RFK Jr. The Defender - Big Oil Injustice with Steven Donziger

00:00:00.000 Hey, welcome everybody.

00:00:01.000 Today my guest is somebody very special, a colleague, a friend, one of my personal heroes, Stephen Donziger.

00:00:11.000 Stephen 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.

00:00:40.000 But what Stephen's been through is something that I think is a science fiction nightmare.

00:00:45.000 It's a dystopian nightmare of the corporate takeover of American democracy.

00:00:52.000 It's something when you hear his story, I think most of you won't believe it.

00:00:58.000 To get ahead a little bit, Stephen is now under house arrest.

00:01:03.000 He's an attorney who has been disbarred.

00:01:05.000 He's wearing an ankle bracelet.

00:01:08.000 His bank accounts have been frozen.

00:01:11.000 His passport has been taken.

00:01:15.000 He 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.

00:01:31.000 And 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.

00:01:44.000 I didn't even know this was possible in America.

00:01:47.000 I actually have been I'm prosecuted privately on criminal charges in Poland.

00:01:54.000 When I was over there, I was testifying before the Polish parliament, and Smithfield Foods prosecuted me for something that I said during that debate.

00:02:09.000 And I said to people at that time, this could never happen in the United States, but actually it can, and it's much worse.

00:02:18.000 And Stephen and I first met, and I went down to Ecuador for the first time in 1988 to work on the oil issue.

00:02:27.000 And 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.

00:02:50.000 And Texaco had been in there since 1977.

00:02:54.000 Texaco was later purchased by Chevron.

00:02:57.000 Texaco was operating there a very, very sloppy oil operation.

00:03:03.000 And they knew nobody was watching them except for the 30,000 indigenous people and some colonists who live in that area.

00:03:10.000 It's a very rich area.

00:03:12.000 It literally is like Eden.

00:03:14.000 It is a paradise.

00:03:16.000 And there are many Indian groups.

00:03:19.000 I 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.

00:03:33.000 And Texaco had gone down there to using what they call a pump and dump operation.

00:03:38.000 First of all, they had very shoddy pipeline that spilled about 16.8 million gallons of oil between 77 and 88.

00:03:47.000 But more insidiously, they were dumping the water from their production wells.

00:03:51.000 When 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.

00:04:02.000 And there are maybe up to 100 gallons of this extremely toxic water.

00:04:07.000 It's called produce water.

00:04:09.000 It's a witch's brew of benzene, toluene, xylene, and all of these soluble and insoluble contaminants that are associated with oil, with petroleum.

00:04:20.000 And you have to bring that up.

00:04:22.000 It comes up to steaming hot.

00:04:24.000 In our country you're forced to collect it in barrels and then properly dispose of it.

00:04:29.000 But they were in the Amazon and nobody was watching.

00:04:32.000 So Texaco just took all of that toxic waste and they dumped it into these big production pools or simply into the nearest river.

00:04:43.000 And from the pools they were unlined and they just went into the river.

00:04:46.000 And the Indians From the earliest days were complaining about it, that their children were dying of cancer, of poisoning, of gastrointestinal issues.

00:04:56.000 They had eye infections, skin infections.

00:05:00.000 They were dying of all kinds of immune compromise that is associated with petroleum exposures.

00:05:10.000 And Texaco would send its...

00:05:12.000 It's representatives in and they would tell them time and again, that is good for you.

00:05:18.000 It's like milk.

00:05:20.000 It's filled with vitamins and it cannot harm you.

00:05:24.000 And the Indians knew they were being lied to, but they had no remedy.

00:05:28.000 And finally, Steven Donziger shows up with a number of other human rights lawyers.

00:05:35.000 And 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.

00:05:46.000 And it thought it could bribe the people, the judges in Ecuador and the government officials, and it could get a better result there.

00:05:57.000 So it told the judges in the Southern District of New York, this action should really be fought in Ecuador.

00:06:04.000 And you fought them, and they won that, and it was transferred to Ecuador.

00:06:09.000 And then Stephen, in front of an Ecuadorian judge, won a...

00:06:16.000 It was something like $18 billion, which shocked them.

00:06:23.000 And they had no intention of paying.

00:06:25.000 They took all their infrastructure and assets and moved them out of Ecuador.

00:06:29.000 And then I think that was reduced to something like $9.5 billion, which was still a big chunk of pocket change.

