Attorney Steven Donziger was disbarred and rebuked by U.S. courts for a $9.5 billion shakedown of Chevron in Ecuador. But now as he faces criminal contempt charges, progressives are lionizing him as a human-rights martyr.
Readers may recall Mr. Donziger’s legal and media campaign against Texaco (now merged with Chevron) for its alleged failure to clean up oil pits from its work in Ecuador during the 1970s. Chevron claimed it had cleaned up the pits, but Mr. Donziger used legal chicanery to obtain a $9.5 billion judgment in Ecuador.
Chevron fought back in U.S. court and won. Federal Judge Lewis Kaplan (a Clinton appointee) in 2014 excoriated Mr. Donziger in a 485-page ruling for engaging in judicial bribery, coercion, money-laundering, witness tampering and hiring an American consulting firm to ghostwrite an expert’s report, among other legal misconduct.
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