Stephen Donziger is one of the world s leading human rights lawyers, and his story is an extraordinary story because it really shows the domination of our justice system, of our democracy, by corporate power in a way that many of the people who follow this show have seen in multiple guises. But what Stephen s been through is something that I think is a science fiction nightmare. It s a dystopian nightmare of the corporate takeover of American democracy. And when you hear his story, I think most of you won t believe it. To get ahead a little bit, Stephen is now under house arrest. He s an attorney who has been disbarred. His bank accounts have been frozen. His passport has been taken. And he is facing criminal charges, not from a prosecutor, but from a law firm that is Chevron s law firm, the company that is angry at him for beating them in a lawsuit. And they ve been able to get a federal judge to appoint a private law firm with financial ties to the oil industry to prosecute him criminally. And now he s facing a criminal charge of conspiracy to commit environmental crime. In this episode, we talk to him about his story and how he s fighting for human rights in the Amazon and the fight against corporate greed and corruption in the oil and gas industry. And how he is fighting for the rights of the indigenous people of the Amazon, and how they are being lied to by the multinationals that are trying to exploit their natural resources and pollute their environment and kill their environment to get their water and land. in order to enrich their oil and their lands. and their children. This is a little like a scene from the movie, and it s going back to the 80s and 90s, but with a whole lot more. Thank you for listening to this episode of HAPPY BONUS EPISODE featuring my guest, my hero, Stephen Donaghy! and I hope you ll join me in the fight for justice and human rights everywhere. - Tom and I have a good day. Thank you so much for listening and supporting me in this amazing episode. Cheers, Tom Cochran, your support is so much appreciated, and thank you for being a friend of mine, and I can t wait to do my best to do our best to help you in this podcast to make a better job on this podcast, and we ll do our very best to make the world better in the future.
00:00:01.000Today my guest is somebody very special, a colleague, a friend, one of my personal heroes, Stephen Donziger.
00:00:11.000Stephen is one of the world's leading human rights lawyers, and his story is an extraordinary story because it really shows the The domination of our justice system, of our democracy by corporate power in a way that many of the people who follow this show have seen in multiple guises.
00:00:40.000But what Stephen's been through is something that I think is a science fiction nightmare.
00:00:45.000It's a dystopian nightmare of the corporate takeover of American democracy.
00:00:52.000It's something when you hear his story, I think most of you won't believe it.
00:00:58.000To get ahead a little bit, Stephen is now under house arrest.
00:01:03.000He's an attorney who has been disbarred.
00:01:15.000He is facing criminal charges, not from a prosecutor, From a law firm that is Chevron's law firm, the company that is angry at him for beating them in a lawsuit.
00:01:31.000And they've been able to persuade a federal judge to appoint a private law firm with financial ties to the oil industry to prosecute Stephen criminally.
00:01:44.000I didn't even know this was possible in America.
00:01:47.000I actually have been I'm prosecuted privately on criminal charges in Poland.
00:01:54.000When I was over there, I was testifying before the Polish parliament, and Smithfield Foods prosecuted me for something that I said during that debate.
00:02:09.000And I said to people at that time, this could never happen in the United States, but actually it can, and it's much worse.
00:02:18.000And Stephen and I first met, and I went down to Ecuador for the first time in 1988 to work on the oil issue.
00:02:27.000And at that time, we had been retained by CONFINI, and I think you were actually representing the kind of rival group, COFAN. But CONFINI, those are the two groups of the indigenous Indians in that part of the Amazon, which is called U Oriente, and the principal town is a little town.
00:02:50.000And Texaco had been in there since 1977.
00:02:54.000Texaco was later purchased by Chevron.
00:02:57.000Texaco was operating there a very, very sloppy oil operation.
00:03:03.000And they knew nobody was watching them except for the 30,000 indigenous people and some colonists who live in that area.
00:03:19.000I was representing the Shuar, which are the headhunting group, very famous headhunting group, the Ashwar, the Quechua, and many, many others who are members of this confederation called Confini.
00:03:33.000And Texaco had gone down there to using what they call a pump and dump operation.
00:03:38.000First of all, they had very shoddy pipeline that spilled about 16.8 million gallons of oil between 77 and 88.