00:06:39.000 And they, instead of paying it, they began suing Stephen.

00:06:43.000 And they found a very sympathetic judge, Art Kaplan, Judge Art Kaplan in New York.

00:06:52.000 And here's a judge who has repeatedly publicly said that this is an important company.

00:06:59.000 It's important for our economy.

00:07:00.000 It's important for our energy system.

00:07:03.000 And thank God we have them.

00:07:04.000 He loves us.

00:07:07.000 And he has done things that I don't think have ever been done in history, the history of our country, to a lawyer.

00:07:15.000 And why don't you, you know, fill in the blanks.

00:07:20.000 I don't mean to talk anymore in this.

00:07:22.000 People want to hear you talking.

00:07:24.000 Thank you, Robert.

00:07:26.000 You know, it's funny.

00:07:27.000 I remember you being involved in this issue in the early part of your career and With Chris Bonifaz.

00:07:33.000 Christobel Bonifaz, yeah.

00:07:35.000 He got me involved.

00:07:37.000 Our first trip was in April of 1993, led by Christobel.

00:07:43.000 I 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.

00:07:58.000 about this awful apocalyptic environmental catastrophe.

00:08:02.000 And when we got there in April of 1993, I was a young lawyer.

00:08:06.000 I was just stunned, shocked, appalled, sickened, nauseated.

00:08:13.000 It 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.

00:08:25.000 The pollution happened As an engineering project, not as an accident.

00:08:29.000 And people need to remember that.

00:08:32.000 I think it was two or three times what Exxon spilled in Valdez.

00:08:38.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:08:39.000 But it was in a much more sensitive environment.

00:08:43.000 With people in it who are eating it every day for the rest of their lives, and not a drop has ever been cleaned up.

00:08:49.000 Yeah, 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. 1.00

00:09:02.000 They don't have fossils.

00:09:04.000 They breathe the air.

00:09:06.000 They eat the food that they capture in the jungle or fishing in the rivers.

00:09:11.000 They bathe in the rivers and the streams.

00:09:13.000 So 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.

00:09:32.000 And when they started to question it, you know, they were told by the Texaco engineers that the oil was like milk, it has vitamins.

00:09:39.000 And 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.

00:09:56.000 And I will say this, you know, it's been a long road by our legal team and I'm not the only lawyer.

00:10:06.000 There's been a lot of really great lawyers who worked on this over the years.

00:10:11.000 What 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.

00:10:28.000 I believe that I am the target of what might be the most vicious and well-financed corporate retaliation campaign ever.

00:10:36.000 They've used 60 law firms and 2,000 lawyers to attack me.

00:10:40.000 And other members of our team.

00:10:42.000 And 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.

00:10:52.000 I 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.

00:11:09.000 And false evidence.

00:11:10.000 And 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.

00:11:25.000 That 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.

00:11:39.000 But they also rejected Judge Kaplan's findings that this case was obtained by fraud.

00:11:45.000 And 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.

00:12:02.000 So they had done this.

00:12:03.000 So 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.

00:12:21.000 And they've been doing that now for 10 or 11 years with the help of this particular judge here in New York.

00:12:28.000 They ended up You know, in the law, you know, enforcing foreign judgments, the presumption is always in favor of the winning party, you know.

00:12:38.000 And to try to overcome that, what they did is they paid this Ecuadorian man $2 million plus, flew him up here.

00:12:47.000 Their lawyers at Gibson Dunn coached him for 53 consecutive days on how to testify.

00:12:52.000 And 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.

00:12:59.000 And it's just completely false.

00:13:01.000 There'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.

00:13:15.000 So on the basis- He was given millions of dollars and U.S. citizenship for him and his entire family.

00:13:21.000 And they paid the best immigration lawyer in America, actually the president then of the National Immigration Lawyers Association, Ira Kurtzbach.

00:13:29.000 He's a fine lawyer.

00:13:31.000 Chevron paid him to get this witness, Alberto Guerra, and his family political asylum in the United States.

00:13:39.000 We believe under false pretense.

00:13:40.000 But in any event, it happened.

00:13:42.000 He now lives in the United States.

00:13:44.000 He was paid 24 times his salary in Ecuador when he moved here.

00:13:49.000 Expenses, income taxes, legal fees, housing, health care, car.

