In September 2009 I posted about Chevron’s campaign to battle charges the company faced in Ecuador.  Today’s Politico provides an update.

This summer, Chevron thought it had made major progress toward proving its point that it could not receive a fair trial in Ecuador, when it revealed that it had obtained videos — purportedly taped secretly by a pair of whistleblowers using recorders implanted in watches and pens — that the company said exposed a bribery scheme in the case involving Ecuadorean officials and possibly the judge in the case. The company turned the recordings over to authorities in the U.S. and Ecuador and circulated excerpts of the recordings on Capitol Hill. The judge recused himself.

But late last month, [public relations consultant Karen] Hinton — who is paid by the Philadelphia law firm financing the suit to advocate on behalf of a nonprofit called the Amazon Defense Coalition — released a report revealing that the American who helped make the recordings was a convicted drug trafficker, while his Ecuadorean partner was a Chevron contractor.