00:03:47.000But more insidiously, they were dumping the water from their production wells.
00:03:51.000When you drill an oil well, You're bringing up, prior to the oil, there's a lot of very highly contaminated water that's locked in the geology that you have to get rid of.
00:04:02.000And there are maybe up to 100 gallons of this extremely toxic water.
00:04:09.000It's a witch's brew of benzene, toluene, xylene, and all of these soluble and insoluble contaminants that are associated with oil, with petroleum.
00:04:24.000In our country you're forced to collect it in barrels and then properly dispose of it.
00:04:29.000But they were in the Amazon and nobody was watching.
00:04:32.000So Texaco just took all of that toxic waste and they dumped it into these big production pools or simply into the nearest river.
00:04:43.000And from the pools they were unlined and they just went into the river.
00:04:46.000And the Indians From the earliest days were complaining about it, that their children were dying of cancer, of poisoning, of gastrointestinal issues.
00:04:56.000They had eye infections, skin infections.
00:05:00.000They were dying of all kinds of immune compromise that is associated with petroleum exposures.
00:05:20.000It's filled with vitamins and it cannot harm you.
00:05:24.000And the Indians knew they were being lied to, but they had no remedy.
00:05:28.000And finally, Steven Donziger shows up with a number of other human rights lawyers.
00:05:35.000And I remember when you sued them in the Southern District of New York, And Chevron didn't want to be sued in the United States because it didn't want to be in front of a jury.
00:05:46.000And it thought it could bribe the people, the judges in Ecuador and the government officials, and it could get a better result there.
00:05:57.000So it told the judges in the Southern District of New York, this action should really be fought in Ecuador.
00:06:04.000And you fought them, and they won that, and it was transferred to Ecuador.
00:06:09.000And then Stephen, in front of an Ecuadorian judge, won a...
00:06:16.000It was something like $18 billion, which shocked them.
00:07:37.000Our first trip was in April of 1993, led by Christobel.
00:07:43.000I went with Christobel, his son John, who was a good friend from law school, some doctors and investigators to really investigate the reports that we had heard based on your work and Judith Kimmerling's and others.
00:07:58.000about this awful apocalyptic environmental catastrophe.
00:08:02.000And when we got there in April of 1993, I was a young lawyer.
00:08:06.000I was just stunned, shocked, appalled, sickened, nauseated.
00:08:13.000It was maddening to see what Texaco did because, you know, the main difference between the damage in Ecuador and say what BP did in the Gulf of Mexico was that in Ecuador it was done by design.
00:08:25.000The pollution happened As an engineering project, not as an accident.
00:08:39.000But it was in a much more sensitive environment.
00:08:43.000With people in it who are eating it every day for the rest of their lives, and not a drop has ever been cleaned up.
00:08:49.000Yeah, and the extraordinary thing, in this kind of environment, the indigenous peoples, the rural communities, Depend on the environment for their sustenance, meaning they drink out of fresh water sources.
00:09:06.000They eat the food that they capture in the jungle or fishing in the rivers.
00:09:11.000They bathe in the rivers and the streams.
00:09:13.000So what happened was over a period of really not that many years, because Texaco was deliberately and systematically dumping millions of gallons of this wastewater Into streams and rivers that local people relied on for their drinking water and for their bathing and their sustenance, people became poisoned little by little.
00:09:32.000And when they started to question it, you know, they were told by the Texaco engineers that the oil was like milk, it has vitamins.
00:09:39.000And the level of abuse, racism, you know, whatever you want to call it, was at levels that I had never and still haven't seen before in kind of an environmental tort context.
00:09:56.000And I will say this, you know, it's been a long road by our legal team and I'm not the only lawyer.
00:10:06.000There's been a lot of really great lawyers who worked on this over the years.
00:10:11.000What Chevron has done to avoid paying a judgment in a case it lost, in a court where it wanted the trial to be held, in a court where it had accepted jurisdiction for this case, to me is unprecedented in the annals of our country's history.
00:10:28.000I believe that I am the target of what might be the most vicious and well-financed corporate retaliation campaign ever.
00:10:36.000They've used 60 law firms and 2,000 lawyers to attack me.
00:10:42.000And without this particular judge, you know, Judge Louis A. Kaplan, who's a New York federal judge, I don't think this ever could have possibly happened.
