A China-linked nonprofit spent years training American judges behind closed doors.
Now Congress has a new report showing exactly who those judges were talking to.
And one judge just made the cover-up impossible to ignore.
The Secret Group Chat That Exposed Everything
Delaware Judge Travis Laster shared a video with a private group of judges in 2022.
The video – circulated on a hidden listserv run by the Environmental Law Institute – predicted that climate lawsuits could one day bankrupt the entire fossil fuel industry.
Laster told the group not to forward it.
"Because the link is of a judicial event that is otherwise not public, please do not forward or use without checking with me," Laster wrote, according to documents obtained by Fox News Digital. "I suspect that goes without saying, but the powers that be will be happier that I said it."
Indiana Court of Appeals Judge Stephen Scheele called it "great work/great stuff."
https://twitter.com/WarMachineRR/status/2072697641369039201?s=20
This was the private listserv of ELI's Climate Judiciary Project – the same group that has now trained more than 2,000 American judges on environmental law since 2018, and the same group a national security organization just formally accused of advancing Chinese Communist Party interests at the expense of American energy.
When the listserv got exposed in 2025, ELI quietly shut it down and scrubbed participating judges' names from its website.
That's not what innocent people do.
What Congress Learned This Week
State Armor, a national security organization focused on foreign threats, sent a bombshell report to congressional leadership Tuesday.
The report documented what ELI spent three decades doing in China while simultaneously running its judge-training operation in America.
ELI worked directly with the Policy Research Center for Environment and Economy – a think tank inside China's Ministry of Ecology and Environment.
In 2018, ELI launched a joint working group with that same ministry-linked entity, the CCP-connected Chinese law firm JunHe, and American firm Latham & Watkins. China's Ministry of Ecology and Environment was listed as a co-founder.
That same year, ELI trained 265 environmental NGO workers, judges, prosecutors, and attorneys at Tianjin University.
https://twitter.com/Michael7ucci/status/2072689648145424772?s=20
Tianjin University later landed on the Commerce Department's Entity List for trade secret theft tied to military applications.
ELI also ran a working group that fed "information and analysis to the Chinese government regarding environmental regulations in the United States and Europe."
They were telling Beijing how American environmental law works – while training American judges on how to apply it.
State Armor's letter to Congress was direct: "Across three decades of engagement, ELI's work has uniformly advanced Chinese strategic and national security interests while undermining American national security by constraining domestic energy producers."
ELI says its China programming ended in 2024 and that it never advanced Chinese government interests.
But as recently as May, ELI's journal published papers by Chinese academics from state-run universities.
In June, ELI hosted a Chinese legal scholar who personally managed programs training Chinese judges – as a guest on a panel about global environmental law careers.
Ted Cruz Said It First
Senator Ted Cruz has been calling this "judicial capture" since 2024.
"This is like paying the players to play and paying the umpire to call the shots the way you want," Cruz said at a Senate hearing last June.
He wasn't wrong.
The same donors who fund ELI's judicial training also fund the law firms suing energy companies in front of the same judges ELI trained.
The JPB Foundation gave $2 million to CJP and $4.45 million to a fund that bankrolls climate lawsuits against energy companies.
The Hewlett Foundation gave $500,000 to CJP and $150,000 to another climate litigation fund.
ELI collected over $1.5 million from the EPA in 2023 and 2024 while running this operation.
https://twitter.com/kenblackwell/status/2072698027890843755?s=20
The Trump administration cut all ties with ELI in September 2025, after 23 state attorneys general demanded it.
The House Judiciary Committee opened a formal probe.
ELI's response was to wipe judge names from its website and make the listserv private.
China Doesn't Need to Win a War
China controls 78% of global solar cell production, 80% of lithium-ion battery chemicals, and 73% of finished battery cells.
Every American energy company that gets buried in climate litigation is one less competitor Beijing has to worry about.
A nonprofit with thirty years of ties to CCP-linked entities trained 2,000 American judges on how to rule in climate cases – while sharing American regulatory secrets with Beijing and training Chinese judges to protect their own energy sector.
As State Armor put it, this is "American unilateral disarmament in energy security and industrial production."
Cruz nailed the mechanism.
The new congressional report names the players and shows the money trail.
Now Congress needs to find out which 2,000 judges got trained, who approved the curriculum, and whether any of them are presiding over energy cases right now.
Sources:
- Robert Schmad, "China-linked green group training US judges draws fresh heat as foreign ties fuel pressure at home," Fox News, July 2, 2026.
- Breanne Deppisch and Andrew Mark Miller, "Unearthed chat sheds light on cozy ties between judges, climate activists, raising ethical concerns," Fox News Digital, July 17, 2025.
- "Climate group scrubs judges' names from website after unearthed chats unmasked cozy ties," Fox News Digital, August 12, 2025.
- "Senate Subcommittee Takes on Climate Lawfare," EID Climate, June 26, 2025.
- "House Judiciary Committee probes climate lawyers' involvement in controversial judicial training," Just the News, January 16, 2026.
- "EPA Orders Employees to 'No Longer Engage with the Environmental Law Institute,'" Legal Insurrection, September 27, 2025.
