Steven Donziger, the human rights lawyer who spent nearly three decades fighting Chevron on behalf of 30,000 people in the Ecuadorian rainforest, has been sentenced to six months in federal prison for “criminal contempt.” On October 1, in a lower Manhattan federal courtroom, Judge Loretta Preska justified imposing the maximum penalty by asserting that Donziger, now 60, had not shown contrition. She said, “It seems that only the proverbial two-by-four between the eyes will instill in him any respect for the law.”
In May, Preska had found Donziger guilty after a trial without a jury. And now Donziger, along with his family and scores of supporters, had to listen to the federal judge compare him to a mule who needed to be beaten with a piece of wood before complying.
Prior to sentencing, Donziger reminded the court in a polite and at times emotional statement that he had already spent 787 days under house arrest in his New York City apartment, a confinement that had put great pressure on his wife and teenage son. He explained that the court-imposed restrictions meant that his son had a father who was “unable to travel, leave his home except under narrow exceptions with court permission 48 hours in advance, unable to even go out for dinner, unable to have a father capable of doing all the things a father can do and should do with a child, including act with spontaneity.”
But even though Donziger was facing prison, he told the court he would not back down: “I have been attacked and demonized for years by Chevron in retaliation for helping Indigenous peoples in Ecuador try to do something to save their cultures, their lives, and our planet in the face of massive oil pollution. That’s the context for why we are here today.”
In response, Preska read out a prepared 50-minute statement for her harsh sentence. “Mr. Donziger spent the last seven plus years thumbing his nose at the US judicial system,” she said. “It’s now time to pay the piper.”
Donziger will not go to prison immediately. His attorneys will challenge the criminal contempt conviction, and they will also ask a higher court to put off his prison sentence pending that appeal. But Preska will keep him under house arrest, once again calling him a “flight risk.” In the past, she has warned that he “has ties to Ecuador,” insinuating that he would abandon his family and his New York City apartment to go live in the rain forest.
You can’t understand this latest injustice without looking back at Chevron’s long campaign against Donziger, who won a landmark pollution case against the oil giant in Ecuadorian courts in 2013. Chevron was ordered to spend $9.5 billion to clean up a contaminated area the size of Rhode Island, and to pay for the health care of the 30,000 plaintiffs whose communities have seen a rising number of cancer cases. Instead of following the legal order, Chevron launched a case in New York, and in 2014, a federal judge, Lewis Kaplan, found Donziger and some of his Ecuadorian allies civilly liable for racketeering, bribery, and fraud. Then, Kaplan asked the federal prosecutor for the Southern District of New York to put Donziger on trial for “criminal contempt” connected to the original conviction. The federal prosecutor refused, so Kaplan handpicked an attorney from a private firm, Rita Glavin, to prosecute—a nearly unprecedented legal maneuver.
As Chevron’s vendetta continued, international outrage grew. Just before sentencing, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights issued an opinion in Donziger’s favor, ruling that his two years of house arrest was illegal under international law and that he had been denied the right to a fair trial. A panel of five prominent jurists called that confinement “arbitrary” and said that both judges, Kaplan and Preska, had shown “a staggering lack of objectivity and impartiality.” In court, Preska briefly acknowledged the UN findings only to dismiss them.
Once again, the mainstream media is largely ignoring Chevron’s campaign of retaliation against Donziger. The New York Times, Donziger’s hometown newspaper, reported nothing in the two days after the verdict, and has barely mentioned the case for the past seven years.
Back in 1993, Donziger, fresh out of Harvard Law School, joined an ongoing fight for environmental justice. The struggle against Texaco, which was taken over by Chevron in 2001, began in the late 1980s in eastern Ecuador, where the oil company drilled and operated wells from 1972 to 1992. Texaco had disposed of its drilling wastes by methods that in some cases would have been illegal in the United States. (More details are here.) Local people began organizing against the pollution in their rivers and streams and in oil-soaked stretches of their land. The case started in the New York federal courts, but then a judge ordered it sent back to Ecuador—a move that Chevron’s lawyers welcomed at the time. So, in 2003, the legal battle re opened in the eastern oil frontier town of Lago Agrio.
The case wound its way up through three levels of the Ecuadorian courts, and in the end, after Chevron exhausted all appeals, its guilt was confirmed. Meanwhile, though, its counterattack back in New York was underway. Chevron charged that Donziger and his allies had committed bribery and fraud in Ecuador to win their case, and it used the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), which had been designed to prosecute the Mafia. Donziger and the codefendants expected they would face a jury, but at the last minute, Chevron dropped its demand for financial damages. Under RICO law, this meant the defendants lost their right to a jury, and Kaplan alone would decide the case.
