Due to my own schedule, I haven’t been writing about the various pending motions in the Lago Agrio RICO trial. I’ve got a day job, you know! But I did want to point to Donziger and the LAPs’ motion to strike Judge Guerra’s testimony. I’m not going to give a view about the motion in this post. Instead, I wanted just to point to footnote 4 of the motion, which tries to make some hay out of my FOIA case:

Chevron for years has orchestrated a public relations and lobbying campaign designed to imbue the public consciousness with fear and suspicion regarding Ecuador. See, e.g., DI 1241-2 at 5-8. By casting Ecuador—universally regarded as one of the world’s top retirement havens (see International Living, The World’s Top Retirement Havens in 2013, available at http://internationalliving.com/2012/12/the-worlds-top-retirement-havens-in-2013/# (last visited October 28, 2013)—as a lawless and dangerous cesspool of a country from which witnesses must be secreted at extraordinary expense, Chevron now attempts to reap the fruits of the antipathy it has so deliberately sown. Indeed, emerging evidence suggests that Chevron may have influenced the content of the U.S. State Department Reports on which it now relies as an independent condemnation of Ecuador. See generally https://lettersblogatory.com/foia/. In short, Chevron’s trashing of a sovereign nation with impunity in these proceedings is the culmination of several years of cynical groundwork-laying.

I’m not sure how Ecuador’s status as a retirement haven comes into it, but I am interested to see someone trying to make some use of the first fruits of the FOIA case.