Dems Ask DOJ To Help Lawyer Found To Have Falsified Science, Bribed Judge To Shake Down Oil Company
“It is about brute force” rather than “all this bulls**t about the law and facts,” said now-disbarred lawyer who stood to gain $600 million in fees from pollution settlement.
Congressional Democrats are asking Attorney General Merrick Garland to intervene in a criminal case against a lawyer found to have falsified scientific evidence and bribed a foreign judge to shake down an oil company, with one member of “The Squad” heralding him as an inspiration for “others to fight back against corporate power.”
Evidence indicates that Steven Donziger and his team ran an elaborate legal fraud that included secretly paying a Latin American court’s independent expert to twist science about pollution and ultimately bribing a judge to issue a multi-billion dollar judgment in their favor.
Donziger has nonetheless found support from celebrities, media, and members of Congress, raising the question of whether Democrats support obstruction of justice and the falsification of science if it serves their agenda — or whether the mere invocation of ideological buzzwords is enough to distract an increasingly partisan America from bothering to sort out the facts.
The celebrities note that Donziger won a ruling against Chevron in court on the premise that it caused pollution in an area where indigenous people live, yet now finds himself on house arrest.
They gloss over what happened in between.
That judgment was awarded by a court in Ecuador in 2011. In 2014, a U.S. federal judge in New York found — and detailed in nearly 500 pages of specifics — that it was secured through lies and corruption so astonishing that they were like something “out of Hollywood.”
In 2016, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit unanimously upheld the U.S. ruling, saying the “record in the present case reveals a parade of corrupt actions” including “coercion, fraud and bribery” and that Donziger could not be allowed to profit off of fraud.
In 2018, an international tribunal at The Hague held that the judgment “was procured through fraud, bribery and corruption.”
In 2020, a panel of New York judges unanimously ordered Donziger disbarred for “egregious professional misconduct” including “obstruction of justice, witness tampering, and judicial coercion.”
Now facing criminal charges for contempt of court related to his refusal to turn over evidence, Donziger’s strategy appears to be a plea for rank partisan loyalty. As his own former legal partners and employees have said he committed fraud, Donziger has seemed to try to convert questions about specific legal misconduct to a referendum on the social statuses of the players: If you think oil companies are bad, then you should support him.
Such emotional appeals and political influence campaigns don’t typically work in a legal system less corrupt than Ecuador’s. But Donziger seems to be calculating that that no longer describes ours.
Defenders
On May 21, Trevor Noah’s “Daily Show” ran a segment in which Donziger said, “I’m a human rights lawyer and I have a black ankle claw shackled to my leg courtesy of the United States criminal justice system because I helped, as a lawyer, win a very big pollution judgment against Chevron.”
Correspondent Roy Wood said, “I’m surprised this is the first time I’m hearing about it.”
That would be a surprising outcome indeed, if that were all there were to the story. And Wood didn’t need to hear much to convince him it was: “At the end of the day, this case is about an oil company claiming they didn’t pollute. What more do you need to know?” he said.
Donziger, who stood to gain at least $600 million from the scheme, once described his business as “The business of getting press coverage as part of a legal strategy… The business of plaintiffs’ law. To make f***ing money.”
The strategy of swapping a specific pattern of facts for a crude morality play, one that broadcast him as a member of an ideological tribe, seemed to pay off.
In April, six members of Congress, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), sent a letter to Garland asking for what seems like political interference in the judicial branch, saying the already extensively-litigated case “involved urgent environmental justice concerns of Indigenous people.”
Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO) said Donziger’s “bravery and brilliance will inspire others to fight back against corporate power.”
On May 26, actress Susan Sarandon said “the shared enemy is Climate Change and Pollution, not human rights lawyers, the afflicted peoples around the world, or their advocates.”
It’s not clear how familiar those advocates are with the evidence in the case. The following comes from the exhaustive 497-page assessment written by federal judge Lewis Kaplan in 2014.
Jungle shakedown
From the 1960s to the 1990s, a subsidiary of Texaco was involved in drilling for oil in the Ecuadorian jungle. In the 1970s, an oil company owned by the government of that country took majority control of the consortium. In 1992, Texaco sold its remaining interests to the Ecuador-owned company, and in 1998, the country confirmed that Texaco had successfully performed agreed-upon environmental cleanup and released it from future claims. The Ecuadorian company continued to operate in the area.
Donziger had worked as a journalist in Latin America and attended Harvard Law School with the grandson of a former Ecuadorian president. Donziger said of Ecuadorian judges, “They’re all corrupt… These judges are really not very bright.”
In 2003, he filed a lawsuit in that country against Chevron, which had since bought Texaco, asking for money for environmental cleanup. “You can solve anything with politics as long as that judges are intelligent enough to understand the politics. They don’t have to be intelligent enough to understand the law,” he later said.
In 2011, the Ecuadorian judge, Nicolas Zambrano, ordered Chevron to pay $8.6 billion, which would double unless it issued an apology within 15 days.
Donziger and his team were purportedly representing a class of 30,000 indigenous residents. But they asked for any funds to go to a group that, as Kaplan later described, “Donziger and some of his Ecuadorian associates controlled.”
Donziger stood to gain more than $600 million in fees, plus “control of or influence over the billions” that would go to the group that would oversee the cleanup fund.
Chevron did not pay, contending that the judgment was the result of foreign judicial corruption. The battle for the money wound up in the U.S. courts —where Judge Kaplan, who was appointed by the bench to Bill Clinton, found that Chevron was right.
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