Donziger’s supporters objected to Kaplan’s pro-corporate statements and hostility toward the human rights lawyer during the RICO trial. Kaplan is a career corporate lawyer turned judge, with no experience in Ecuador or anywhere else in the Global South. Yet he decided which witnesses to believe and which to disregard—and in 2014 he found Donziger and the others guilty.
Only a corporation like Chevron worth billions could have financed such a prosecution. The oil giant paid for a disgraced former judge named Alberto Guerra and his family to move to the United States. Chevron’s lawyers rehearsed Guerra’s testimony with him 53 times before he went on the witness stand, where Guerra claimed that Donziger and an Ecuadorian lawyer had offered him a $500,000 bribe and that the pair had ghostwritten the final judgment against Chevron. Donziger and his defense team estimate that Chevron has spent $2 billion on legal fees and other costs. (Chevron’s designated spokesman, James Craig, declined to give the corporation’s own figure for how much it has spent on the case. Craig also declined to say if Chevron is still paying Guerra or if he is still living in the United States.)
Chevron’s attacks against Donziger did not stop after it won the racketeering verdict. The current contempt case began when the oil corporation petitioned Kaplan for access to Donziger’s personal computer and cell phone. Donziger declined, arguing that his electronic communications would give Chevron’s lawyers “backdoor access to everything we are planning, thinking, and doing.” He said he would wait until the US Court of Appeals heard his argument, and if it required him to, then he would hand over his electronics. Preska dismissed his defense and convicted him in May—again, without a jury.
It’s vital to recognize Chevron’s role in this legal persecution. Its attorneys show up at every Donziger legal case—even the ones that don’t directly involve the company. At the same time as Donziger was defending himself against the criminal contempt charge, he was also fighting the effort to take away his license to practice law in New York. The state bar association appointed a special officer named John Horan to preside over open hearings, and he found in Donziger’s favor. Horan, a former prosecutor, had harsh words for Chevron: “The extent of [Donziger’s] pursuit by Chevron is so extravagant, and at this point so unnecessary and punitive, [that] while not a factor in my recommendation, [it] is nonetheless background to it.”
Months later, a higher New York state court tossed out Horan’s finding and disbarred Donziger.
Putting Donziger in a federal prison for six months is more than vindictiveness. The $9.5 billion judgment against Chevron in Ecuador still stands, but the oil giant unloaded its assets there. That means the plaintiffs must collect in other countries where the corporation has holdings. Kaplan’s racketeering verdict specifically prohibited the Ecuadorians from forcing Chevron to pay the judgment in the United States. But there are promising possibilities in Canada and elsewhere. Donziger is forced to put those fights on hold while he tries to stay out of prison.
But there are signs that Chevron has gone too far, and that relentlessly pursuing a human rights lawyer is damaging its international reputation. The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights is only the latest sign of concern and anger. Sixty-eight Nobel Laureates have shown their solidarity; another 475 lawyers and human rights defenders have signed a letter that calls his prosecution “one of the most important corporate accountability and human rights cases of our time.” Representative Jim McGovern, a Democrat from Massachusetts, said after the prison sentence that “it’s the executives at Chevron,” not Donziger, “who should be behind bars.”
What’s more, a movement to boycott Chevron is in the early stages. Big Oil is under scrutiny because of its role in the climate crisis, and divestment campaigns on college campuses and elsewhere are starting to have an impact. Large institutional investors may also start to pay attention. CalPERS, the giant retirement investment fund for California government employees, is headquartered in Chevron’s home state, and the teachers and municipal employees who contribute to it may ask why it holds $456 million of the oil giant’s stock.
Chevron must have hoped that its long retaliation campaign would force Donziger to abandon the fight for environmental justice—but it appears its aggressive strategy is backfiring.
Trump’s trip to Europe was a complete disaster, and not because he acted like a boorish bully
On his recent visit to Europe, he managed to convey once again his contempt for America’s European allies, and to demonstrate that he places more value on his own personal comfort than on the sacrifices that US soldiers have made in the past.
The trip itself cost millions of taxpayer dollars, yet Trump chose to skip a key ceremony honoring US war dead at Aisne-Marne American Cemetery because it was raining.
