Chapo Trap House - 598 - More Pods About Streaming and Books feat. Steven Donziger (1/31/22)

Episode Date: February 1, 2022

The boys look at the phenomenon of literary Felixes, plus discuss a few current censorship debates. Plus, we’re joined once again by lawyer Steven Donziger, who is now back under house arrest after the Department of Corrections sent him home from Jail. We discuss the end stages of case, his corporate prosecution, and the future for the people of Ecuador in their case against Chevron. Information on Steven’s case and ways to support collected at https://www.freedonziger.com/ Tickets for our upcoming southern live shows at: chapotraphouse.com/live

Greetings, friends. It's choppo Monday, January 31st, 2022. And just a little bit, I will be talking again with I think now one of our one of our all-time leading champion return guests, lawyer Stephen Donzinger. He's out of prison but still on house arrest. I talked to him about his 45 days in Danbury Prison in Connecticut. Interesting chat. But before we get to the first half of the show in the interview, time for a little tour plugs. That's right, our southern tour coming up. If you don't know by now, here's a reminder. We're hitting the south, Charlotte, Atlanta, Nashville, Austin, Dallas, Houston, and New Orleans. Tickets available on chopotraphouse.com slash live. A little, a little inducement here. Was it the Trillbilly Boys? We'll be joining us in Nashville.

The Pendejo Time Gang will be joining us in Texas. And in Atlanta, I will hopefully be reconnecting with my biological family should you the listeners do your job. Absolutely. Yeah, we're going to track them down. We're going to get to Austin. Austin will be normalized. You guys better get your weirdness in while you can because that shit is gone as soon as we get there. If you are weird in my presence in Austin City Limits, you will get gunned down. We won't be compromising all weirdos. Yeah, you are going to there's no hospital. You're going straight to the fucking morgue. And I will be legally in the right. Governor Greg Abbott has lethally authorized us to kinetically enforce normal Austin. There's no fucking weirdness. There's no devil sticks. There's

no unicycles. There's no bar with beanbag chairs. Get that fucking weird shit out of there, or you will be taking a dirt nap. That is on God. It's going to be fun. So we'd love to, we'd love for you to come see you and you can see us when we're in the south. So without further ado, let's start the show. I guess I'd like to begin today's show with this important factoid that I learned this morning, courtesy of Drift Magazine. Last year's Hot New Releases by Lauren Orler, Clara Sestanovich, and Sally Rooney all feature a love interest named Felix, and no one will say why. See, I knew about the Lauren Orler thing. I was not aware of Sally Rooney and the other book, but the hot new fiction in the world today written by women

all feature a love interest named Felix. Now, why do you think that is? I've never, I've never been with a woman who's written a book. Or read a book. Most of the women I'm with, yeah, I've never read a book. Most of the women I'm with can barely read. Yeah. Not because they're, no, not for that reason. They have a stigmatism that they won't get fixed. It's the problem. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know what point they're trying to make here. They're sort of, I didn't read the full art. I was looking for the article, but it was like five minutes before the show. I don't know. I think they're saying it's a bad thing. I think they're like, this guy's fucking all the book ladies. And I'm not.

He used to use to hate the literary scene. No, I'm not. No, I'm not. I know one of the women who wrote these books. We all know Lauren. Lauren's a great writer. I've like, yeah, no. No. She's, she would not do that. Everyone else never met them. Sally Rooney. Sally Rooney, she's Irish, so she's probably lying. Yeah, she's lying. She's also an nepotism case. She got into books because she has a famous dad, Mickey Rooney. So, you know, no, no respect for what she's writing. It goes on to the little clip says, comparing the love interest named Felix. It says, it's the kind of convergence that nags at you, like learning that 99% of exported bananas are genetically identical. One fungus

could wipe out the whole crop. Like, I don't really get what's, what's, what's that mean? I think she means like, or I don't know who wrote this article, but the author may mean like, if my dick fell off, it'd be like, oh, no more books. But that like, no, like my dick could fall off and it would be fine because they would keep naming these characters Felix, these women I've never met, by the way. I don't, yeah, no, I don't, I don't know. I don't know what they're saying. Everyone in my family is incredibly upset with me, not because of this, but because I posted it and I did that tongue clover thing in an accompanying picture that everyone hates. Listeners, Felix is being self-effacing and bashful as usual,

but my man is getting more pussy than Gorva doll. He's slaying, he's slaying the literary scene. Joyce Carol Oates is going to be writing a book about a big dick player named Felix any day now. I don't know. I think it's just like that name. People saw me and they're like, wow, what a name. People are going to remember that one better, better, better put that in my book, better put that in my, in my dime novel that's being sold at the pharmacy, except for, except for Lauren Euler, the only author I can vouch for. No offense to Sally Rooney or the other person have not read their books, but I'm assuming it is, you know, it's like Walgreens fiction, the other ones. They're like romance novels. They're like, you know, about a meek woman who

meets a European prince and he has my name. I mean, I just, I hope the banana fungus doesn't wipe out all the Felix's in the world. Terrible. It's just, I don't want to, I don't want to think about that right now. I tried, I tried like going to their website to find out what article this would be under. And I like, holy shit, I read more article, more long articles than I've probably read in like 10 years. I don't like, I couldn't find this article, but like, holy fuck, I know a lot about like the personal essay now. I think it pushed out the names of like 50 MMA fighters I knew who never even made it to the UFC and like people who won Counter-Strike majors. It pushed out all the important things I know and it replaced it with this literary

knowledge and I'm really not happy about it. Okay. Literature, censorship, big topics. What do you all think about the graphic novel, Mouse being banned from Tennessee schools? First question, have you guys read Mouse? Yeah, long time ago, really long time ago. No, I never read it. Seem boring. Yeah, you were like, why is this comic all about the bad guys? How come we never see these brave cats? Well, yeah, I know, I read Mouse in school and I gotta say, I stand with Tennessee for banning this book. I think all serious graphic novels should be banned.

