Does a Senior Obama Official Have Unseemly Ties to Notorious Human-Rights Abuser Chevron?

By Jeremy Scahill, AlterNet. Posted July 10, 2009.

The lawsuit in Ecuador was brought by 30,000 Amazon-basin residents, where Chevron faces a potential penalty of $27 billion in damages for allegedly causing massive environmental damage to the Amazon rainforest. The case was originally filed in New York in 1993, but was moved to Ecuador in 2002 at Chevron's request. The company thought the move would swiftly end the litigation. Chevron was wrong.

Ecuador's President Raphael Correa has called Chevron's conduct a "crime against humanity." According to court-appointed experts in Ecuador, more than 18 billion gallons of oil were spilled, and the contamination led to 1,400 cancer deaths. A decision in the case could come this year.

Chevron has dozens of lawyers on its payroll, but one in particular stands out. In April 2008, the company hired William Haynes II as its chief corporate counsel. Haynes is an infamous figure from the Bush era; as the Pentagon general counsel, he was one of the key attorneys laying out the legal justifications for the Bush administration's global torture and detention policies.

Haynes is perhaps best known for resigning after it was revealed he described the military commissions process as rigged. (The former chief prosecutor of the military commissions, Morris Davis, told The Nation magazine Haynes told him: "We can't have acquittals. ... We've got to have convictions.")

Chevron will need all the legal and political influence it can afford. The Ecuador case is so serious that New York's Attorney General Andrew Cuomo sent Chevron a letter in May suggesting the company "may have misled shareholders about the risk it faces in a potential $27 billion lawsuit alleging it caused 'massive' oil pollution in Ecuador," according to Bloomberg. Cuomo blasted Chevron's public claims that Ecuador's courts did not have jurisdiction, pointing out that Chevron "consented to the jurisdiction of that very Ecuadorian court." Other states have expressed similar concerns.

Attorney Steven Donziger has long worked the case and now serves as a legal adviser to the Ecuadoran plantiffs. He says Chevron has a record of "buying" influence in an effort to "engineer judicial results." Noting Holbrooke's close relationship with Chevron through the GBC, Donziger says he believes both Holbrooke and Chevron knew exactly what they were doing with this award.

"It is typical of what Chevron does. They donate money to create this organization, they are instrumental in getting Holbrooke's name on the award and then pay for ads lauding themselves for an award they financed," Donziger says. "There is no greater example of what is wrong with Washington than this one. Holbrooke allowed Chevron to use his name in an attempt to gain credibility and cover up one of the world's greatest crimes. It is an outrageous abuse of the public trust by Holbrooke. You can't, as a U.S. State Department official -- or any government official for that matter -- give an award to a company that has business before the department that employs you."

The Holbrooke award, critics charge, is the latest development in a high-stakes lobbying/public-relations campaign. Over the past few years, Chevron has deployed a team of high-powered former senior U.S. officials-turned-lobbyists in Washington to attempt to quash the case and, more recently, to pressure the Obama administration to punish Ecuador -- by canceling its preferred-trading status -- for allowing the case to proceed. The company tried the same tactic with the Bush administration.

"We can't let little countries screw around with big companies like this -- companies that have made big investments around the world," an unnamed Chevron lobbyist told Newsweek in 2008.

Among Chevron's lobbyists are former Sens. Trent Lott of Texas and John Breaux of Louisiana; Mickey Kantor, former U.S. trade representative, secretary of commerce and the 1992 Clinton-Gore campaign chairman; Thomas F. "Mack" McLarty III, Bill Clinton's former White House chief of staff; and Carla Hills, former secretary of Housing and Urban Development and former U.S. trade representative. Like Rice, Chevron name a tanker after Hills.

Chevron has also used Wayne Berman, who chaired the finance committee for John McCain's presidential campaign. According to federal lobbying records, in the first quarter of 2009, Chevron spent $6.8 million on lobbying. The company had seven lobbyists devoted to foreign policy. The first "lobbying issue" listed was: "Ecuadorial judicial independence." Among the entities lobbied was the State Department, Holbrooke's employer.

"It is no coincidence that Chevron is trying to polish their image with ads in the Washington Post at the same time that they are launching a massive lobbying campaign to interfere with [the Ecuador] lawsuit," says Rainforest Action Network's Brune. "Chevron is trying to avoid responsibility in Ecuador by essentially buying credibility in Washington."

In April, Chevron sent a petition to Obama trade representative Ron Kirk, asking him to retaliate against Ecuador by canceling its Andean Trade Preference Benefits. While Chevron is devoting serious resources to the Ecuador case, persuading Obama to interfere is a complicated endeavor.

See more stories tagged with: ecuador, big oil, michael isikoff, hillary clinton, condoleezza rice, chevron, william haynes, nigeria, richard holbrooke, andrew cuomo, steve kretzmann, steven donziger, fareed zakaria

Jeremy Scahill, an independent journalist who reports frequently for the national radio and TV program Democracy Now, has spent extensive time reporting from Iraq and Yugoslavia. He is currently a Puffin Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute. Scahill is the author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army. His writing and reporting is available at Rebel Reports.

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