00:10:52.000I mean, every step of the way, you know, when they brought this civil racketeering case, it's been infected by what I believe are due process violations, misconduct by Chevron's lawyers, misconduct by Chevron's witnesses.
00:11:10.000And really, the key operative fact that people need to remember when I talk about my house arrest is the judgment that I work with others to help obtain for the people of Ecuador has been validated by 29 separate appellate judges in Ecuador and Canada.
00:11:25.000That is, by Ecuador's Supreme Court, by Ecuador's Constitutional Court in unanimous decisions, and also by the Ontario Court of Appeals in Canada, as well as by Canada's Supreme Court, the latter two Not on the merits, but for enforcement purposes.
00:11:39.000But they also rejected Judge Kaplan's findings that this case was obtained by fraud.
00:11:45.000And what ended up happening, Robert, is that as we were about to win the case, and the evidence against them was overwhelming voluminous, I mean, as much as admitted they'd been dumping toxic waste, they were trying to blame PetroEcuador, the state oil company, but everyone knew that they had designed the system, and they were the operator.
00:12:03.000So as we were approaching the end of the trial in 2010, 2011, we came across an internal Chevron document where one of the officials said our long-term strategy to win this case is to demonize Donziger.
00:12:21.000And they've been doing that now for 10 or 11 years with the help of this particular judge here in New York.
00:12:28.000They ended up You know, in the law, you know, enforcing foreign judgments, the presumption is always in favor of the winning party, you know.
00:12:38.000And to try to overcome that, what they did is they paid this Ecuadorian man $2 million plus, flew him up here.
00:12:47.000Their lawyers at Gibson Dunn coached him for 53 consecutive days on how to testify.
00:12:52.000And he came into Judge Kaplan's courtroom and said he had been in a meeting in Quito where I had approved the bribe of the trial judge.
00:13:01.000There's no evidence that ever happened other than the words from this paid Chevron witness, who, by the way, later recanted most of his testimony and admitted on cross-examination in a separate proceeding that he had been lying before Judge Kaplan.
00:13:15.000So on the basis- He was given millions of dollars and U.S. citizenship for him and his entire family.
00:13:21.000And they paid the best immigration lawyer in America, actually the president then of the National Immigration Lawyers Association, Ira Kurtzbach.
00:14:24.000He found that I participated in a fraud While 29 other judges validated the judgment based on the voluminous body of scientific evidence that was presented to the Ecuador court.
00:14:35.000And as one final quick point, Judge Kaplan refused to look at the evidence that had been presented in Ecuador.
00:14:41.000He just refused, flat out refused to look at any of the environmental evidence.
00:14:45.000Yet he was purporting to determine whether the judgment in Ecuador was valid or not.
00:14:50.000So it was really a reverse engineered trial.
00:16:00.000But to avoid a jury, they dropped all the damages claims because, you know, for those who don't know, under our Constitution, in a civil case, you only get a jury if you're sued for money.
00:16:10.000So to avoid a jury, that is to avoid it, you know, giving me a jury of my peers and having Judge Kaplan decide the case alone, Chevron on the eve of trial dropped all the money damages claims, knowing Kaplan had signaled to them what he was going to do.
00:16:23.000And I knew at that point it was a lost cause.
00:16:35.000Kaplan relied on this paid Chevron witness to conclude that I had tried to bribe the trial judge.
00:16:40.000Again, a finding rejected by 29 appellate judges in Ecuador and Canada.
00:16:44.000Nevertheless, we kept going and Continuing our enforcement actions against Chevron's assets in other countries, including in Canada, where our team was having quite a bit of success.
00:16:57.000I think Chevron got really, this is my theory at least, Chevron got really nervous, went back to Judge Kaplan, and said, we can't let this guy Donziger work on the case.
00:17:06.000That Kaplan then, without a jury, gave them millions of dollars of court costs from me.
00:17:50.000But what that allowed them to do is try to get my electronic devices, my computer and my cell phone, because I wanted to examine them to see if I had hidden bank accounts and whatnot.
00:18:01.000You know, and that obviously implicates my ethical obligations to my clients.