00:13:54.000 He became a kept man by Chevron.

00:13:57.000 Judge Kaplan let this happen.

00:14:00.000 You can't pay fact witnesses under legal ethics.

00:14:04.000 You can pay an expert witness, his or her fee, but not a fact witness.

00:14:09.000 Judge Kaplan let Chevron pay this guy massive sums of money.

00:14:12.000 We call it a bribe.

00:14:13.000 I don't know what they call it.

00:14:15.000 We think they bribed this guy to try to frame me.

00:14:19.000 Judge Kaplan denied me a jury.

00:14:21.000 I never had a neutral fact finder.

00:14:23.000 There we are.

00:14:24.000 He 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.

00:14:35.000 And as one final quick point, Judge Kaplan refused to look at the evidence that had been presented in Ecuador.

00:14:41.000 He just refused, flat out refused to look at any of the environmental evidence.

00:14:45.000 Yet he was purporting to determine whether the judgment in Ecuador was valid or not.

00:14:50.000 So it was really a reverse engineered trial.

00:14:54.000 It was not a fair trial.

00:14:56.000 But the important point is the Ecuadorians, the affected communities, have won their case.

00:15:01.000 It's a winning judgment, and I think this is happening to me because we've been very successful, not because there were mistakes made.

00:15:08.000 Well, let's hear what has...

00:15:11.000 Tell us about the parade of horribles that has happened to you at the hands of Judge Kaplan, because it's really...

00:15:19.000 I don't think anybody will believe this when they hear it.

00:15:22.000 This is...

00:15:24.000 Okay, here we go.

00:15:26.000 So you're sitting in your house right now wearing an ankle bracelet.

00:15:30.000 In 10 days, it'll be 600 days.

00:15:33.000 Let me be clear about how this happened.

00:15:35.000 And you have no passport.

00:15:37.000 Your bank account is frozen.

00:15:39.000 You're not allowed to make a living.

00:15:41.000 I can't.

00:15:42.000 Yeah.

00:15:44.000 Without a hearing.

00:15:46.000 So what happened was, you know, after Judge Kaplan ruled against me, you know, Chevron had dropped all its damages claims.

00:15:53.000 It originally sued me for the largest amount of money ever made.

00:15:56.000 An individual has ever been sued for in this country, $60 billion.

00:15:59.000 $60 billion.

00:16:00.000 But 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.

00:16:10.000 So 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.

00:16:23.000 And I knew at that point it was a lost cause.

00:16:26.000 So the trial then happened.

00:16:27.000 It was very, you know, rapid and I believe truncated and unfair.

00:16:32.000 It produced the result we expected.

00:16:35.000 Kaplan relied on this paid Chevron witness to conclude that I had tried to bribe the trial judge.

00:16:40.000 Again, a finding rejected by 29 appellate judges in Ecuador and Canada.

00:16:44.000 Nevertheless, 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.

00:16:57.000 I 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.

00:17:06.000 That Kaplan then, without a jury, gave them millions of dollars of court costs from me.

00:17:12.000 He ordered me to pay.

00:17:13.000 I'm a human rights guy working out of a two-bedroom apartment.

00:17:16.000 They make $250 billion a year as an oil company, but he ordered me to pay their legal fees.

00:17:20.000 Millions and millions of dollars.

00:17:24.000 Exactly.

00:17:25.000 I didn't have that kind of money, obviously.

00:17:27.000 So he let them freeze my bank accounts.

00:17:30.000 I didn't have a ton of money, but we were living off this money that we were raising to fund the litigation.

00:17:37.000 At that point, they froze my bank accounts.

00:17:43.000 And they claimed that I had probably hidden money away somewhere, which was preposterous.

00:17:49.000 And they knew it.

00:17:50.000 But 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.

00:18:01.000 You know, and that obviously implicates my ethical obligations to my clients.

00:18:05.000 It violates attorney-client privilege.

00:18:09.000 I mean, all sorts of privileges that are just vital to the functioning of any lawyer in the world.

00:18:14.000 And so I asked Judge Kaplan, I said, please hold me in civil contempt.

00:18:19.000 I cannot do this without appealing at first to the federal appellate court here in New York.

00:18:25.000 Judge Kaplan refused to hold me in civil contempt.

00:18:28.000 I couldn't get a direct appeal.