Yeah, get out of here. It's for kids. Like you can, I think adult graphic novels, that's how you get every movie being Marvel trauma based entertainment. Oh, yeah. You convince people that comic books are for adults and then it's like, well, that means movies based on comic books can be adult movies and that's all wrong. That's a lie. You don't like a like serious graphic novel? You don't like it when, you know, the plot's something like, you know, Satan is a guy and he has a human daughter for some reason and she's a professional hitman, but she's addicted to pills and she has to do like one last big job so she can pay for tuition for art school and the guy assigning her the job is like a big

bald fat guy and there's like this really good scene where he lights a $100 bill on fire to light a cigar and then he, you know, sort of mockingly recites the pledge of allegiance and she makes a fist and her really long nails sort of like, it's a really good scene where the blood like drips out of her fist. She's like, all right, I'll do this job and then she closes the door and she leaves and the pledge of allegiance cigar guy says something like, she's got an ass that won't quit too bad. It's going to be in the ground. And then there's a whole, there's like, this is like a Neil Gamer graphic novel. There's like 700 pages arguing about free will. Yeah, no, that actually sounds good. Never mind. I take it all back. I want to read that. Yeah, it's good. I was thinking of

Joe Sacco's Palestine, but this graphic novel sounds pretty awesome. Yeah, it's my graphic novel. It's called Daughters. Well, I just, I was reading about the Tennessee School Board decision in mouse and I was, I liked it because like the complaints from parents or they were like, you know, like it's, you know, it's like a good serious book, but like, you know, the nudity, there's no cause for that. The nudity and the cursing. And I, you know, I remember, I remember mouse. The nudity is when people are being filed into a gas chamber. It's not, it's not exactly the most titillating. This is getting too riled up here. Yeah. I hated those hot shower scenes. Was this dressed to kill? I like, it is funny that like every school that like bans a book like

mouse for nudity, it's also the exact same school where it's like, oh, every, every night we have a night called Jubilation Night where all the sophomores get naked and like play patty cake with the oldest teachers. Wasn't it actually in Tennessee where that happened recently where they, where they had the, the, the, like the football team dress up like girls and like do, do lap dances for the, for the teachers? Yeah, no, they're like, they're like, we're, we're not having any of this filth in school. Anyway, tonight we're having our special tradition where we put a key in the asshole of the gym teacher and the quarterback has to pull it out and open a lot. Oh, I'm sorry. Literally right next door. Yeah. Well, they're all, they all do that

though. They do. No, it's a fine Southern tradition. Yeah. Pussy popping with the principal. Everyone remembers being in high school and if you were the kicker on the football team, it was tradition that you get slutted out by the booster club. I just, I mean, there's, I just, there is no cause to teach, there must be a way to teach about the Holocaust without all the smut and sexiness. Later this evening, I will be, I will be presenting my daughter at the veiled prophetess Gala. Yeah, we're, this is just too, too gross, too extreme. Anyway, we're making a, we're making a sort of like jungle juice type punch using blood from my daughter's first tampon. So we've done for hundreds of years. It's tradition. We should probably split this episode,

you know, great. Anyway, yeah, Steven Donziger is. I'm sorry. No, it's okay. Yeah. So, yeah. And also, Art Spiegelman, cats are not Nazis. Okay. I'm sick of it. This is, this is, this slander will not stand. All right. And poles are not pigs either. French, not frogs, offensive. Get it out of our schools. You know, in 2017, when I was like saying every day I'm punching Nazis, that's what, that's what I meant. Just like just kicking cats in higher city blocks, just pointing them because of mouse. Still think that fiction can affect you? Well, here's another pseudo, pseudo censorship related hot topic this week. Neil Young versus Joe Rogan and Spotify. Where do you guys come down on this one? Will you be searching for a heart of

gold or Joe Rogan's ropey and old guests? Sorry, that one was, that was real. Hold on. Hold on. Okay. Are you going to be an old man who's a young man's a lot like you? Or are you going to listen to the words of a very short Jew when Joe Rogan has been Shapiro? We can do better than that. Okay. Are you going to enjoy Neil Young's harvest? Or are you going to go, Hey, Jordan Peterson, that's a dope vest. Oh yeah. That's the one. Yeah. Joni Mitchell has joined with Neil Young. So this is like a real boomer. That one is very funny because Joni Mitchell also claims that she has more jellans. That's the fact. That's a true fact. He's like, Joe Rogan is spreading anti-science misinformation. By the way, I have plastic tendrils growing out of my body. Yeah. I mean like,

you know, respect to them for taking a stand, you know, always. I'm against like taking any podcast off. It's like anything unless you really get to tug in the collar if that starts being a thing. Also, what I don't really get is, do people not know that Rogan, by going to Spotify, like cut his audience in half or something like that? Because, you know, you got it's a fucking paywall. Like he's lost listeners since going to Spotify. So if you kick him off Spotify, he will just end up having more people listening to the show. It really does seem like people, they have no idea what to do. It's like, yeah, no one could join the fucking club. But what we have, what we have experience doing is complaining to the manager and hoping that some customer

service representative can make a choice for us and exercise authority that we can't and that will make things better. Yeah. No, I mean, my attitude is like, purely from a pragmatic point of view, if you're like are, you know, concerned about like, oh, there's medical misinformation being spread out there. I just think at this point, like any appearance of like, you know, censorship or like these reprimands or whatever of someone like Joe Rogan or for his audience is only going to like double, lead to a doubling down on the very thing that you're seeking to combat. Like at this point, like it's just sort of like, I don't know, try to reverse psychology or something like that. Yeah. Go on Joe Rogan. Yeah. But I like, it's just like, where do you draw the line with Spotify

too? That's the weird thing too, right? Because it's like, okay, if we take like Joe Rogan off because he has that like beard crank, the RNA guy who's like now just working for the Pfizer of India to like make the same thing. Like, okay, well, I can go on Spotify every day. And I do. And I listened to a guy who like probably killed at least five people. Like I can listen to that guy. He's like a very popular rapper. He's no longer with us, but he's on there. Do we like take him off? Because you know, you can you can point that he legitimately harmed people. I can listen to fucking Varg on there. I can listen to, there's all types of shit I can listen to on there. And I guess it is different. But you know, Joe Rogan got this very lucrative deal, but that more