00:18:30.000This went on for months and months and months while Chevron was bombarding me with discovery requests and trying to...
00:18:35.000Why did you want to be held in civil contempt?
00:18:37.000You mean as opposed to criminal contempt?
00:18:40.000In other words, it was just a tactical maneuver to get a direct appeal on what I thought was an unlawful order that I turn over my confidential case file to Chevron.
00:18:48.000I had no way to get to the appellate court without them first holding me in civil contempt.
00:18:53.000So, Bobby, this is a typical way lawyers deal with these types of issues.
00:19:01.000And then if the appellate court rules in their favor, it goes away.
00:19:04.000And if they lose at the appellate court, they then comply with the order, which was my intention.
00:19:09.000I'm the only person in US history who's ever been held or charged with criminal contempt for doing what I did, which was the normal, what the courts call the well-trodden path to get up to the appellate court about a significant discovery dispute.
00:19:23.000What Judge Kaplan did that has never been done before is after I had appealed, he finally held me in civil contempt per my request.
00:19:31.000I filed for my appeal the next day, and a few weeks later, while I hadn't even written my brief yet, he charged me with criminal contempt for not complying with the order that I had challenged on appeal, and had me locked up.
00:20:19.000I am the only person in the United States charged with a misdemeanor at the federal level who has no criminal record, who's even been held one day pretrial.
00:20:30.000And the third interesting fact is the longest sentence ever imposed on a lawyer in New York, convicted of criminal contempt, Bruce Cutler, you might remember him, in 1994, was 90 days of home confinement.
00:20:45.000So why am I still in home confinement when I've served the maximum sentence already many times over?
00:20:52.000You know, and I believe what's really driving this is Chevron and interest in the federal judiciary that really want to attack the idea of human rights and environmental justice litigation, at least the successful kind.
00:21:06.000And one other additional shocking point.
00:21:09.000When Judge Kaplan, when a judge charges someone with criminal contempt, it's unusual, right?
00:21:14.000You know, criminal charges come out of prosecutorial offices, not out of the judiciary.
00:21:20.000That's our separation of powers in the American system.
00:21:23.000You know, the executive branch charges and prosecutes crimes.
00:21:28.000Judges oversee the courtroom and the legislative branch defines what the, the statute defines what the crime is.
00:21:40.000It can only happen under very rare circumstances.
00:21:42.000And when he or she does it, they're required by law to take it first to the U.S. attorney, the federal prosecutor, to pursue.
00:21:49.000And in this case, the federal prosecutor turned down Judge Kaplan.
00:21:53.000They declined to prosecute me for, I think, obvious reasons.
00:21:58.000When that failed, rather than let it sit, Judge Kaplan appointed a private law firm, Seward and Kissel, to prosecute me in the name of the government.
00:22:08.000When I showed up in court the very first day, they had me locked up.
00:22:11.000And I'm thinking, what the heck am I being prosecuted by a private law firm?
00:22:17.000We started researching Seward and Kissel's client base, and they have extensive clients in the oil and gas industry.
00:22:24.000And it turns out, and they admitted seven months after I'd been locked up in my home, that Chevron had been a client as recently as 2018, that one of their biggest clients was a company called Oaktree Capital, which is a $120 billion fund that finances a lot of oil and gas deals.
00:22:42.000Oaktree has two executives on Chevron's board of directors.
00:22:46.000The financial links between my prosecutor and Chevron and other Chevron-related entities are extensive, comprehensive, And our expert, ethics expert, Ellen Araszewski, said they can't prosecute you.
00:23:05.000And they have an interest in your destruction because of all their oil and gas ties, including their ties to Chevron.
00:23:12.000So essentially, if you reduce this to its basic nugget of whatever, the rub here, is I am the first person in America ever prosecuted by a corporation via its law firm.
00:23:27.000And the government, through Judge Kaplan, essentially gave Big Oil the power to prosecute its biggest critic.
00:23:33.000And they've locked me up, and they've deprived me of my liberty.
00:23:55.000I feel like I'm being punished for doing my job effectively as a lawyer on behalf of the people, Bobby, that you met, you know, back in the late 80s when you were down in Ecuador.
00:24:05.000So, you know, I've calculated that the only way I can stop this, really, there's a couple of ways.
