted to lying under oath.
Many respected lawyers, authors, and activists also testified on
Donziger’s behalf. Without exception, all described Donziger as a man
dedicated to justice in Ecuador on behalf of Chevron’s victims, who was
framed by Chevron and its corrupt witness Alberto Guerra, who claimed
without any corroborating evidence that Donziger had approved a bribe to
a judge,” Paul Paz y Miño, Amazon Watch’s Director of Outreach wrote.
Amazon Watch further provided a detailed recap of the Donziger saga:
- In 2011, Chevron was found liable in Ecuador for the deliberate
dumping of billions of gallons of toxic oil waste into the Amazon
between 1964 and 1992, decimating indigenous groups and provoking an
outbreak of cancer that has killed hundreds if not thousands of people. - Four levels of courts in Ecuador – including its supreme and
constitutional courts – imposed damages on Chevron of at least $9.5
billion; most of the pollution, including an estimated 1,000 unlined
toxic waste pits, continue to poison soils, rivers, and groundwater. - Having definitively lost the case in Ecuador, Chevron abruptly
removed all of its assets from the country and never paid a dime to the
affected communities. - In the RICO case, Chevron bribed its star witness Alberto Guerra and
used false evidence to try to criminalize human rights lawyer Steven
Donziger and the Ecuadorian communities fighting for cleanup. - Donziger’s law license was suspended in New York based on the
allegation that he was “an immediate threat to the public interest” due
to his litigation against Chevron. - With U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan as an ally, Chevron has
demanded Donziger surrender his computer and cell phone for inspection
by the company so that it can sue or target anybody Donziger has been in
touch with, or anyone supporting the campaign for justice in Ecuador. - Judge Kaplan has held Donziger in civil contempt, seized his
passport, and fined him an exorbitant $200,000 per day for refusing to
turn over his computer and phone while an appeal is pending. - Judge Kaplan himself then filed criminal contempt charges against
Donziger and asked the federal prosecutor in New York to prosecute him;
the prosecutor refused. - Judge Kaplan then appointed private lawyers from a
corporate law firm and deputized them to act as “government prosecutors”
to target Donziger. Pending trial, Donziger has been confined to home
detention and required to wear an electronic monitoring device for the
last two months. - Chevron has tried to undermine the very idea of corporate
accountability with its unprecedented, unethical, and illegal attacks
against Steven Donziger and those who stand up for a proper environmental cleanup in Ecuador.
Judge Kaplan denied a jury for the Ecuadorian villagers’ case against
the oil company while Kaplan had investments in the oil companies,
which is a requisite for Judge Kaplan to be recused from the case. The
judge also flatly refused to allow the victims (who suffer illnesses
from Texaco/Chevron toxic waste) he referred to as “plaintiffs” to
produce evidence about massive environmental contamination caused by the
oil giants.
Instead, Judge Kaplan threatened Donziger with massive fines for
refusing to give his computer and cell phone to Chevron (which would
violate the sacrosanct attorney-client privilege).
Kaplan has proven he is a lapdog for Chevron time and time again. In
June, one single day after this writer’s first article was published,
the judge escalated his abuse even further against Donziger by issuing a cruel and unusual punishment.
The tyrannical Kaplan ordered Donziger to face fines up to $200,000
per day and to seize his passport for each day that he fails to turn
over attorney-client privileged information.
Chevron is already on public record claiming that Donziger doesn’t
have enough money to satisfy the $800,000 judgment Justice Kaplan has
egregiously awarded Chevron, on top of the now-ordered $200,000 a day
fine.
When Donziger refused to do so, the out-of-bounds Judge Kaplan asked
the Southern District of NY U.S. Attorney’s office to prosecute Donziger
for contempt.
The SDNY U.S. Attorney office declined to prosecute Donziger and do the judge’s corrupt dirty work, Courthouse News reported.
Steven Donziger is now fighting to restore his right to practice law
after his license was suspended without a hearing, an unfathomable case.
The case is based entirely on the retaliatory RICO suit and testimony
by a bribed witness who admitted they lied, as Activist Post’s Derrick Broze reported in 2015.
Kaplan has been working on behalf of Chevron, who claims that
Donziger committed fraud, bribed a judge in Ecuador and ghost-wrote the
Ecuadorian verdict. All statements that are proven to be completely
false by both testimony and forensic evidence. However, because no U.S. court would consider that evidence,
Judge Kaplan’s RICO verdict still stands. Even though his court order
is still active and Donziger is being punished, the findings have been
thoroughly discredited and even rejected by 17 appellate judges in
Ecuador.
It is highly ironic that Donziger is being accused of fraud and
bribery, since the sole witness Chevron utilized against him is an
Ecuadorian Judge Alberto Guerra. Guerra was thrown off his bench for
corruption, admitted to lying, and Chevron confessed the witness had been paid $2 million dollars, Alternet reported.
Kaplan also dismissed the fact that Guerra was being paid $12,000
a month by Chevron, as well as being supplied with a personal lawyer
and a car under the company “witness-protection program.”