goes to like the stupid ways that podcasts do business with Spotify, where Spotify could just take our public RSS feeds and we don't get paid royalties because there's like no restrictions on it. Yeah, I was gonna say, Rogan is probably the only content creator of any variety that's actually making money from Spotify. Yeah. Well, and you like they don't pay us. Like there's just like they have no reason to pay us because these are just public RSS feeds. And unless like every podcast like us that got like, you know, a certain number of downloads a month was like, we're withholding these until like, you know, we have some RIA, RIA double A type organization where you pay us a licensing fee. Though I think it should be like more like TV

with like ad packages. This is really fucking boring. But like, I'm sorry. But like, like, yeah, it is different because yeah, they gave him like $100 million. But if the if your thing is like, we want to take him off, like where do you draw the line and what gets taken off? I'm just I'm against anything like that getting taken off. I'm sorry. I think his anti-vax shit is stupid. But yeah. But like also, where do you draw the line? There is no you like nobody's in charge of this. The hope is that you just send enough complaints that somebody's like, we hear you, we respect you. And then and then we do something about it. And and the hope is that that process that machinery of just, I guess, using hashtags to get people riled enough enough to

send enough angry texts or emails to and that that feedback mechanism will somehow like guide us towards like ideal policy when it's just the uncoordinated anxiety of people who are totally understandably frustrated with how things are, but who otherwise have no coordination at all beyond just what they see in front of them and their their reaction to it. And that that we just are like the best hope for a lot of people seem to have is that is that that totally unorganized anxiety coupled with the mechanisms of social media can somehow be herded towards good changes in policy, even though getting rid of Joe Rogan doesn't do anything about the fundamental breach in public trust that makes people be suspicious of vaccines that you cannot fix by by removing

somebody from a streaming platform. Yeah. And the only consequence it would actually have is like, yeah, Joe, as you said, Joe Rogan's off Spotify, he goes back to YouTube and like all these platforms, he starts like making ad revenue on YouTube again, because yeah, he's releasing these like four hour long videos that get millions of views and can run ads during them and like have ad reads embedded into the show. And then conservatives like because they get riled up by this or like, oh, we want to take off like, I don't know, name something. It could be anything from like a liberal podcast where they're like, I don't know, we're gonna we're gonna we're gonna prostitute out Matt Gates. I don't know if that exists, but something like that. Or they're like, yeah, they take my

example. And they're like, well, King Vaughn like killed all these people. Why can't we get him get him taken off? And then they have to do that because like the culture shifts in a way where they're more powerful. And then it'll just be the like more and more things get taken off. But none of the fundamental causes still change. Like people are still not getting the vaccine for reasons that Matt elicited or like, there's still like awful fucking unfathomable violence in South Southern Chicago. But you, we were able to yell at the guy who's in charge of Spotify. And they were like scared enough because of the cultural moment that they acquiesced. Well, speaking of a unorganized anxiety, I mean, like the Rogan, the Rogan kerfuffle this week did sort of resuscitate.

And I'm sort of do this to bring it back to like a choppo circa 2020. But it just that it led to like a renewal of the old debate over like, can we say now that Bernie going on Rogan was a bad look or like a Bernie platforming Rogan or like any, any, any of this bullshit. And I'm sorry to indulge in this again. But it's like, um, did you learn anything over the last two years? No, because if you actually absorbed the lessons of the last two years, it's too terrifying to contemplate, which is that all this stuff that was us included spent so much time fixating on ended up being totally extraneous to the process and irrelevant. And it's that confrontation of irrelevancy that is just too horrifying to contemplate. People would much rather continue,

just go basically memento themselves back to 2017 and have the same arguments over and over again and agonize over the same position from the same imagined position of like influence within the political system, then accept a premise that the implications of which fundamentally undermine their entire approach to politics and culture and everything else, because there's nothing to replace it. Me taking a Polaroid of Joe Rogan and then writing on the back of it, don't platform his lies. Yeah, no, it is that like depressed me. So there is like a field of things that depressed me in that way, not because like with the Joe Rogan thing that I find it like particularly like, I do find it like offensively stupid, but that's not the reason it depresses me.

It depresses me for the same reason that I see people like still post polls or like Medicare for all still really popular. Yeah. And I go, how could you have lived through the last two years and been like, okay, that's like the deal and end all. Yeah, Joe Rogan's bad. What's your fucking point? Medicare for all is like popular in these polls you showed. All the people that you should that are in those polls supporting Medicare for all, they fucking voted for Joe Biden, because it's a issue polls are fucking worthless. And these people do not live in the same world of priorities or processing events or reading the same shit that you do. You are entirely in an entirely different worlds with Joe Rogan. It's like, I mean, yeah, he's like, he says bad

shit. And he has like stupid people on and he says dumb fucking shit about the vaccine. But like, how is that? Yeah, again, I hate to have this 2020 argument again, but like, a, how is that worse than any candidate going on CNN and talking to Wolf Blitzer, who is a fucking spokesman for a pack and like might as well still be and be like what. So like he would have won if he didn't go on Joe Rogan. I mean, like it's like a cargo cult thing now where it's like, okay, he went on Joe Rogan and he lost. So he shouldn't have gone on Joe Rogan. Okay. Exactly. And it's just like, the lesson here is like, it wouldn't have fucking mattered one way or another. We all saw what fucking happened. But in the moment at the time, there was good reason

to believe that going on Rogan was a smart fucking move. I mean, like, you know, like as part of a broader strategy, that strategy didn't work. But him certainly him denouncing Joe Rogan wouldn't have fucking worked either. Yeah, because that is that the assumption behind that is that the problem is there was not a perfectly calibrated, perfectly purified, non-problematic messaging that was totally amenable to the most sensitive fraction of like the online left. And that if that had been articulated, it would have somehow won. And that assumes that the opinions expressed on the internet that people interact with and that make their make them understand like what the political lines are, are dispositive beyond that place, like that they influence the actual people

who have to vote in these things. I mean, the real the real bet of Bernie was that there are people who have lost who have been dropped out of politics have have stopped paying attention to it because of its failure to address any of their real concerns, who could be brought back in. And if they can, it I think is pretty definitively shown, it cannot be through the normal process of political engagement that you get through a media campaign. And if the media campaign can't reach the people who need to be reached to overwhelm the vast majority of Democratic voters who have first and foremost committed themselves to the Democratic Party as a project, then the discrete opinions of people online obviously have nothing to do with anything,