00:18:30.000 This went on for months and months and months while Chevron was bombarding me with discovery requests and trying to...

00:18:35.000 Why did you want to be held in civil contempt?

00:18:37.000 You mean as opposed to criminal contempt?

00:18:40.000 In 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.

00:18:48.000 I had no way to get to the appellate court without them first holding me in civil contempt.

00:18:53.000 So, Bobby, this is a typical way lawyers deal with these types of issues.

00:18:58.000 They ask to be held in contempt.

00:19:01.000 And then if the appellate court rules in their favor, it goes away.

00:19:04.000 And if they lose at the appellate court, they then comply with the order, which was my intention.

00:19:09.000 I'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.

00:19:23.000 What Judge Kaplan did that has never been done before is after I had appealed, he finally held me in civil contempt per my request.

00:19:31.000 I 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.

00:19:47.000 And this was on August 6, 2019.

00:19:51.000 Now let me explain what this means.

00:19:54.000 You charge me with a misdemeanor, meaning the maximum sentence if I get convicted is six months in prison.

00:20:00.000 I believe I'm totally innocent, but let's just, maybe we'll assume it's legit and I get convicted, okay?

00:20:06.000 I've already served 590 days at home on a charge with a maximum sentence of 180 days in prison.

00:20:16.000 And I have not had a trial yet.

00:20:19.000 I 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.

00:20:28.000 And again, I've been held 590 days.

00:20:30.000 And 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.

00:20:45.000 So why am I still in home confinement when I've served the maximum sentence already many times over?

00:20:52.000 You 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.

00:21:06.000 And one other additional shocking point.

00:21:09.000 When Judge Kaplan, when a judge charges someone with criminal contempt, it's unusual, right?

00:21:14.000 You know, criminal charges come out of prosecutorial offices, not out of the judiciary.

00:21:20.000 That's our separation of powers in the American system.

00:21:23.000 You know, the executive branch charges and prosecutes crimes.

00:21:28.000 Judges oversee the courtroom and the legislative branch defines what the, the statute defines what the crime is.

00:21:35.000 So when a judge Charge is a crime.

00:21:39.000 It's highly unusual.

00:21:40.000 It can only happen under very rare circumstances.

00:21:42.000 And 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.

00:21:49.000 And in this case, the federal prosecutor turned down Judge Kaplan.

00:21:53.000 They declined to prosecute me for, I think, obvious reasons.

00:21:58.000 When 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.

00:22:08.000 When I showed up in court the very first day, they had me locked up.

00:22:11.000 And I'm thinking, what the heck am I being prosecuted by a private law firm?

00:22:15.000 And this is the kicker.

00:22:17.000 We started researching Seward and Kissel's client base, and they have extensive clients in the oil and gas industry.

00:22:24.000 And 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.

00:22:42.000 Oaktree has two executives on Chevron's board of directors.

00:22:46.000 The 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.

00:23:03.000 It's illegal.

00:23:04.000 They have to be disinterested.

00:23:05.000 And they have an interest in your destruction because of all their oil and gas ties, including their ties to Chevron.

00:23:12.000 So 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.

00:23:27.000 And the government, through Judge Kaplan, essentially gave Big Oil the power to prosecute its biggest critic.

00:23:33.000 And they've locked me up, and they've deprived me of my liberty.

00:23:36.000 And they're a private law firm.

00:23:38.000 They're not even a governmental prosecutor.

00:23:40.000 And that's my situation.

00:23:42.000 Listen, It's shocking.

00:23:44.000 And I'm not going to lie.

00:23:46.000 It's scary.

00:23:47.000 You know, I have a wife and a 14-year-old son.

00:23:50.000 I have a trial scheduled for May 10th.

00:23:52.000 Again, they're denying me a jury.

00:23:55.000 I 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.

00:24:05.000 So, you know, I've calculated that the only way I can stop this, really, there's a couple of ways.

00:24:10.000 One is people need to pay attention and complain.

00:24:13.000 There needs to be a major public outcry.

00:24:15.000 And 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.

00:24:41.000 So 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.

00:24:54.000 Well, 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.

00:25:14.000 What can people who are listening to this podcast, what can they do to help Stephen Donziger?

00:25:20.000 Thank you.

00:25:21.000 So people who want to help, please go to our website.

00:25:24.000 It's called FreeDonziger, F-R-E-E-D-O-N-Z-I-G-E-R, all together,.org.