00:24:10.000One is people need to pay attention and complain.
00:24:13.000There needs to be a major public outcry.
00:24:15.000And two is we have asked, or several Human rights groups like Amnesty International and others have asked Merrick Garland, the new Attorney General, to step in and take the case away from this private Chevron law firm and prosecute me directly out of the Department of Justice, at which point I believe they'll either dismiss the case or it'll be handled professionally such that I won't have to be locked up.
00:24:41.000So the real ask now is for the DOJ to take the case back from the private Chevron law firm so I could be prosecuted by a disinterested professional prosecutor, not a Chevron paid prosecutor.
00:24:54.000Well, you have a tremendous amount of support in the human rights community and from environmental groups including Amazon Watch, Rainforest Action Network, Waterkeeper Lions, the I think you have 10 or more Nobel Prize winners who have written in your support.
00:25:14.000What can people who are listening to this podcast, what can they do to help Stephen Donziger?
00:25:36.000And you can also donate money to my defense fund on that website.
00:25:41.000And I want to talk a little bit about support that I need if I can.
00:25:45.000First of all, I recognize times are difficult for many people, and we want you involved whether you can support financially or not.
00:25:53.000But if you can donate even a little bit, we have literally thousands of small donors who have helped me.
00:25:59.000And we raised money to pay lawyers, to pay expenses, and to pay my household expenses so my wife, son, and I can survive this, given that I can't get paid anymore.
00:26:10.000Since I was disbarred, by the way, based entirely on Judge Kaplan's erroneous findings based on Chevron's pay witnesses.
00:26:21.000Where I was allowed to challenge Judge Kaplan's findings.
00:26:24.000So Judge Kaplan not only ruled against me in the RICO case, it was also That decision was transferred into the bar grievance process to suspend my law license.
00:26:36.000I have a case now before the New York Court of Appeals.
00:26:39.000But it's a very dangerous day for any lawyer when a finding of civil fraud by a sole judge without a jury is used as a basis to take away someone's law license.
00:26:51.000Again, it's just another kind of aspect to this case that's irregular.
00:26:57.000You know, so there almost seems to be like an exception for me on almost every level of the law.
00:27:03.000I mean, I'm the first person ever sued under civil RICO who never got a jury, first person in the country, you know.
00:27:09.000I'm the first person in New York disbarred without a hearing based on a civil fraud charge with no jury, as opposed to a criminal finding, which is beyond a reasonable doubt, you know.
00:27:22.000I'm the first person held pretrial on a misdemeanor at home for even one day, much less 600 days.
00:27:31.000Time after time, the courts here seem to make exceptions to the law in order to help Chevron target me.
00:27:45.000You know when you sue Chevron, it's not going to be easy, Street.
00:27:48.000I mean, you know they're going to fight you, right?
00:27:50.000But what I never anticipated is the extent to which the judiciary or federal judiciary or at least elements of it could be so captured by a private oil company so they would be twisted into serving the interests of that company, as has happened with Judge Kaplan.
00:28:07.000You know, and look, I respect the rule of law.
00:28:25.000You know, creepy kinds of things that, you know, people who are human rights observers are used to seeing in countries like Turkey or Saudi Arabia or Russia.
00:28:35.000You know, they're not used to seeing that in the United States of America.
00:28:38.000So, you know, and also I want to say this.
00:28:43.000I mean, you know, this is not about Stephen Donziger, ultimately.
00:28:47.000It's really about the effort by the fossil fuel industry writ large to intimidate human rights lawyers.
00:28:53.000I mean, that's what this is really about.
00:28:54.000They want to hold me up as an example so young lawyers, law students, Others, non-profits, NGOs, do not do what we have done, which is build a really successful multi-billion dollar lawsuit against a big oil company.
00:29:12.000It challenges their business model, it challenges their way of doing business, it challenges their money, and it challenges their whole approach to getting away with pollution.
00:29:24.000You know, and what Chevron did in Ecuador, I mean, they privatized the profits, socialized the costs, put them on the backs of some of these vulnerable indigenous communities.
00:29:41.000You know, and this lawsuit was about correcting That injustice.
00:29:45.000And instead of paying the judgment that it lost legitimately as affirmed by multiple courts, they have spent literally billions of dollars going after me and other people.