because those opinions are just being put out into an ether that is totally invisible to the actual center mass of necessary voters or would be voters or hypothetical voters that would need to be engaged and just simply are not. It is a completely pointless exercise and a uniquely damaging exercise to tailor your fucking national presidential campaign to these ephemeral things on Twitter. Like if you were starting a press your exploratory committee in secret in like 2017 or some shit and you were like I'm just going with what with what's popular on Twitter your only policy would be like I'm drafting a hundred thousand people to go to Portland to fight Proud Boys. And then two years later that's not as big of a thing and you you just get into whatever

the thing is then. I mean we saw this in practice with the fucking Elizabeth Warren campaign. She was hyper reactive to everything that was big on a space on Twitter. It didn't fucking matter. It did not fucking matter at all. You know why? Because all the fucking all the overwhelming force the overwhelming force in the hinge point state of South Carolina these like white hogs that like flooded the primary that it was a disproportionately like white electorate in South Carolina compared to other years that elected Joe Biden by this fucking landslide there. Do you think they they saw the Rogan thing and they're like oh he's kind of gross. Oh I really don't like Sam Tripoli. I think it just has to be Biden. You know I was

really for Medicare for all and I was I was really I really wanted to end these foreign wars and all this but it's like I did Joe Rogan. I think I have to go. I have to go for the racial jungle guy. What the fuck like what the fuck are you talking about. This is just this is like I'm not going to use the word cope. I hate that word. It's going to be as embarrassing as epic or based as in a few years but it is it is a way of like it reminds you of like Red Sox fans before they won the World Series. If only this had been done. If only we'd used a different brand of fucking chewing tobacco and the dugout. If you know he didn't spit a sunflower seed at this angle at this time when the moon was in this fucking position. It's if you were you should it's sad to look at these

past two years but if you are looking at them you should go holy shit like so much of what we thought was important and what we thought would play out was totally wrong and we really have to rethink what does and doesn't work in getting these like uninitiated non-voting Americans. And if we're going to look at the burning campaign and like look at how they fucked up if we're still doing that. I think you have to look at the people who actually worked on the campaign. A lot of whom have spent their entire fucking careers preaching to the choir and no one outside of it and you have to look at those people and go holy shit and maybe think what I think or what we think and go holy fucking shit I maxed out to that. I still am glad I did. I don't regret

anything we did for Bernie and any of the effort we put in or doors we knocked on but like Jesus fucking Christ. Yeah I mean Felix you brought it up but if you if you're seeking a candidate and a message for progressive politics socialist politics leftist politics whatever you want to say in America untainted from any problematic association well yeah congratulations on the Elizabeth Warren campaign it worked out that worked out great even better than Bernie did. You guys fucking killed it. Yeah um Felix you're missing uh like um like uh tailoring political campaigns and messaging to uh like you know uh online politics of the moment. But okay how about this 2024 uh here's a perfect candidate perfect message perfect platform

remember when everyone got mad at Jen Psaki for saying that what do you want us to do just send tests to everyone in America okay she's going to hell for that yes but we do need to send every American in the mail via the post office for free one of those cards you can give to a doctor before your checkup that says don't weigh me. I mean I like just as an aside uh the fat activism stuff there's some of it that I think is like absolutely paid by paid for by Archer Daniels Midland and Conagra the type where it's like there's no such thing as junk food or like a food desert some of it is like you know I feel for them because it is like you know a lot of obesity like probably most of it yeah definitely is genetic and it's the diet industry is horrible

and all this shit but the stuff always makes me laugh because it's trying to create like an identity about being fat in a country where like most people are fat or at least you could you could definitely describe it that way but it's never like you know do you think of who do you think want a majority of like morbidly obese people in 2016 I think I know who it was I think it was the big guy uh who who who like a lot of Americans who are in bad shape are like I'm not fat I played college football 40 years ago I mean yeah like uh you know I mean I want one of these cars because you know I I've definitely gained weight since the last time I went to the doctor's office and I don't want to know about that shit my dick got smaller that's what my card says don't measure

you don't you hate only your doctor measures your soft and erect dick made him stop doing that I drank too much yellow five from that dude I'm starting a campaign right now to just turn off all of the unnecessary air conditioning in doctor's offices that's not the way my dick and balls actually look I just like I just did a polar bear challenge before I got my dick check up okay don't put that in my medical file all right that's not real don't you hate it when your doctor who has like an unusually dry tongue just sticks his tongue down your throat to see if you have like a tonsil problem yeah and uh yeah the the the the archer Daniels Midland thing is like you know like like if if if weight is like I mean like a genetic thing which I mean like

I guess in some sense it is I mean I don't know what I'm talking about but like if that's true then like the DNA of every American changed over the last 30 to 40 years like in particular like evolution in like rapid rapid a time frame here and it's just like it's because of the bad food that we eat and I'm not saying it's like eating bad food makes you like a morally bad person but it is an issue of our food supply that is essentially poison right yeah no this issue fucking like I eat it all the time too you know so like we're all part I mean it's like good and bad food is like shouldn't shouldn't these the people are right it's not a moral judgment but it is it's it's a factual one in that like the food you consume of you know is either of more or a varying nutritional value

value and to your body yeah I made in my best possible world the second thing we nationalized after the entire health care system would be like food production like absolutely I don't know how you can look at the last 40 years and think anyone has a right to do for-profit factory farming like this is again yeah this is you cannot fucking blame anyone for this like I completely agree with those people and some people are like more predisposed predisposed to uh like you know gain a lot of weight and have bad reactions to that shitty food than other people uh it definitely is genetic we're all eating the same slop but it is I don't look at it as a choice being made by Americans I look at it as another thing being done to all of us no I mean like the choice is being

made by you know politicians and the people who own these companies and like the or the the the regulators who make a choice to allow chemicals and you know corn slurry and like every food that we eat it's literally like you couldn't feed to livestock in Europe because they're because they have made different choices in their you know government regulatory bodies yeah well with that note our upcoming tour is officially titled the I'm no longer fat tour but wait this doesn't apply to me oh um Felix is no longer fat tour yeah the Felix is called the Felix uh Felix from literature I'm no longer fat you may know him from contemporary literature it's Felix that he's not fat anymore I'm not I'm no longer it's not like 2020 when I got really fat I'm not fat anymore