00:25:33.000 And you can sign up for our campaign.

00:25:36.000 And you can also donate money to my defense fund on that website.

00:25:41.000 And I want to talk a little bit about support that I need if I can.

00:25:45.000 First of all, I recognize times are difficult for many people, and we want you involved whether you can support financially or not.

00:25:53.000 But if you can donate even a little bit, we have literally thousands of small donors who have helped me.

00:25:59.000 And 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.

00:26:10.000 Since I was disbarred, by the way, based entirely on Judge Kaplan's erroneous findings based on Chevron's pay witnesses.

00:26:18.000 I never had a hearing.

00:26:21.000 Where I was allowed to challenge Judge Kaplan's findings.

00:26:24.000 So 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.

00:26:34.000 I'm challenging that, by the way.

00:26:36.000 I have a case now before the New York Court of Appeals.

00:26:39.000 But 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.

00:26:51.000 Again, it's just another kind of aspect to this case that's irregular.

00:26:55.000 You just don't see this.

00:26:57.000 You know, so there almost seems to be like an exception for me on almost every level of the law.

00:27:03.000 I mean, I'm the first person ever sued under civil RICO who never got a jury, first person in the country, you know.

00:27:09.000 I'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.

00:27:22.000 I'm the first person held pretrial on a misdemeanor at home for even one day, much less 600 days.

00:27:31.000 Time after time, the courts here seem to make exceptions to the law in order to help Chevron target me.

00:27:40.000 It's shocking to me.

00:27:45.000 You know when you sue Chevron, it's not going to be easy, Street.

00:27:48.000 I mean, you know they're going to fight you, right?

00:27:50.000 But 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.

00:28:07.000 You know, and look, I respect the rule of law.

00:28:10.000 I respect the courts.

00:28:12.000 You know, I've been litigating in court now for 27 years on this case, and I've done a lot of other cases.

00:28:17.000 You know, I'm a law guy.

00:28:19.000 But what's happening to me is not rule of law stuff.

00:28:23.000 It's very irregular stuff.

00:28:25.000 You 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.

00:28:35.000 You know, they're not used to seeing that in the United States of America.

00:28:38.000 So, you know, and also I want to say this.

00:28:41.000 This goes way beyond me, right?

00:28:43.000 I mean, you know, this is not about Stephen Donziger, ultimately.

00:28:47.000 It's really about the effort by the fossil fuel industry writ large to intimidate human rights lawyers.

00:28:53.000 I mean, that's what this is really about.

00:28:54.000 They 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.

00:29:12.000 It 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.

00:29:24.000 You 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.

00:29:33.000 The pollution is still there.

00:29:35.000 You know, so they expect the people who live there to pick up the tab for pollution Chevron caused?

00:29:40.000 No.

00:29:41.000 You know, and this lawsuit was about correcting That injustice.

00:29:45.000 And 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.

00:29:56.000 You know, that's not right.

00:29:57.000 That's an abuse of the legal system.

00:30:01.000 It's classic crony capitalism.

00:30:06.000 It'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.

00:30:27.000 I'm curious about one thing.

00:30:29.000 Usually 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.

00:30:41.000 Every state has its own procedures for law licensing and lawyer discipline.

00:30:47.000 In 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.

00:31:04.000 And 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.

00:31:19.000 And I'm like, you gotta be kidding me.

00:31:21.000 Why 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?

00:31:30.000 And they ended up suspending me.

00:31:34.000 Without 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.

00:31:45.000 I was determined because I won this case against Chevron to be an immediate threat to the public order.

00:31:50.000 So when I got suspended, I still insisted on what's called a post suspension hearing.

00:31:55.000 They still wouldn't let me challenge Judge Kaplan.

00:31:58.000 So I brought in a bunch of witnesses who could talk about my integrity.

00:32:01.000 I mean, prominent people, prominent lawyers.

00:32:04.000 And the neutral hearing officer, a gentleman by the name of John Horan, who's a longtime New York lawyer, ruled in my favor.

00:32:12.000 And recommended that my bar license be reinstated in a 45-page decision.

00:32:18.000 And the Bar Grievance Committee, which is under, I think, the heavy influence of the corporate law firms in town, appealed that.

00:32:25.000 And 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.

00:32:38.000 So they basically nullified my whole hearing.