The White House offered up a cloud of unconvincing excuses for Trump’s absence, but other world leaders were not deterred by the fear of a few raindrops, and neither were past presidents Obama, Clinton, Bush, or Kennedy back in their day.
By choosing to stay warm and dry in his hotel room while other world leaders acknowledged the heroism of those who fought and died for freedom, Trump gave the concept of “American exceptionalism” a whole new meaning.
And then, instead of marching with other European leaders at a ceremony marking the end of World War I, Trump showed up lateand on his own and even missed the symbolic tolling of a bell marking the 100th anniversary of the 1918 armistice. (In a revealing coincidence, Vladimir Putin arrived on his own as well.)Overall, Trump seemed intent on proving that while the obligations of being president might force him to go on such trips, he doesn’t have to behave himself while he’s there.
For example, Trump is correct to accuse China of engaging in a variety of predatory trade practices and of failing to live up to its World Trade Organization commitments. He is also right when he complains that Europe has neglected its own defenses and relies too much on American protection (though he still seems to think NATO is a club with membership dues)..
He is hardly the first US official to criticize European defense preparations but being unoriginal doesn’t make it wrong.
Trump is also correct in his belief that Europe, Russia, and the United States would be better off if the divisions that presently divide them could be bridged or at least alleviated.
It would be better for Europe if Russia withdrew from Ukraine, stopped trying to intimidate the Baltic states, and stopped murdering former spies in foreign countries.
It would be good for Russia if Western sanctions were lifted and it no longer had to worry about open-ended NATO expansion. And it would be good for the United States if Russia could be pulled away from its increasingly close partnership with China.
For that matter, Trump wasn’t wrong to see North Korea’s nuclear and long-range missile programs as a serious problem that called for creative diplomacy.
The real problem is that Trump has no idea what to do about any of these issues, and he seems incapable of formulating a coherent approach to any of them. To the extent that he does have an actual policy toward Europe, for example, it is the exact opposite of what the United States ought to be doing.
Trump’s broad approach to Europe is one of “divide and rule.” He’s called the European Union a “foe” of the United States, and he has backed a number of the political forces that are now roiling the Continent and threatening the EU’s long-term future.
He endorsed Brexit, expressed his support for Marine Le Pen in France, and thinks well of illiberal leaders like Viktor Orban of Hungary and Andrzej Duda of Poland. Why? Because he thinks dividing Europe into contending national states will allow the larger and more powerful United States to bargain with each European state separately rather than face all of them together, and thus secure better deals for itself.
This approach might be termed “Neanderthal realism.” Playing “divide and rule” is a good idea when dealing with real enemies, but it makes no sense to sow division among countries with whom one has generally friendly relations and close economic ties, and when their collective support might be needed in other contexts.
This approach also runs counter to Trump’s stated desire to reduce US security commitments to Europe and to get Europe to take on greater responsibility for its own defense.
If you really want the United States to get out of the business of protecting Europe, you should also want Europe to be tranquil, capable, prosperous, and united after the United States withdraws. Why? So that Washington doesn’t have to worry about developments there and can focus its attention on other regions, such as Asia.
A Europe roiled by xenophobia, resurgent hyper-nationalism, and persistent internal wrangling wouldn’t be to America’s advantage; it would be just another problem area we’d have to keep an eye on.
Nor would a divided Europe be of much use in addressing any of the other problems on America’s foreign-policy agenda.
Why doesn’t Trump see this? Possibly because he is reflexively relying on the same tactics that brought him to the White House.
Trump’s political success in the United States rests on his skill at picking fights with others, whether it is rival Republican candidates, Democrats of all kinds, the media, Meryl Streep, Jeff Bezos, or anybody else who disagrees with him. His goal is either to bully opponents into backing down or use the spat to rev up his base.It has worked tolerably well here in the United States, because a lot of Americans are still angry or fearful and Trump is both shameless and adept at fueling those emotions. This same instinct leads him to behave abominably abroad: Insulting British Prime Minister Theresa May and London Mayor Sadiq Khan, deriding Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada as “Very dishonest & weak” or derisively tossing Starburst candies to German Chancellor Angela Merkel during a meeting of G-7 leaders... The problem, of course, is that the boorish behavior and conflict-stoking policies tend to backfire on the world stage.
.. Trump’s bullying bluster didn’t win big trade concessions from Canada, Mexico, or South Korea; the shiny “new” trade deals Trump negotiated with them were nearly identical to the old arrangements and in some ways inferior to them.
