It’s Not Just Strategic U.S. Land China Is Trying To Buy, They’re Buying Judges, Too

About three weeks ago, the country was understandably preoccupied. We were in the final phase of the battle to get the One Big Beautiful Bill passed, still reveling in the aftermath of taking Iran off the board as a potential nuclear power, and we were celebrating a bunch of late-term Supreme Court decisions confirming that the elected head of the Article II branch of government actually gets to manage the employees of Article II agencies. But during that time, Texas Senator Ted Cruz chaired a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing on creeping Chinese influence on U.S. energy policy, using climate change as the vehicle with which to hamper the Trump goals of becoming a dominant energy producer once again. 

Cruz’ opening statement as chair of the subcommittee ran about 13 minutes. It’s worth watching once if you have the time, but there was two and a half minutes in there that were eyebrow raising. 

So it’s not just the CCP is using Confucius Institutes to permeate American academia, and they’re not content flying spy balloons and other reconnaissance aircraft over the country to map out sensitive locations. And he’s not even talking about Communist Chinese shell companies attempting to buy land next to military or other critical infrastructure sites. They’re apparently now in the business of educating and influencing judges. The ranking member of the committee, Sheldon Whitehouse, looks absolutely disinterested in what Cruz is outlining, because he’s too busy reading and reviewing some document a staffer handed him. Perhaps it’s a proposed member list at the whites-only club in Rhode Island of which he holds so dear and he’s helping advise the membership committee. Whitehouse does have to maintain his standards, you know. 

So why does a three-week-old Senate subcommittee matter? Fox News’ Emma Colton and Breanne Deppisch have an update that are the receipts to what Cruz was alleging. There’s now evidence of emails and group chats of over a dozen judges engaged with CCP-backed climate groups to bone up on possible creative legislation to hamper the Trump administration’s energy proposals.  

An environmental advocacy group accused of trying to manipulate judges organized a years-long, nationwide online forum with jurists to promote favorable info and litigation updates regarding climate issues – until the email-styled group chat was abruptly made private, Fox News Digital found. 

The Climate Judiciary Project (CJP) was founded in 2018 by a left-wing environmental nonprofit, the Environmental Law Institute (ELI), and pitches itself as a “first-of-its-kind effort” that “provides judges with authoritative, objective, and trusted education on climate science, the impacts of climate change, and the ways climate science is arising in the law.”

Delaware Governor Jack Markell nominated J. Travis Laster to be a vice-chancellor in the Delaware Chancery Courts, which mediates a lot of merger disputes and other equity-based litigation. It’s an important court, because Delaware is the incorporation state for a ton of small businesses and large corporations alike. Laster is one of the judges Fox News caught in group chat communiques with entities bankrolled by the CCP.

One message posted by Delaware Judge Travis Laster, vice chancellor of the Delaware Court of Chancery, features a YouTube video of a 2022 climate presentation delivered by a Delaware official and a Columbia University professor that focused on the onslaught of climate lawsuits since the mid-2000s. It also included claims that such lawsuits could one day bankrupt the fuel industry. 

Laster shared the video in the group with a disclaimer to others: “Please do not forward or use without checking with me” as the video is “unlisted” on YouTube and not publicly available.

Judges all over the country, from Indiana’s Appellate Court to district courts in Nebraska, and including judges appointed by both Republicans and Democrats, as many as 14 of them, were part of the document cache Fox News was able to investigate. 

n another message, CJP’s manager, Jared Mummert, sent a message to the group in May 2024 praising the judges for their mentorship of a second group of “Judicial Leaders in Climate Science” – which included 14 judges from 12 states and Puerto Rico – as part of a partnership between CJP and the National Judicial College. The National Judicial College provides judicial training for judges across the country from its Reno, Nevada, campus. 

“We want to give a special ‘thank you’ to those who are serving as mentors to this second cohort!” the message read. It added that CJP was ramping up its number of “engagement opportunities” to “every six months for both cohorts of judges to come together to share updates and connect with one another.”

In short, this is an ethical nightmare for the Article III branch coming on the heels of a raft of extra-Constitutional sailing over the past 50 years into judicial activism through nationwide mandates. And that sailing picked up speed towards the falls of late before the Court’s CASA decision put an end to district judges using their bench to make, shape, or scrap national policy. 

The concept of rule of law is one that undergirds our entire experiment as a democratic republic. But it’s a very fragile concept, and one that will erode further if you enter a court regarding a case in which you have particular interest, and wonder not just who appointed the judge and where his or her ideological leanings are, but now also whether they’re on the take, even if indirectly, from the Communist Chinese Party in Beijing. 

While the Supreme Court had a very good and productive term this year, restoring Constitutional order between the branches and upholding parental rights among the highlights, it would appear that judicial ethics review really needs to be undertaken by the Court very soon. 

Good on Ted Cruz for bringing the subject up, and very commendable reportage by Colton and Deppisch. We are in a new era with an adversary that has already shown willingness to permeate every level of American society to their advantage. The fairly loose grip on the reins of lower courts by SCOTUS may have worked relatively well in the past, but one gets the sense that there needs to be a new set of judicial guidelines while the Court is constituted by a solid majority of rational justices. If the Court does reset the rules of conduct, that could very well become Chief John Roberts’ greatest legacy.  

Editor’s Note: Thanks to President Trump and his administration’s bold leadership, we are respected on the world stage, and our enemies are being put on notice.

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