The abuse of due process is unrelenting as Judge Kaplan continuously demonstrated bias in the Chevron case, according to U.S. Appellate Attorney Deepak Gupta (who represented Donziger).
In recently filed documents,
the corruption is laid bare and judges are accused of horrific crimes
against the court. These crimes include — abuse of power and judicial
misconduct according to Donziger’s lawyer, Andrew Frisch, a former
federal prosecutor.
Frisch accused Kaplan and Judge Loretta Preska, a member of the
Trump-affiliated Federalist Society of abuses of power and misconduct in
the Donziger case.
Frisch’s main points are as follows as reported by the website MakeChevronCleanUp:
- Kaplan filed criminal contempt charges
against Donziger last July and quietly named Preska to preside while he
ran the case from the background, creating what Frisch called
a “two-headed” judge designed by Kaplan to hide his true role and to
immunize himself from a recusal motion given his long history of
bias against Donziger. In handpicking Preska, Kaplan also bypassed local
rules requiring random assignment of cases. - To ensure he could control the contempt charges
against Donziger from behind the scenes, Kaplan also appointed a private
law firm with extensive ties to the oil industry to prosecute in the
name of the U.S. government after the U.S. Attorney (the regular
prosecutor) rejected the charges. Kaplan never disclosed that the firm,
Seward & Kissel, has Chevron on its private client roster or that it
worked for several companies that do business with Chevron, as outlined
in an affidavit from ethics expert Ellen Yaroshfsky. - Kaplan, Preska, and the Seward law firm appeared to collude
to actively cover-up the Seward conflict for months despite continued
pressure from Donziger to disclose any relationship with the company. In
a court hearing before Preska on January 6, Seward partner Rita Glavin
(appointed by Kaplan to prosecute) denied any conflict of interest as
she was refusing to disclose that Chevron was a client. - In February before the Federal appellate court, Glavin again refused
to consent to Donziger’s release while continuing to deceive the court
by covering up her firm’s conflict. Normally, such deceit is grounds for
bar discipline. Under pressure from Frisch and
the Yaroshefsky opinion, Glavin and her partner Mark
Hyland grudgingly disclosed the conflict in late March months
after Donziger had been put in detention. - When Donziger’s counsel later insisted that Seward describe the
nature of its representation of Chevron, the firm refused to provide any
further information citing its duties of loyalty to Chevron as a
private client. Seward is putting its loyalties to Chevron ahead of its
ethical duties to turn over exculpatory information to a defendant it is
trying imprison in apparent service of Chevron’s goal of blocking the
lawyer from enforcing the Ecuador judgement, said Frisch. - Preska issued an order last week that “reveals abuses of power and
discretion surpassed only by gross indifference to prosecutorial
misconduct and the appearance of judicial bias,” according to the
filing. In an apparent effort to protect Kaplan and the Seward
firm, Preska ruled that the conflict of interest was not severe enough
to warrant disqualification. She also denied Donziger an evidentiary
hearing. - Chevron’s main law firm used to attack Donziger for the last decade,
Gibson Dunn & Crutcher, also had an obligation to disclose Seward’s
conflict once the criminal contempt case began but failed to do
so. Lawyers at Gibson Dunn for months had been urging Kaplan
to jail Donziger. Since then, a team of Gibson Dunn
lawyers began coordinating with the Seward firm and even appeared to be
drafting some of the firm’s submissions urging Donziger’s continued
detention.
“Simply stated, Judges Kaplan and Preska have ratified
deceit by the lawyers appointed by Judge Kaplan to prosecute the
criminal case about their firm’s attorney-client relationship with the
Chevron Corporation, for whose benefit Judge Kaplan issued the orders
which Mr. Donziger is alleged to have willfully violated,” Frisch wrote
in the brief.
In addition, a referee named John R. Horan, a former Assistant United
States Attorney in the Southern District of New York, found Mr.
Donziger’s testimony at the disciplinary proceeding [in late 2019,
during the pendency of the criminal case] to be “candid and clear …
[with] no sign of dissembling or evasiveness.”
This all further displays what this writer has talked about before
regarding corruption becoming the rule instead of the exception
spreading across the world that Corps are acting above the law with oil
giants and big banks toxicity infecting our systems of global justice.
It is a classic David vs. Goliath tale, where New York Attorney
Steven Donziger won a decade-long case for $9 billion against Chevron.
Now, the real fight begins against the corrupt collusion of a judge and a
corporate giant. This is a bigger case than you may imagine with more
at stake than just a lawyer and his law license. Donziger’s case will
shape and determine global human rights issues, and decide whether
corporations can evade their legal accountability for disasters such as
what happened in Ecuador.
In other words, Donziger’s case could set a precedent normalizing
this type of behavior, which will be felt for generations to come; and
if this treatment is allowed, all future lawyers fighting for
reparations for those affected by a tragedy caused by a corporation may
be terrified to do their due duty.
If you would like to help out Donziger you can donate to his fund here at his website.
**By [@An0nkn0wledge](@an0nkn0wledge)**
Aaron Kesel writes for Activist Post.
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