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Who is Steven Donziger, the Jewish environmental lawyer who politicians want Biden to pardon next?

Donziger was imprisoned and later put under house arrest after suing Chevron for $9.5-billion

After President Joe Biden pardoned his son, Hunter Biden, earlier this week, members of Congress began pressuring him to pardon others during his final weeks in office.

Their pardon suggestions include Indigenous rights activist Leonard Peltier and NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, as well as a posthumous pardon for the Jewish accused Soviet spy Ethel Rosenberg. Also on the list: Jewish environmental lawyer Steven R. Donziger.

But who is Donziger, and why are Congressman Jim McGovern and other activists pressuring the Biden administration to pardon him?

Who is Steven Donziger?

Steven Donziger is an American human rights lawyer who spent his career campaigning for the rights of Indigenous and farming communities in the Amazonian region of Ecuador and found himself in one of the largest environmental lawsuits in history.

From the 1960s to the 1990s, Texaco, an oil brand corporation owned by Chevron, allegedly dumped millions of gallons of poisonous oil and billions of gallons of wastewater into the Amazonian rainforest. The chemicals from the contaminated water led to increased birth defects, cancer and disease among Indigenous and other local communities living in the region, according to the plaintiff’s report and the nonprofit Amazon Watch.

In 1993, Donziger – then a recent grad of Harvard Law School – travelled to Ecuador with a legal team and witnessed the devastation in the Amazon firsthand. Ten years later, Donziger led a legal team in Ecuador representing 30,000 locals in the Amazon arguing for legal remediation for decades of toxic waste. A 2011 Supreme Court of Ecuador ruling argued in Donziger’s favor, and Chevron was ordered to pay $9.5-billion in damages to the plaintiffs.

Why was Donziger disbarred and put under house arrest?

After suing Chevron, Donziger faced a decades-long aggressive counter-lawsuit from the company. Chevron argued that the evidence Donziger cited in his original case against the oil company was fraudulent, and it accused Donziger of ghost-writing an environmental report.

Donziger was disbarred from the District of Columbia in 2018 for professional misconduct. Donziger then faced a court order to hand over case files containing decades of confidential information between him and his clients, including his phone and computer. He refused to hand over these documents to Chevron, saying that it was an invasion of client-attorney confidentiality.

As a result, Donziger was also charged with contempt of court in 2021 and imprisoned for six months, and he was later placed under house arrest until April 2022. Chevron, having argued that the original 2011 ruling relied on fraud and possibly even conspiracy, has yet to pay a single cent to the affected Indigenous communities in the Amazon.

Okay, but he’s been released. Why are people still trying to pardon him?

In an October 2024 draft of a pardon letter addressed to Biden issued by McGovern’s team, first received by Axios, signatories recount how several federal judges and high-level judges have criticized “legal irregularities” in Chevron’s case against Donziger that deem the case unconstitutional or illegal.

Specifically, the letter describes the court order for Donziger to surrender his confidential case files as a violation of attorney-client privileges, and as an order that has never been seen before in American court history.

The letter also points to Donziger’s extended house arrest before his trial – he was confined to his apartment for 26 months before his trial because of COVID-19 – as an excessively harsh punishment, which may have been a move by Chevron to intimidate him.

“We believe that the legal case against Mr. Donziger, as well as the excessively harsh nature of the punishment against him, are directly tied to his prior work against Chevron,” the letter reads.

In addition, the group “Free Donziger” has raised over $600,000 on Chuffed to pressure the White House into pardoning him. In the donation blurb, Donziger accuses the judge in his trial of having had financial ties to Chevron, which may have influenced the verdict.

Donziger’s Jewish history?

Donziger has a Jewish family with a long history of activism and social justice, which has informed his advocacy.

Donziger grew up in the Jewish community of Jacksonville, Florida, according to a profile in Haaretz. His mother, Hester Donziger, also known as “Honey,” was a prominent social activist in the community. His maternal grandfather, Aaron E. Koota, was the son of Russian Jewish immigrants who later became New York State Supreme Court Judge.

After his release from house arrest, Donziger posted a tribute on Instagram to his mother, in which he credited her sense of social justice for providing him with the strength to get through his detention period.

“Honey instilled in me so much for which I am deeply grateful,” Donziger told his followers on Instagram. “She passed away in 2009 way too early. Got thru 993 days of detention in great part because of the lessons she taught me and my sister.”

Donziger has long been an outspoken critic of Israel and the Israeli government, especially since Oct. 7 and the subsequent Israel-Hamas war.

In 2019, Donziger took to X, then known as Twitter, to express his frustration with the targeting of Representative Ilhan Omar after her vocal criticism of AIPAC.

Since Oct. 7, Donziger has often re-posted articles and posts lambasting Israel’s conduct in the war on his Instagram and on X.  Donziger often invokes his Jewish identity when discussing his outrage at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“As a Jew and human rights attorney, I find this photo repulsive,” Donziger posted on X in response to a photo of Israel Defense Forces soldiers unfurling an Israeli flag in Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza last year.

Donziger wrote again on X in October this year. He uploaded an image of a police officer arresting a Jewish Voices For Peace activist after a demonstration on Wall Street. “As a person of conscience and a Jew, I stand with these protesters,” Donziger said.

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