And given how Trump has treated America’s allies, why would May, Merkel, Macron, Abe, or Trudeau do him (or the United States) any favors? The declining US image abroad compounds this problem, as foreign leaders know their own popularity will suffer if they help Trump in any way.
.. Trump’s personal conduct is not even the biggest problem. Arguably, an even bigger issue is the strategic incoherence of his entire transactional approach. His overarching objective is to try to screw the best possible deal out of every interaction, but this approach instead makes it more difficult for the United States to achieve its most important foreign-policy goals.
.. Threatening trade wars with allies in Europe or Canada makes little sense from a purely economic perspective, for example, and it has made it harder for the United States to address the more serious challenge of China’s trade policies.
If Trump were as worried about China’s trade infractions as he claims to be, he would have lined up Europe, Japan, and other major economic actors and confronted China with a united front. Similarly, pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal and threatening allies with secondary sanctions not only raises doubts about America’s judgment (because the deal was working, and the Europeans know it); it just fuels further resentment at America’s shortsighted bullying.
.. It is increasingly clear that Trump was never the brilliant businessman he claimed to be; he got most of his wealth from his father using various shady tax dodges, and the Trump Organization may have been heavily dependent on illegal activities like money laundering.
.. We should focus less on his personal antics and inadequacies and focus more on his inability to formulate effective policies, even on issues where his instincts are in fact mostly correct.
.. Sadly, the 45th US president possesses a world-class ability to get things wrong, even when he’s right.
Normalizing Trade Relations With China Was a Mistake
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, an alliance of economic nationalists, human-rights activists, and anti-communists sought to deny China MFN status every year. And every year that alliance was defeated by those who insisted that by opening the American economy to Chinese imports, the United States would gently nudge Beijing towards economic liberalism, multiparty democracy, and a rejection of hegemonic designs—predictions that haven’t exactly been borne out.
One could argue that the final defeat for China trade hawks came not in 2000, when Congress actually passed PNTR for China, but in 1998, when lawmakers decreed that most-favored-nation status would henceforth be known as “normal trade relations.” Once China finally secured its anodyne-sounding PNTR status, which in turn greased the wheels for its accession to the World Trade Organization, it wasn’t long before its economy became irrevocably intertwined with that of the U.S. Never let it be said that language doesn’t matter.
.. For decades, China’s central government has sought to strengthen its hold on its western territories by, among other things, encouraging the large-scale settlement of members of its Han ethnic majority in Xinjiang, homeland of the mostly Muslim Uighurs, and Tibet, with its distinctive ethno-religious heritage. While the fate of Tibet was once a cause célèbre, that of the Uighurs has never garnered much attention in the wider world. This partly reflects the extraordinary success of China’s repressive apparatus, which layers mass surveillance, mass incarceration, outright censorship, and artful media manipulation to greatly limit the flow of news and information out of Xinjiang... Yet it is also an indirect product of PNTR. The annual battles over whether or not China merited MFN status naturally brought human rights issues to the fore, and gave voice to champions of the Tibetans and other marginalized, and sometimes brutalized, minorities. The deepening of economic ties that followed PNTR had the opposite effect—rather than draw attention to all the reasons the U.S. might want to be wary of further entanglement with China, it greatly enriched those who profited from that entanglement. Soon research universities across the U.S. were receiving large infusions of capital from investors and entrepreneurs who were deeply interested in preserving amicable relations with China, not to mention a steady and lucrative stream of fee-paying students, many of whom were the scions of China’s nouveau-riche... Aspirational mothers and fathers are keen to teach their kids Mandarin, so certain are they that it is the language of the future. The Free Tibet T-shirts that were ubiquitous on college campuses in the 1990s, when debates over PNTR were especially fierce, are now nowhere to be seen. That the Uighur cause has attracted little American interest is par for the course. Calling for a boycott of Israel is, for campus activists of a certain stripe, practically de rigeur. Boycotting China, in contrast, verges on the unthinkable. For one, it would require feats of self-denial that no red-blooded American consumer could hope to endure.What might the world have looked like had the U.S. never granted PNTR to China? One possibility is that China would have pursued an economic strategy built around fostering indigenous entrepreneurship and bettering the lives of its own workers, as it did in the 1980s. Instead, Beijing chose to transfer wealth from ordinary Chinese citizens to its politically powerful export sector, a path made possible by PNTR. China might very well have become just as rich by embracing a more balanced and humane approach to development. Doing so, however, would have required that its central government surrender a measure of control to its citizens. Rather than foster liberalism and openness in China, I suspect PNTR did exactly the opposite—creating the conditions for China’s central government to exert tighter control over the Chinese populace... Instead of offshoring much of its industrial base to an often-hostile authoritarian power, perhaps it would have deepened its economic ties to democratizing states in Latin America, Asia, and the wider world. Trade with China would have proceeded apace, to be sure, but U.S. multinationals wouldn’t have felt quite as secure in locating production facilities in one of the world’s last remaining communist dictatorships, which sees economic development as a weapon in its struggle for power and influence.