most of the tour is about well there we go um should we should so much like transition into the Stephen Thonsinger interview now yeah at some point will you have to ask him his interior design tips because a guy who has spent that much time in his house has got to have picked up a thing or two about like how to you know uh create the illusion of space uh maintain feng shui and all that this shit looks good like he's obviously like it is a fucking crime that they have done this to him and he should not be on house arrest but like credit to Don Thiger the man and his family um that place like they really made the most of it you know we were talking about a little bit before the show started one of the aspects of the one of the things in the interview that I learned is that

he was a furloughed from his actual prison sentence of six months after like 45 days he was furloughed because the Bureau of Prisons were just like uh he's over 60 um there's too many people in here already and like covid is spreading rapidly so like we're just gonna we're just gonna like send him back home you know and like matt you said it was like that's how fucking evil judge presca and Rita glaven the prosecutor are is that you said Strothermarten's character Strothermarten from fucking cool hand luke is like this is a bit much don't you think we got a problem we got we got a uh we got a failure to communicate here you're trying to kill a 60 year old man what are you doing it's like by the way he was the only one in danbury prison for who was there for a misdemeanor

dude he was in a prison and he was just they're like oh what are you in for like uh you know a contempt a misdemeanor contempt charge from a judge it's like do you know what prison staff do like like they do gladiator fights where they like bet on the outcome they make inmates fight each other for the to the death because they're bored and even they were like are you guys serious this seems cool and unusual like the fucking they'll just like beat an inmate to death like nearly to death and throw him in solitary and be like oh he like hit his head and they're like this is just they're like this is just like a sweet old man like what are you like are you okay dude yo we gotta get you out of here fucking god judge prescott hugs and smiles hugs and smiles hugs and

smiles sending hugs and smiles a big smile all right well uh i'm just uh i'm issuing the official chopper challenge going to uh you know repeat guest even donzing here as you'll hear in the interview uh he's standing strong his head's up he's gonna be a free man april 25th so without further ado once again steven donzinger back on the show cheers guys cheers okay uh joining me now once again is lawyer steven donzinger who is now what over 900 days of um both in house arrest and then a 45 day stretch in prison the last time i talked to you was right before your sentencing and uh you were sentenced to uh sort of out what a six a six months stretch in danbury prison in connecticut uh could you just talk about um the circumstances that led to you being furloughed

and what your time in danbury was like well it's great great to be with you again will and thanks again for having me i mean first of all let me just stay to the outside i'm a corporate political prisoner i mean i was charged with criminal contempt by a judge the charge was rejected by the u.s attorney who pointed a private chevron law firm to prosecute me appointed a friend to be the judge i was denied a jury and i was essentially railroaded with a contempt conviction because i refused to turn over my computer to chevron protecting privileged information you know owned by my clients down in equitable so i believe this entire situation was unjust and it's on appeal but the reality is i have now served over 900 days in detention some of that in a prison

most of that in my house with an ankle bracelet for a misdemeanor charge that has a maximum sentence of 180 days i mean it's the most extraordinary abuse of power by a corporation and it's judicial allies that frankly i've ever witnessed and you know although our criminal justice system is people know has many many deep-seated problems um this is a new one i mean this is essentially a private corporate prosecution intended to silence a lawyer a successful human rights lawyer who helped indigenous peoples in ecuador win a 10 billion dollar pollution judgment against chevron that's why they're attacking me so having said that the experience in prison uh it was unpleasant uh obviously i mean who wants to go to prison um they furloughed

me early and by the way i'm not free i'm still detained at home under the custody of the bureau prison but i think the reason they wanted me out early is because of my age i'm 60 years old um covid was a real real threat into prison um and they also saw that i was the only person they're convicted of a misdemeanor i mean literally of 900 people in the men's side of that prison there was also a woman's side every single one was convicted of some sort of felony i was the only one convicted of a misdemeanor they looked at my situation and they're like this is crazy and i think the staffs that we got to get this guy out of here um it was very clear the bureau prisons function professionally and you know unlike judges cap on a presca who sort of made this

happen was not willing to do the bidding of chevron and continue this campaign to try to you know really destroy me and destroy my reputation which by the way i'll add i think is totally failed but that's that was the purpose of it um and so like you were sentenced and then you had to drive yourself to connecticut and turn yourself in to the the bureau of prisons and it was just like i remember thinking like when you were sentenced i mean i mean it's all it's all grotesque but like did you have some feeling like of i mean if not relief just a sense of like at least you know there's an end date to when your tension this this this this sort of limbo that you've been existing in for the over two years now i'm like like what did

that feel like well look i mean you know i was in indefinite detention prior to my trial one of the weird anomalies and i would say this is illegal under international law is that in the united states when you're detained at home it doesn't count toward your sentence you know and because of covid and various delays that happen i literally was home two years and two months before i was able to have a trial which is crazy it's a misdemeanor and i'm literally the only lawyer and individual in america with no criminal record ever locked up prior to trial and a misdemeanor for even a day and i was locked up for over two years at home so you know at least now i'm home it's counting toward my sentence but i still maintain my sentence is illegal and i should

be released immediately amnesty international has called for my immediate release as have five jurists from the united nations working group on arbitrary detention who looked at my case so the us is not in conformity with the law and the way i'm being treated and we've called on attorney general garland and on president biden to immediately act to take back this prosecution from the chevron law firm the name of which is seward and kissle bring it into the into the department of justice and dismiss the case and have me released immediately on the basis of these international decisions or at a minimum on the basis of the fact that i've already served my sentence five times over i mean this is an embarrassment for the united states of america

and i just tweeted by the way you can i'd urge people to follow this on my twitter feed as donziger but secretary of state blinkin you know just yesterday tweeted for the taliban to release an american citizen who they're holding okay total silence on the fact that an american human rights lawyer is being held illegally against his will right here in minhattan and it's hypocrisy so i'm calling on president biden and secretary blinkin and the u.s government as a whole to do something about this immediately um yeah i mean like you're talking about uh blinkin and biden uh their silence on your case um their inaction their refusal to do anything i mean just um just the other week um we learned that president biden has named a lawyer named jennifer reardon to be a federal judge