00:32:42.000 We're the only person to hear the evidence ruled in my favor.

00:32:45.000 And we've appealed that to the New York Court of Appeals.

00:32:48.000 Well, we've asked them to let me appeal it.

00:32:51.000 We filed a motion for leave to appeal.

00:32:54.000 And it's been sitting up there since September of last year.

00:32:57.000 They haven't ruled on it.

00:32:58.000 So the issue isn't over.

00:33:00.000 I 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.

00:33:11.000 But the larger point is I got my law license suspended based on this non-jury civil RICO case that has been discredited.

00:33:20.000 So, 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.

00:33:30.000 You know, think about this, Robert.

00:33:32.000 You 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.

00:33:43.000 Let's go down there and, you know, knock some heads around.

00:33:48.000 And, you know, there's a bar complaint against him signed by hundreds of lawyers.

00:33:52.000 It's 53 pages.

00:33:53.000 And they haven't done anything.

00:33:55.000 I 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.

00:34:02.000 And 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.

00:34:16.000 As 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,

00:34:37.000 but you must have spent a lot of time thinking about and perhaps investigating about why Judge Lewis Kaplan Would be so sympathetic.

00:34:50.000 Do you think it's ideological?

00:34:52.000 Or is there something more than that?

00:34:57.000 I don't know.

00:34:58.000 I mean, I've asked myself that a lot.

00:35:01.000 And I want to be clear, I've always treated Judge Kaplan with respect.

00:35:06.000 I've advocated in his courtroom for years.

00:35:09.000 I've been there dozens of times, and I've always been respectful toward him, personally.

00:35:15.000 Even though I do believe That he is making decisions that, to me, are not proper.

00:35:23.000 So, you know, I think he ideologically is very sympathetic to big corporations.

00:35:31.000 You 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.

00:35:42.000 They had some lowest bowels. 0.99

00:35:45.000 Firm, who kind of laid the chunk for the right-wing corporate ideology.

00:35:54.000 Yeah, that famous memo by Lewis Powell.

00:35:59.000 I don't know what it is.

00:36:02.000 Every time we try to get information...

00:36:05.000 Who appointed him?

00:36:07.000 Bill Clinton.

00:36:09.000 He was a liberal Democrat or...

00:36:15.000 No.

00:36:16.000 I mean, look, if you go back to the first Clinton years, I mean, Clinton was triangulating, right?

00:36:22.000 So, you know, Judge Kaplan has issued some decent decisions on issues of civil liberties.

00:36:29.000 Yeah, I mean, it's all mixed. 1.00

00:36:31.000 But when it comes to, like, corporations and human rights lawyering, He seems to be all in on the side of the corporation.

00:36:38.000 I 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.

00:36:52.000 In this case, I think Judge Kaplan You know, just brings to the bench a certain view of how his job should be.

00:37:02.000 And I think he jumped all over the Ecuador case.

00:37:05.000 I mean, I think it was just bizarre.

00:37:07.000 I 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.

00:37:18.000 I mean, who does that?

00:37:19.000 You know, I'll say this.

00:37:20.000 Think about this.

00:37:22.000 Go ahead.

00:37:23.000 After 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.

00:37:53.000 That's exactly right.

00:37:54.000 It was in Ecuador because Chevron Praise Ecuador's court system in 14 sworn affidavits.

00:38:01.000 It was like, you read these affidavits, you think it was like, you know, it was like the best court system in the world.

00:38:07.000 But 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.

00:38:18.000 And 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.

00:38:27.000 They won it in Ecuador.

00:38:28.000 We go to Ecuador.

00:38:29.000 We start winning.

00:38:29.000 They then come back to our original venue and say, oh, now we actually do want to be here because we were given a raw deal in Ecuador.

00:38:38.000 Help us, Judge Kaplan, attack the entire Ecuador judicial system, which is what he did without a jury.

00:38:45.000 And think about it.

00:38:46.000 Just think about what this means.

00:38:48.000 You 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.

00:39:05.000 That's what he did.

00:39:07.000 Can you imagine if a trial judge in Ecuador tried to overturn a US Supreme Court decision?

00:39:13.000 How people would laugh at that?

00:39:16.000 And 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.

00:39:24.000 I'm like, you know, haven't you heard about these 29 other judges?

00:39:28.000 I 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.

