State Armor launched a six-figure advertising blitz urging Congress to investigate the Environmental Law Institute, a nonprofit that has trained thousands of American judges on climate science, over alleged decades-long ties to Chinese Communist Party-linked organizations.
The campaign, which rolled out Wednesday in Washington with television ads, mobile billboards circling Capitol Hill and the institute's M Street headquarters, and targeted digital spots, follows a letter State Armor CEO Michael Lucci sent Tuesday morning to five Republican committee chairmen asking them to examine the Environmental Law Institute's funding, its relationships with Chinese entities, its information-sharing activities, and its judicial education programs.
Lucci addressed the letter to Sen. Chuck Grassley of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Mike Lee of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, Rep. Jim Jordan and Rep. Brett Guthrie of the House Judiciary Committee, and Rep. John Moolenaar, who chairs the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party. It marks the second such request in four months; State Armor first wrote to the same chairmen in June.
The Environmental Law Institute, known inside legal circles as ELI, created its Climate Judiciary Project in 2018. The project has since trained more than 2,000 American judges on environmental law, the Daily Caller News Foundation reported. ELI itself says on its website that it has provided training and resources to more than 3,000 judges in 28 countries since 1990 and describes its mission as helping "people improve the implementation of environmental and natural resource law globally."
State Armor's 39-page report, released in July, alleges the institute worked with Chinese government agencies, universities, judges, and legal groups for decades while advancing policies inside the United States that restrict domestic energy production. Fox News reported that ELI's programming in China concluded only in 2024 and that the relationships stretched back to the mid-1990s, encompassing Chinese NGOs, universities, judges, and environmental regulators.
Breitbart reported that the alleged institutional relationships included Wuhan University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China's Supreme People's Court, and China's Ministry of Ecology. The breadth of those connections, spanning courts, academia, and government regulators, is what State Armor says warrants congressional scrutiny.
Lucci, in a statement provided to the Daily Caller News Foundation, did not hold back about the group's position:
"ELI has allowed itself to be a middleman for Chinese influence here in America, and has carried out work that effectively advances the CCP's [Chinese Communist Party] geopolitical goals."
He added that Congress should "take a serious look at ELI's actions and relationships with Communist China to determine if legal action should be taken." His letter to the five chairmen described the institute as what "may represent one of the most sophisticated and least scrutinized potential avenues of Chinese influence operating within American legal and policy institutions."
The September letter adds a new dimension that the June letter did not include: a claim that ELI is working against American data center development at the same time China is racing to dominate artificial intelligence infrastructure.
Lucci wrote that the institute "has positioned itself as a leading voice against the rapid development of data centers and the energy infrastructure necessary to power them" and "is working to impede American development in a strategically critical industry while China races ahead."
To support the claim, the letter points to two items on ELI's own website. The first is a July 2025 public webinar on data center water use that ELI co-hosted with the Network for the Digital Economy and Environment, featuring panelists from Virginia Tech, the consulting firm WestWater Research, and the nonprofit Protect Our Aquifer. The second is a comment published this month in ELI's journal, the Environmental Law Reporter, titled "A Call for a National Data Center Moratorium and Policy Framework."
That journal comment was written by Bob Sussman, a former deputy administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency under President Bill Clinton. The Environmental Law Reporter states on its articles page that it welcomes outside submissions and that its goal is to educate the profession and foster debate, a framing that could complicate any effort to treat the Sussman piece as an institutional ELI position rather than a guest contribution.
State Armor, for its part, posted on X on September 15 that "China stands to gain when lawmakers become skittish about building modern data centers needed to keep us ahead in the AI race," tagging Attorney General Todd Blanche's account and adding: "China wants us to slow down. Lawmakers should keep that in mind when considering policies that could do just that."
Chad Mizelle, a former chief of staff and acting associate attorney general at the Justice Department, weighed in through a statement provided by State Armor. He pointed to what he described as a conflict involving a firm that sits on ELI's board while also briefing groups he called "CCP-adjacent" and defending energy companies in climate lawsuits:
"That a firm can sit on ELI's board and brief CCP-adjacent groups while defending energy companies in dozens of climate suits is exactly the kind of conflict that should outrage clients and federal officials alike."
Mizelle did not name the firm. State Armor's letter and report do not identify it in the material provided through the Daily Caller's reporting, leaving one of the sharper allegations without a public target.
State Armor's letter also frames the judicial training question in terms of perception. The group wrote in its congressional letter that "the question is not whether judges should receive continuing education but rather whether any educational initiative funded, organized, or influenced by organizations with relationships with foreign entities, particularly a foreign adversary, could affect the perception or reality of judicial impartiality."
Several of the Republican lawmakers who received the letter have separately voiced alarm. Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas wrote in a Facebook post in July that judges trained by or working with Communist China "have no place in our judicial system." Cotton added, in remarks reported by Breitbart: "If these allegations are true, they will be held accountable."
Rep. Moolenaar, who chairs the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, told The Daily Signal in early July that American judges "should closely vet the programs they participate in and never take part in training sponsored by CCP-linked United Front groups." The United Front Work Department is a Chinese government body that coordinates influence operations abroad, a fact that gives Moolenaar's warning a specific institutional edge.
Whether any of the five chairmen will act on State Armor's request remains unclear. None has publicly responded to either the June or September letters as of the Daily Caller's reporting.
The Environmental Law Institute did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation's request for comment. On its website, the institute says suggestions that the Climate Judiciary Project's activities are improper are "without merit." ELI describes its curriculum as drawing on the National Climate Assessment, the National Academies, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The institute's website also states: "We educate thousands of environmental professionals each year in the United States, with the conviction that more skilled environmental professionals result in better environmental outcomes." Separately, ELI says it is "training judges around the world on critical topics in domestic and international environmental law and informing communities dependent on the Gulf of Mexico on how to influence the restoration and recovery process."
Those descriptions paint a picture of a mainstream legal education outfit. But the gap between that self-portrait and the allegations in State Armor's 39-page report, which claims ELI maintained working relationships with Chinese courts, universities, and government ministries through 2024, is wide enough that congressional committees could reasonably decide it warrants a closer look.
The timing of State Armor's campaign is not accidental. On October 5, the Supreme Court is scheduled to hear Suncor Energy v. County Commissioners of Boulder County as the first argument of its new term. That case will decide whether local governments can pursue energy companies for climate damages under state law, a question that could reshape the broader climate litigation strategy in which ELI-trained judges may play a role.
If the court opens the door to state-level climate suits, the judges presiding over those cases will matter more than ever. And if those judges received their climate education from an organization with unresolved questions about foreign entanglements, the legitimacy of their rulings could face challenges that go well beyond the merits of any individual case.
Americans have a right to expect that the judges deciding their cases answer to the Constitution, not to the priorities of a foreign adversary. Congress now has the letter, the report, and the questions. What it lacks is an excuse not to ask them.