and now she was an she was a lawyer at gibson dunne uh who you know was basically what was her role in your involvement in your case yeah so so president biden i mean this was kind of shocked me he appointed a chevron lawyer to the federal bench her name is jennifer reardon she works at a law firm gibson dunne and crutcher here in new york i mean they've been paid literally hundreds of millions of dollars by chevron over the last 10 years to try to destroy the victory won by the indigenous peoples and former communities of ecuador over chevron in the court case including making up evidence against me as the lawyer for those groups down in ecuador and orchestrating my detention i mean you know they worked with the their that's that's chevron

law firm worked with the second chevron law firm appointed by the judge after my contempt charges were rejected by the us attorney to lock me up you know so jennifer reardon um has spent a good part of her career working in a group in that firm attacking indigenous peoples in the amazon attacking human rights lawyers and she's complicit in what i believe is a massive um fraud perpetrated by chevron to put illegal evidence into court in an effort to sort of keep me silenced and detained so i don't understand why joe biden would purport to be you know to have a plan to deal with the climate crisis and appoint a pro oil judge with a history of really being complicit in human rights violations targeting indigenous peoples who are on the front

who are the frontline defenders of our planet um it's really an abomination by the way i think part of the reason she was appointed is because senator jillibrand of the new york senator has very close ties to her and was urging president biden to do it reardon the nominee has raised a ton of money for jillibrand and for chuck schumer the firm has um and you know that's how they get support but i mean this is a slap in the face to all of us who care about climate and care about environmental justice and human rights so i you know i've called in my twitter feed for president biden to withdraw the nomination and i think a lot of environmental groups are going to be are going to be doing the same um yeah like uh i'm just revising it there's a there's a

piece in the intercept um that uh has a uh uh jillibrand received about 190 thousand dollars from a pack uh gibson dunes uh pack so i mean uh uh there you go i mean uh that's why you know the you know you're you're a resident of the state of new york that's why you know you're yes you said you're a corporate prisoner being held you know prosecuted in new york you're currently under house arrest in new york both senators no politician from this state democratic politician has said or done anything and i guess this is a follow the money situation i mean in these these law these law firms have deep pockets yeah i mean there have been people congresspersons 11 of them actually including alexandria casio cortez corrig bush jimma

govern jamie raskin and others who have spoken out and demanded my immediate release along with 68 Nobel laureates what's shocking to me is my actual representatives including the two senators and jerry nadler the representative have done nothing they've not spoken out they haven't visited me i've been here over two years um and i believe that they're just bought off by chevron and by their law firm gibson dunes i mean jillibrand is heavily dependent on gibson dunes for campaign contributions so is senator schumer and representative nadler i mean that's just pathetic i you know he we tried we sent him 24 000 emails asking him to speak out about a human rights violation happening to one of his constituents he didn't do anything we later found out his son

is a partner an attorney in the gibson dunes law firm and he's partners with jennifer reardon and the other lawyers who are profiting from attacking me and protecting chevron's human rights abuses so they're all hacks in my opinion caught up in a system that you know where they can so easily be bought off i mean it's so sad but you know i feel i know what's happening i mean it's it's obvious that you know nadler jillibrand senator schumer they should speak out they should do more they're silent it's you know and they received tons of money from the chevron and its law firms um i want to get back to uh you know you're you're sentencing and uh the furlough but but in between there are the the 45 days that you spent in danbury prison in canada kit could you

just like uh just let me like what was like a day like in danbury prison like with the other inmates aware of your situation i mean the the surreality of you being there for a misdemeanor so the answer is over time most became very aware of my situation i was getting a ton of letters from the outside because of amnesty international getting letters from all over the world and people wanted to know why i was getting so many letters and i told them my story um and they have ways of checking out when an inmate tells a story they can check it out by asking people on the outside and you know people want to know each other's stories so you know i i you know i was treated with respect um i thought frankly there was more mutual respect

among inmates on the inside than there often is among people on the outside um the conditions were really difficult largely because the the covid problem the prison was locked down of course the lockdown seemed to relate more to staff convenience than to medical issues in my opinion but you know we couldn't leave the unit except one time a week um couldn't get outside uh so it was tough and also there was very little food um and space you know and there was virtually no programs no educational programs i mean you know one thing i learned is if you want to get a college education in prison it's impossible because all the free offerings and the various universities around the world you can't get access to them because they don't allow you to get on the internet you know so

there's all these ways the bureau prisons has to sort of control the carceral system and to manage it in the cheapest way possible and there's very almost no resources devoted to serious program and i saw a lot of people sitting around all day with nothing to do wasting away and i will say this the prison had 900 people i mean there were people in that prison convicted of very serious offenses but they had been in the system 15 20 25 years and they were on their way out and the prison i was in was a low security prison that was had a lot of people who were getting close to leaving um and i was mixed up with you know from serious people who had served a lot of time but i will say that my personal experience was positive i found that everyone you know for the

most part treated each other with respect people cared about each other um you know in a system that really is designed to strip you of your identity and is quite brutal in many respects there's so much humanity that bubbles up and responds among the inmates themselves you know just the care they have for each other inmates help each other with legal briefs um with with all sorts of issues you know so you know you have no cell phone you have no internet you know in prison you have to go the old fashioned just talk to people and you get to know people and you can connect in that way and you know i learned a lot but it was unpleasant yeah um meanwhile on the outside here i mean like what have i mean in the time that you've been certainly uh under house

arrest and then like since being sentenced what have um uh our old friends judge presca and your corporate prosecutor read a glaven uh what have they been up to since they sent you to prison because i'm uh just one example here uh read a glaven uh the you know private attorney who is you know uh your prosecutor uh has billed taxpayers about 640 thousand dollars for her work um sending you to prison and there are many more um records of uh the billing that uh she has yet to disclose well that's a great question i mean i will say this for my for the prosecution of me i read a glaven and her law firm have billed not just 640 they probably build over a million they haven't disclosed all their invoices so a misdemeanor usually costs about 5000