00:39:40.000 Go figure.

00:39:42.000 Think about that.

00:39:45.000 You've given us a lot to think about, Steve.

00:39:48.000 You read, like, Michael Krause is a law professor at Chevron-funded, you know, Scalia Law School at George Mason University.

00:39:57.000 And he writes these blogs on Forbes.

00:39:59.000 I mean, I think Chevron probably pays him, but they're totally pro-Chevron about me.

00:40:04.000 And You know, all he can talk about is Judge Kaplan.

00:40:08.000 Never mentions the Supreme Court of Ecuador, Supreme Court of Canada.

00:40:11.000 Never mentions the fact that Chevron relied on paid witness testimony.

00:40:14.000 Never mentions the fact that Judge Kaplan wouldn't look at the evidence in Ecuador.

00:40:19.000 I mean, you know, if you don't know any better and you read their story, like, you know, it looks credible.

00:40:26.000 But once you really learn how this really went down, I find most people are just shocked.

00:40:33.000 Yeah, I'm shocked.

00:40:34.000 I'm shocked.

00:40:35.000 As 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.

00:40:53.000 This 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.

00:41:15.000 Steven 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.

00:41:27.000 Unfortunately, the American Revolution, you're standing up for principle.

00:41:31.000 You have You've endured tremendous personal sacrifices that, you know, you deserve just the opposite.

00:41:39.000 We ought to be building a statue to you rather than locking you in your apartment with an ankle bracelet.

00:41:46.000 I'm going to send you a thousand dollar check to Free Donziger.

00:41:52.000 Is that it?

00:41:54.000 Thank you, Bobby.

00:41:55.000 It's freedonziger.org.

00:41:57.000 Okay.

00:41:58.000 And I want you to use it for personal reasons, you know, to supplement your income and get a good present, a birthday present for Matt.

00:42:09.000 And I hope that other people who are listening to this will also do what you can and send a couple of bucks to Stephen.

00:42:18.000 And tell us again exactly how they do it.

00:42:22.000 Freedonziger.org.

00:42:24.000 So go to a website.

00:42:25.000 It's called Freedonziger.org.

00:42:32.000 There's a donate button right when you get to the page.

00:42:35.000 There's a lot of information, you know, beyond...

00:42:38.000 The information I've given out today.

00:42:40.000 And you can click on the donate button and you can donate whatever amount you feel comfortable.

00:42:45.000 If you don't want to donate, click anyway and join the campaign.

00:42:49.000 There's a sign up.

00:42:50.000 And we're trying to build out our base of support.

00:42:52.000 We have 25,000 plus names already and every couple of weeks or sometimes more often I'll send around an update.

00:43:01.000 What's happening with the case.

00:43:03.000 A key date to remember is May 10th.

00:43:05.000 That's the date of my trial, my non-jury trial.

00:43:09.000 And, you know, I have a good legal team.

00:43:11.000 We're going to go in there and do the best we can under difficult circumstances.

00:43:15.000 But it's very important that people bear witness to that trial.

00:43:18.000 And if you're around New York and want to attend it, we'll let you know how you can do that.

00:43:23.000 But even if you can't attend or don't live in New York, you can listen into the trial via Zoom.

00:43:28.000 It's going to be broadcast.

00:43:30.000 Because of COVID, that's kind of a thing that's been going on now in the federal courts.

00:43:36.000 So we want, yeah, that's it, freedonziger.org.

00:43:42.000 And we want as many people as possible to bear witness.

00:43:46.000 And I'll also say this, if you, I tweet a fair amount about the case on my Twitter feed, it's at S Donziger.

00:43:55.000 So 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.

00:44:11.000 So check out my feed and you'll get a lot more information about the case and really daily updates.

00:44:17.000 Yeah, I was...

00:44:22.000 Yeah, I was an older guy getting used to social media too, and then they solved my problem by throwing me off of it altogether.

00:44:29.000 You 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.

00:44:51.000 I'm against these totalitarian petroleum tyrants.

00:44:59.000 Thank you.

00:45:00.000 Bobby, thank you.

00:45:01.000 And I just want to say before we go, your work has been an inspiration for me and other environmental lawyers over the years.

00:45:07.000 Thank you for what you do, what you've done.

RFK Jr. The Defender - March 19, 2021

Big Oil Injustice with Steven Donziger

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