In a one-page order today, Judge Kaplan denied yesterday’s motion, described in the post below, to strike Chevron’s star witness in the RICO trial challenging a multibillion dollar Ecuadorian judgment against Chevron. The motion claimed that payments Chevron made to the witness to relocate to the U.S. were bribes. The order states that the motion was “frivolous”:
As our Court of Appeals repeatedly has made plain, “[i]t is the province of the [trier of fact] and not of the court to determine [as a matter of law] whether a witness who may have been inaccurate, contradictory and even untruthful in some respects was nonetheless entirely credible in the essentials of his testimony.” United States v. Truman, 688 F.3d 129, 140 (2d Cir. 2012) (quoting United States v. O’Connor, 650 F.3d 850,855 (2d Cir. 2011) (internal quotation marks omitted). The Court will carefully consider the credibility of all witnesses before making its ultimate findings of fact.