Mueller Zeros In on Story Put Together About Trump Tower Meeting
Mr. Corallo is planning to tell Mr. Mueller about a previously undisclosed conference call with Mr. Trump and Hope Hicks, the White House communications director, according to the three people. Mr. Corallo planned to tell investigators that Ms. Hicks said during the call that emails written by Donald Trump Jr. before the Trump Tower meeting — in which the younger Mr. Trump said he was eager to receive political dirt about Mrs. Clinton from the Russians — “will never get out.” That left Mr. Corallo with concerns that Ms. Hicks could be contemplating obstructing justice, the people said.
In a statement on Wednesday, a lawyer for Ms. Hicks strongly denied Mr. Corallo’s allegations.
.. President Trump’s aides received the list midflight on Air Force One on the way back from the summit meeting and began writing a response. In the plane’s front cabin, Mr. Trump huddled with Ms. Hicks. During the meeting, according to people familiar with the episode, Ms. Hicks was sending frequent text messages to Donald Trump Jr., who was in New York. Alan Garten, a lawyer for the younger Mr. Trump who was also in New York, was also messaging with White House advisers aboard the plane.
.. The president supervised the writing of the statement, according to three people familiar with the episode, with input from other White House aides. A fierce debate erupted over how much information the news release should include. Mr. Trump was insistent about including language that the meeting was about Russian adoptions, according to two people with knowledge of the discussion... “It was a short introductory meeting,” it read. “I asked Jared and Paul to stop by. We primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children that was active and popular with American families years ago and was since ended by the Russian government, but it was not a campaign issue at that time and there was no follow up.”According to four people familiar with the discussions, Donald Trump Jr. had insisted that the word “primarily” be included in the statement.
.. Mr. Corallo, the spokesman for the legal team, said in that story that the Russians had “misrepresented who they were and who they worked for.” He, along with the rest of the president’s legal team, was not consulted about Donald Trump Jr.’s statement before it was released.
He suggested that the meeting might have been set up by Democratic operatives, connecting one of the Russians in the meeting, Natalia V. Veselnitskaya, to the research firm that helped produce an unverified dossier that contained salacious allegations about Mr. Trump’s connections to Russia.
.. Accusations began flying that the botched response made an already bad situation worse. Ms. Hicks called Mr. Corallo, according to three people who relayed his version of events to The Times. She accused him of trafficking in conspiracy theories and drawing more attention to the story.
.. The conference call with the president, Mr. Corallo and Ms. Hicks took place the next morning, and what transpired on the call is a matter of dispute.
In Mr. Corallo’s account — which he provided contemporaneously to three colleagues who later gave it to The Times — he told both Mr. Trump and Ms. Hicks that the statement drafted aboard Air Force One would backfire because documents would eventually surface showing that the meeting had been set up for the Trump campaign to get political dirt about Mrs. Clinton from the Russians.
.. According to his account, Ms. Hicks responded that the emails “will never get out” because only a few people had access to them. Mr. Corallo, who worked as a Justice Department spokesman during the George W. Bush administration, told colleagues he was alarmed not only by what Ms. Hicks had said — either she was being naïve or was suggesting that the emails could be withheld from investigators — but also that she had said it in front of the president without a lawyer on the phone and that the conversation could not be protected by attorney-client privilege.
.. Even if Mr. Corallo is correct and Ms. Hicks was hinting at an attempt to conceal the emails, doing so would have been nearly impossible. Congress had requested records from Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump’s campaign chairman; Mr. Kushner; and other Trump campaign officials about meetings with Russians. And lawyers had already copied and stamped the emails for delivery to Capitol Hill.
.. When the president began questioning Mr. Corallo about the nature of the documents, Mr. Corallo cut off the conversation and urged the president to continue the discussion with his lawyers.
Mr. Corallo told colleagues that he immediately notified the legal team of the conversation and jotted down notes to memorialize it. He also shared his concerns with Stephen K. Bannon, then the president’s chief strategist.