Happy New Year: Chevron Donated $190,000 to Supreme Court "Charity" During Ecuador Case

Oil Giant's General Counsel Hew Pate Sits On Charity's Board While My Case Involving Chevron is Pending Before the Nine Justices

I am gobsmacked by a report last week in The New York Times that Chevron secretly poured $190,000 into a little-known Supreme Court "charity" when the company had cases pending before the justices — including the Ecuador pollution case and my challenge to Chevron's unprecedented private prosecution and detention of me after I helped Amazon Indigenous peoples win a historic pollution case against the company.

The Supreme Court justices are meeting this month to decide whether to take my appeal of the private Chevron prosecution while the Court’s charity accepts money from Chevron and Chevron’s General Counsel (R. Hewitt Pate) sits as a trustee on the charity.

How can this possibly be acceptable?

Other corporations with business before the court — among them United Press International and Amazon — also donated generously to this charity. Large donors (including presumably Chevron lawyer Pate) also get personal access to the justices at an annual black-tie fundraising dinner. The Amazon communities in Ecuador who are Chevron's victims are obviously unable to donate to this charity or attend the gala fundraiser. They have almost no money while Chevron refuses to comply with court orders that it remediate its mass industrial poisoning of their ancestral lands.

I am urging the Supreme Court to dissolve the charity and return all donated funds from any corporation or law firm with business before the court.

Whatever the original intent, the charity has degenerated into a cesspool of flagrant conflicts and corporate influence peddling. No country that respects the rule of law would ever tolerate its highest court housing a charity that accepts secret donations from parties arguing cases before it. If the Supreme Court needs funds to preserve its history (a main purpose of the charity), the justices should go to Congress and have the funds appropriated. The charity should under no circumstances take money from parties and law firms with business before the court.

News of this secret money pipeline into a Supreme Court charity is yet another sign of corporate greed deepening its penetration of the US judiciary. Even Harvard Law professor and conservative legal scholar Charles Fried — who served as Solicitor General of the United States under President Reagan — said he is "disgusted" by the donations. More broadly, the pro-corporate Federalist Society has largely taken control of judicial appointments in this country as documented in the brilliant book “The Scheme” by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse.

There is clearly a breakdown in ethics at the highest court. We all know that the Supreme Court is not subject to judicial ethics rules like every other federal court in the country. That needs to change, as Senator Whitehouse and others have been pushing from the halls of Congress.

At core, the NYT report documents yet another serious blow to the rule of law in the United States. My private prosecution by Chevron was (and is) obviously another such blow. As was the Trump-orchestrated insurrection. As is charging climate activists like Jessica Reznicek with “terrorism” for engaging in civil disobedience. That this latest challenge to the rule of law comes from within the court itself is profoundly upsetting. That it is being facilitated by the very justices most responsible for protecting the rule of law is almost unfathomable.

Read the full report via the New York Times here.