dollars to prosecute they've spent 200 times the normal amount to go after me okay let me just state that at the outset and it was paid by taxpayers after the u.s attorney refused to prosecute me so think about that judge Kaplan who went after me appointed a private share of a law firm to prosecute me and had them pay from taxpayers which essentially means taxpayers are funding an illegal prosecution that had been rejected by the normal federal prosecutor frankly it's an outrage and i think glaven and her firm should return every penny of that money but on top of that million dollars and james north just did a great article in the nation about this it turns out that the gibson done from the second chevron law firm that's been targeting me for

years where jennifer reardon works as a partner um they they will they build chevron literally millions of additional dollars to do redeglaven's work like they were writing her briefs they were helping her find documents they were strapped everyone was writing redeglaven your prosecutor shoot they were writing her legal briefs for your case i believe they were writing her briefs i mean judge prescos was used to let us get discovery on how that really went down but i am no fool and when i saw the the highly sophisticated uh briefs that glaven was writing i mean glaven you know was getting support from a major law firm and i'm sure it was a chevron law firm listen the record in this case is millions of pages the case has gone on 28 years and there

is no way we to glaven could have possibly written some of the stuff that was being submitted to screw me it was very clear the chevron law firm that you know the one that had been working on this for years was behind it and they admitted in court during my trial that they had been paid by chevron i mean they had spent 132 hours the chevron lawyers at gibson done meeting with redeglaven preparing for my trial i mean chevron financed and orchestrated this entire prosecution that's why we say it was illegal and is the nation's first corporate prosecution and by the way it's a playbook for the fossil fuel industry kids yourself don't kid yourself because people who speak out and they you know often you can't get a public prosecutor to go after a guy like me

because they know it's not just the idea judge can actually appoint a private law firm or empower a private corporation like chevron to deprive someone of their liberty in the name of the u.s government it's outrageous but it's what happened in my case well i mean yeah it's like to expand outward from the ordeal that you're going through i mean once again to the the bigger picture of your clients the people of ecuador the judgment that you won against chevron where like where does that stand and like what is what how does like that what is the larger picture looked like to you now in terms of human rights environmental rights and the efforts to hold companies like chevron accountable for the i don't know environmental genocides that they

perpetrate and seek in pursuit of profit well listen um you know chevron's whole strategy was to distract attention from its massive environmental crimes called the Chernobyl or the amazon in ecuador by trying to get people to think about me and the lawyers so i want to be very clear this case is about the people of ecuador and it's about the crimes chevron committed in the amazon that have literally killed thousands of people from cancer and other oral related illnesses and have poisoned you know 1500 square miles of rainforests in which about a hundred thousand indigenous people that's the fundamental problem it's not anything having to do with me now in terms of the case i want to be very clear my legal situation is distinct from that of the people

in ecuador who won the judgment against chevron they have their own lawyers who are researching places in around the world to enforce that judgment such that chevron is forced to comply with the rule of law and the people of ecuador who have been poisoned and harmed can receive compensation to clean up and remediate the environmental disaster that has existed down there by the way for 50 years it's connected to my situation because i'm their lawyer and chevron has tried to disable my ability to be an advocate by orchestrating this you know this unjust and baseless prosecution against me that's kept me in detention for almost three years they're connected but they're not one in the same the case in ecuador regardless of what happens

to me and i believe ultimately i will be out of this and soon because my sentence is about to end they have their own team and they will be pursuing chevron to the ends of the earth which will chevron complies with the law and pays the judgment they owe and again just to reiterate you you won the case you've already won the case what no matter what they've done to you or no matter how much they've um what they put you through or what they continue to deny or distract you won the case but chevron has not paid the the judgment that was levied against them that's exactly right instead they paid literally billions of dollars to hire 60 law firms and 2 000 lawyers to attack the indigenous leaders in ecuador and attack steven donziger and other people

and that's where biden's judicial nominee jennifer reart is profiting because she's partners in a law firm that has had chevron paid them literally hundreds of millions of dollars in my opinion to hide their human rights abuses in the amazon hide their destruction of indigenous ancestral lands and hide their attacks their illegitimate illegal attacks on the advocates the frontline defenders like myself would have held them accountable that's what jennifer reart is doing she does not deserve to be on the bench and i'm again i'm perplexed as to why president biden appointed her i mean again this is sort of like one of these uh when i hear about it i want to be like explain this to me like i'm a third grader where it's like okay you've been in prison

for three years now and including actual prison not just house arrest how like chevron the case is over they lost how is it how is it possible that they haven't coughed up even a scent despite the judgment levied against them because they have decided it's cheaper to hire dozens of law firms hundreds of lawyers to just file motions and grind down our team and what's called post judgment litigation and you know it's a classic corporate defense strategy you see this now in a lot of the climate cases that the municipalities have been filing um there's one case that's 20 years old you know against exon out of indonesia that is going to trial finally this year in washington dc a major human rights case against exon so you know the the corporations are used to

laundering their unethical activities through big law firms they pay them tons of money to complicate matters and to delay matters so they don't have to actually pay the people they poison and the people they harmed and these law firms need to be held accountable they need to be called out ted wells for example as a partner at um paul weiss he represents exon made tens of millions of dollars in fees not more randy mastrow ted butros at gibson done same thing and you see the same big law firms representing the big fossil fuel companies in all the lawsuits and it makes it really really difficult for environmental groups for vulnerable communities or even for state attorney generals to hold them accountable because they just delay delay delay

delay and judges generally are now you know our federal judiciary has gone so far to the right it's very difficult for the judges to hold these these abuses of power accountable so you know that's why it takes so long and that's why i've been working on this case 28 years by the way and i don't want people to think we've failed we won the case and the process of winning we've held chevron accountable to a great degree they've had to spend a lot of money to deal with us the people of Ecuador still have not recovered the funds that they're owed i mean one gets the impression that you know like they've made this calculus that it's cheaper to just keep spend keep paying lawyers to just grind out this war of attrition but one gets the impression that

they would spend the exact they would spend nine billion dollars on lawyers to avoid paying the nine billion dollars that they owe to ecuador based on the principal alone i think that's correct and i want to tell you the logic behind that okay in my opinion they know they've done this in multiple places around the world and they know once one place recovers the funds they're going to have a massive liability additional liability around the world in multiple places so they overspend in the first lawsuit our lawsuit our successful lawsuit as a way to discourage these other lawsuits from happening so yeah you're under house arrest now but i i did see on your twitter account the other day you did get the you did get the opportunity

