Crooked Federal Judge Lewis Kaplan

This judge is owned and managed by an oil corporation, Chevron. He does not even pretend to be independent. Today he sent a man to prison for six months for not turning over client-privileged information because Chevon wants them.

In 1993 a human right lawyer and environmentalist, named Steven Donziger, sued Texaco/Chevron for spilling a lot of oil in the pristine Amazon rainforest and leaving a toxic mess for powerless Amazonians to live with. Texaco/Chevron didn’t like being challenged in their unbridled destruction of the Earth, has been trying to say he lied or made up facts. So they told their employee, Judge Kaplan, to charge him with criminal contempt of court.

In 2019, Chevron-owned Judge Lewis Kaplan was angry that the US Attorney determined there wasn’t a prosecutable case against Mr. Donziger, he took the astounding step of appointing a private oil and gas industry law firm, Seward & Kissel, to prosecute Mr. Donziger in the name of the U.S. government.

Another crooked judge, Judge Loretta A. Preska, oversaw that trial and refused to grant him a trial by jury. (Remember the good old days when trial by jury was a right?)

Still think we live in a democratic-republic? They aren’t even pretending about that anymore: a case so weak that the actual prosecutor wouldn’t touch it, appointing a biased industry lawyer as the prosecutor, and refusing a citizen a trial by jury before going to jail/prison.