00:30:06.000It's capturing, as you say, the judiciary to engineer the system of Socialism for the rich, for the oil industry, and this very kind of savage, barbaric, commercialist capitalism, and really a feudalism for the rest of us.
00:30:29.000Usually when you lose your law license, there's some involvement from the bar, and I cannot believe that the New York Bar Association would have anything to do with this.
00:30:41.000Every state has its own procedures for law licensing and lawyer discipline.
00:30:47.000In New York, where I live in Manhattan, there's something called the Manhattan Bar Grievance Committee, and several judges who work with Judge Kaplan referred me to the Grievance Committee Based on Judge Kaplan's findings, and they were all his longtime colleagues on the bench.
00:31:04.000And they told the Bar Grievance Committee that they should apply collateral estoppel against me, which basically means I couldn't challenge Judge Kaplan's false findings of fact that had already been contradicted by courts in Ecuador, the highest court in Ecuador, the highest court in Canada.
00:31:19.000And I'm like, you gotta be kidding me.
00:31:21.000Why would judges who are obligated to uphold the rule of law, uphold due process of law, be suggesting to the Bar Grievance Committee that I can't have a hearing?
00:31:34.000Without a hearing on based on the statute in New York that allows a lawyer to be suspended if he or she is determined without a hearing to be an immediate threat to the public order.
00:31:45.000I was determined because I won this case against Chevron to be an immediate threat to the public order.
00:31:50.000So when I got suspended, I still insisted on what's called a post suspension hearing.
00:31:55.000They still wouldn't let me challenge Judge Kaplan.
00:31:58.000So I brought in a bunch of witnesses who could talk about my integrity.
00:32:04.000And the neutral hearing officer, a gentleman by the name of John Horan, who's a longtime New York lawyer, ruled in my favor.
00:32:12.000And recommended that my bar license be reinstated in a 45-page decision.
00:32:18.000And the Bar Grievance Committee, which is under, I think, the heavy influence of the corporate law firms in town, appealed that.
00:32:25.000And the New York Appellate Court, the Intermediate Appellate Court, without even giving me a hearing, in a two-page conclusory opinion overturned his 45-page considered decision suggesting my law license be returned.
00:32:38.000So they basically nullified my whole hearing.
00:32:42.000We're the only person to hear the evidence ruled in my favor.
00:32:45.000And we've appealed that to the New York Court of Appeals.
00:32:48.000Well, we've asked them to let me appeal it.
00:32:51.000We filed a motion for leave to appeal.
00:32:54.000And it's been sitting up there since September of last year.
00:33:00.000I still have a law license in Washington, D.C., Although it's suspended based on the decision in New York as a matter of reciprocal discipline.
00:33:11.000But the larger point is I got my law license suspended based on this non-jury civil RICO case that has been discredited.
00:33:20.000So, you know, that, again, is another bizarre feature of these Chevron-orchestrated attacks on me, not just through the federal judiciary, but also through the Barr process.
00:33:32.000You know, remember Rudy Giuliani, who's a lawyer in New York, made that speech at Trump's rally just prior to the invasion of the U.S. Capitol on January 6th.
00:33:43.000Let's go down there and, you know, knock some heads around.
00:33:48.000And, you know, there's a bar complaint against him signed by hundreds of lawyers.
00:33:55.000I mean, they never suspended him as a threat to the public order, even though he basically incited a mob riot in the U.S. Capitol.
00:34:02.000And there's a real disparity in treatment between people who fight for human rights and people who represent corporate interests, in my view, when it comes to the bar grievance process in New York, and it really needs to be corrected.
00:34:16.000As attorneys, we were prohibited from From criticizing judges, people who are on the bench, and there are sanctions if you do that that are available if we publicly disparage them,
00:34:37.000but you must have spent a lot of time thinking about and perhaps investigating about why Judge Lewis Kaplan Would be so sympathetic.
00:35:01.000And I want to be clear, I've always treated Judge Kaplan with respect.
00:35:06.000I've advocated in his courtroom for years.
00:35:09.000I've been there dozens of times, and I've always been respectful toward him, personally.
00:35:15.000Even though I do believe That he is making decisions that, to me, are not proper.