to leave your house to go to the Bronx and submit a piss test to the bureau of prisons yeah i mean they that's what it's like when i mean you were still you know under the management of the bureau of prisons they can drug test you at any time that's true i mean at least like a subway trip uptown yeah you know and it's it's really unbelievable i mean i they're testing me for drugs i'm 60 years old i'm not a drug user i was not convicted of a drug offense but you know it's all about control it's about reminding you you're not free it's a psychological game to some degree and it's ultimately very dehumanizing i mean i'm i can deal with it i mean i'm not complaining that i mean i'm complaining about my situation but like it's fine like it's just how that their

bureaucracy that they set up works it's a bureaucracy of control and yeah i mean i got called at 11 p.m. friday night they said you got to come into mar to give urine you know a piss test and they can do that any day any time they can call you up any hour the day 24 seven and demand you come in by the way to the halfway house which is a private place that has a contract with the bureau of prisons the bureau of prisons uses them to monitor people on home confinement who are in bureau of prisons custody so they visit my house um you know they monitor me they make me do check ins they'll call me up i have to send a selfie to prove i'm home and that kind of thing i want to be clear though the staff of the halfway house are really nice i mean they're good people

who work hard and they try to do their jobs according to the policies and systems created by the bureau of prisons so i'm not blaming them they're actually very lovely people but the system itself is designed to just crush people with control yeah i mean if i'd been in my apartment for three years i would be uh hoping to get a call for a drug test every other day just i know just to get out of the house i know uh just the uh i guess my last question for you is like there there is now for the first time in a long time for you there is kind of like there is a set date that that ends your detention and that is what about six months from now no my brother okay three months amounts three months okay April 27 April 25th so you got that date you got that circle

on the calendar we're gonna we're gonna have a you know we're gonna have a big celebration almost yeah one of my parts no yeah i and i guess like i you know during this this this whole uh you know just Kafka asked the trial or whatever i mean you've done an astonishing job of you know advocating for yourself for your clients you know getting getting this you know rather astonishing story out there um despite the by the way complete almost complete blackout from any major or mainstream news source i'm just yeah like i'm wondering a party at your house i mean like what do you plan to do April 25th or April 26 you know like what my idea is to celebrate as a form of expressing my appreciation to the thousands of people around the world who

stood by me the Ecuadorians and my family um this has been a hell of an ordeal i mean you know look i'm strong i'm resilient i'm making the most of it i'm still working out of my home but like you know i can't deny that's been really tough so we're going to celebrate um and express appreciation and my hope to just invite everyone to my house and we're going to do a block party on the street below and dance and you know create strength and energy for the battles ahead this is not over you know they're they could still attack me personally we the Ecuadorians and their legal team have more work to do to make sure chevron pays up and lives are saved you know this is not the steven donziger game okay it is a humanitarian crisis in the amazon hundreds of people have

cancer thousands have died thousands more will die unless something is done and chevron has not paid a damn penny and i will say bp by the way has paid almost 70 billion dollars to you know as compensation and fines for the gulf of mexico spill in 2010 chevron hadn't paid a penny for a much larger spill and a much more delicate ecosystem but they did deliberately to save money and paid a penny to the people of Ecuador so we need to solve this problem and american companies particularly fossil fuel companies need to be held accountable for their acts of pollution all over the world it's not just Ecuador it's many many places this is a hell of an accomplishment by the Ecuadorian indigenous communities and the farmer communities and their legal team to win this judgment it's epic

it's historical let's celebrate it let's appreciate it even though they haven't actually collected on it yet the fact is chevron has been driven so crazy by the existence of this judgment that they hired 60 law firms and 2 000 lawyers and spent probably a billion dollars plus in legal fees to deal with it that is major accountability okay they're not going to do this again so easily next time other big oil companies so i just want to take a step back and say despite your deal that i'm in and the fact there's more work to do the historic accomplishments of these people down in Ecuador needs to be noted celebrated appreciated and made known all over the world yeah i mean i that to me is uh you know the most admirable and kind of like uplifting the element of your story

here but everything you've gone through is that it has backfired on chevron chevron and their law firms because clearly you are not broken and i guarantee there are way more people who are aware of what they did and what they've done to you because of the actions that they've taken i mean again it's not over they have not been held accountable in any regard but they have not succeeded in uh breaking you or your determination or just sweeping you under the road that's that's so true will and you know i will say this i salute you and other podcasters and independent media outlets for keeping this story alive i mean the new york times has totally ignored the story a massive human rights violation by a by a lawyer in its own city i'm a 30 minute walk for their

newsroom they've never written a story about me um while people like you and others have put it out there and the support we're getting is phenomenal by the way if people want to learn more please go to the website free donziger.com f-r-e-e-d-o-n-z-i-g-e-r you can donate money to our legal defense firm we're urging people to donate um right now we have a matching donor up to a hundred thousand dollars until the end of the month which is tonight at midnight i don't know when this is actually going to run but in any event we're urging people to give and even if you can't give i know times can be tough right now with for some people join our campaign anyway give us your email and you'll get regular case updates again it's free donziger.com by the way our campaign has developed almost

into a movement i mean we literally have 90 000 people around the world signed up over the last two years um you know it's shocking but by locking me up they've forced us to organize better and the amount of support we're getting is moving it's touching it's and we're trying to harness it you know to make chevron be held fully accountable but also take on some other broader human rights and climate issues well uh steven once again free donziger.com that information will be in the episode description of this episode it will be out this evening um i would last thing uh i grew up on the upper west side my mom still lives on the upper west side april 25th april whenever the party is i would love to come through to the party i'll bring some i'll bring some zabars treats for

zabars and maybe a little barney greengrass yeah absolutely anyway love to see you then obviously and thanks again for having me really appreciate it steven once again thanks for your time and thank you for uh you know standing up staying strong appreciate it will all right thanks a lot bye bye tonight there's gonna be a jailbreak somewhere in this town see me and the boys we don't like it so we're getting up and going down high low looking right to left if you see us coming i think it's best we'll move away do you hear what i say from under my breath

tonight there's gonna be a jailbreak somewhere in this town tonight there's gonna be a jailbreak so don't you be around out don't you be around