New Christie Attack Dog Attorney No Friend to Ecuador's Indigenous Peoples

[Judi Lynn]

New Christie Attack Dog Attorney No Friend to Ecuador's Indigenous Peoples
Posted: 01/20/2014 12:16 am

In a recent column, journalist Chris Hedges compares New Jersey governor Chris Christie to a "Third World despot." In a rhetorical flourish, Hedges writes that if the New Jersey governor ever becomes president "the corporate state's repression, now on the brink of totalitarianism, would with the help of Christie, his corporate backers and his Tea Party loyalists become a full-blown corporate fascism."

Hedges' article is a bit over the top and ideological at times, and it would be a mistake to equate Christie with some kind of "banana republic"-type dictator along the lines of Anastasio Somoza. Nevertheless, Christie's links to high-powered attorneys may stir uncomfortable memories for those who have been on the receiving end of the corporate stick in Latin America.

Recently, the New Jersey governor tapped well-known lawyer Randy Mastro to lead his political defense in the so-called "Bridgegate" scandal. A Republican attorney known for aggressive tactics, Mastro served as former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's Chief of Staff and subsequently as the city's Deputy Mayor for Operations. He was also a member of John McCain's judicial steering committee during the 2008 presidential election.

The Nicaragua Legal Prototype

More recently, Mastro has been chairing a "crisis management group" in the powerful Gibson & Dunn Los Angeles-based law firm. The company has long been infamous for its defense of corporations and their foreign dealings. In one high-profile case, Gibson & Dunn rescued Dole Food from billions of dollars in damages based on allegations that the company had used pesticides which caused sterility and other harm to banana workers in Nicaragua. Turning the tables, Gibson & Dunn claimed that workers had lied about their medical condition in an attempt to defraud Dole, and the case was later dismissed.

More:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nikolas-kozloff/new-christie-attack-dog-a_b_4629610.html

[msanthrope]

1. This is such a poorly-written article about a landmark legal fight. Mastro was able to find the

judge the Plaintiffs were paying off..much to the embarrassment of Correa, who has now cut his payoff demand in half. It's unlikely Ecuador is ever going to see a penny. Mastro is a very, very, good lawyer.....a true fixer. The fact that Christie hired him means he thinks he's in deep, deep shit.

For the last month, Chevron has presented a parade of witnesses against Steven R. Donziger, the freelance lawyer who has been suing the company for 20 years over pollution of the Ecuadorean Amazon jungle. One after another, the witnesses, including some of his closest allies and financiers who are now estranged from his cause, have testified that Mr. Donziger committed witness tampering and fraud.

To Chevron, the case against Mr. Donziger is nothing less than an effort to uphold the rule of law and prevent him and his allies from benefiting from a multibillion-dollar Ecuadorean judgment that he won in 2011.

But now, in testimony prepared for delivery in court next week, Mr. Donziger is as defiant as ever, even as he acknowledges mistakes. Among those admissions are that he concealed his relationship and payments to a court-appointed expert witness who presented a report to the Ecuadorean court that tried the case.

“I did make errors along the way,” he said in a draft of his testimony that he has been preparing the last several days. But he stopped well short of apologizing; instead, he challenged the constitutionality of the case and questioned the fairness of Judge Lewis A. Kaplan of Federal District Court in Manhattan.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/14/business/energy-environment/lawyer-concedes-mistakes-in-chevron-case.html?_r=0