00:35:23.000So, you know, I think he ideologically is very sympathetic to big corporations.
00:35:31.000You know, prior to being named to the bench, he represented Brown and Williamson in tobacco litigation at a big corporate law firm as a defense counsel.
00:36:31.000But when it comes to, like, corporations and human rights lawyering, He seems to be all in on the side of the corporation.
00:36:38.000I mean, just because a judge is appointed by a Democrat doesn't, or at least with Bill Clinton, doesn't necessarily mean they have Bill Clinton's philosophy about human rights or civil rights or whatever it may be.
00:36:52.000In this case, I think Judge Kaplan You know, just brings to the bench a certain view of how his job should be.
00:37:02.000And I think he jumped all over the Ecuador case.
00:37:07.000I mean, you know, he ruled that, again, based on this paid Chevron witness, he ruled that Ecuador's entire judicial system didn't meet basic standards of due process.
00:37:23.000After the Court of Appeals in the Southern District Said that, declared, and Exxon argued that it was a great judicial system and that they could handle this case and that they were honest and that they had a rule of law and that they were sophisticated enough to handle this case and had it transferred from the Southern District to Ecuador at their request.
00:37:54.000It was in Ecuador because Chevron Praise Ecuador's court system in 14 sworn affidavits.
00:38:01.000It was like, you read these affidavits, you think it was like, you know, it was like the best court system in the world.
00:38:07.000But it was only when we took them up on their word, went down there litigated, put in the evidence, started to win, that suddenly that court system wasn't to their liking, and they started to attack it.
00:38:18.000And then they came, think about this, they came back to the court that we originally filed the underlying lawsuit, and they would never do the lawsuit in the US to avoid a jury.
00:38:48.000You have a first-level trial court, the lowest court in the federal system, In New York, essentially ruling in a way that tries to overturn a Supreme Court decision from another sovereign nation.
00:39:16.000And it's like, what's amazing to me is when a U.S. judge does it, there's people, I mean, colleagues are like, oh, Judge Kaplan ruled, you know, I'm so sorry.
00:39:24.000I'm like, you know, haven't you heard about these 29 other judges?
00:39:28.000I mean, there's people who give more credibility to one U.S. judge than the collective credibility of 29 appellate judges in Ecuador and Canada, including the entire Supreme Courts of both countries.
00:40:35.000As much as I, as cynical as I am about the institutions of government and about agency capture and about the power of the oil industry over American democracy, I really never thought that I would see anything like this in the United States of America.
00:40:53.000This is, you know, something that you see in a banana republic, you know, in Venezuela or You know, the Dominican Republic back in the 50s where everything is up for grabs and it's not a judicial system.
00:41:15.000Steven Dozier, as I told you, your son Matt, you are to me as much a hero as any of the people who sacrificed their lives.
00:41:27.000Unfortunately, the American Revolution, you're standing up for principle.
00:41:31.000You have You've endured tremendous personal sacrifices that, you know, you deserve just the opposite.
00:41:39.000We ought to be building a statue to you rather than locking you in your apartment with an ankle bracelet.
00:41:46.000I'm going to send you a thousand dollar check to Free Donziger.
00:43:30.000Because of COVID, that's kind of a thing that's been going on now in the federal courts.
00:43:36.000So we want, yeah, that's it, freedonziger.org.
00:43:42.000And we want as many people as possible to bear witness.
00:43:46.000And I'll also say this, if you, I tweet a fair amount about the case on my Twitter feed, it's at S Donziger.
00:43:55.000So if you can follow me on Twitter, and also I'm on Instagram, and I'm, you know, I'm kind of a I'm an older guy and I'm sort of getting used to social media, but I use Twitter a fair amount.
00:44:11.000So check out my feed and you'll get a lot more information about the case and really daily updates.
00:44:22.000Yeah, I was an older guy getting used to social media too, and then they solved my problem by throwing me off of it altogether.
00:44:29.000You know, we would love to livestream your trial on The Defender, so why don't we talk afterwards about how we can do that, how we might be able to do that, and we'd like to continue to support you in every way that we can, Stephen, and thank you for fighting for, you know, for these, you know, the poorest of the poor.
00:44:51.000I'm against these totalitarian petroleum tyrants.