Tag: lawsuits

GOP Senators Present Evidence China Bankrolls Environmentalist Lawsuits To Cripple U.S. Power

Senators met yesterday for a subcommittee hearing to discuss claims that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), foreign donors, and leftist legal activism are behind a “systematic campaign” to dismantle American energy dominance.

Throughout the hearing, Chairman Ted Cruz, R-Texas, emphasized how foreign funding and activist litigation are undermining U.S. energy infrastructure, posing a national security threat. His four Democrat colleagues repeatedly dismissed the concerns as a “conspiracy theory,” instead focusing on energy costs and “global warming.”

The “assault by the radical left,” “paid for by the [CCP],” seeks to “seize control of our courts [and] to weaponize litigation against U.S. energy producers,” Cruz said. He noted the assault is “three-pronged,” weaponizing “foreign funding, mass litigation, and judicial indoctrination” against “American energy independence.”

In describing the first prong, Cruz highlighted a “strategic alliance … between leftist billionaires, radical environmental organizations, and the Chinese Communist Party.” He said, “One of the primary vehicles for this alliance is Energy Foundation China, which has funneled upwards of $12 million to U.S.-based climate advocacy groups since 2020.”

This money flows “directly to aggressive litigation outfits” that file lawsuits against American gas and oil companies, Cruz said. He later said the “second prong” of the assault is a “legal barrage” aimed at bankrupting such companies. Cruz said more than 30 lawsuits have been filed in “at least 15 Democratic-run jurisdictions, including by 12 states” against U.S. oil, gas, and coal producers.

Scott Walter, president of Capital Research Center, testified during the hearing. He said, “Many environmentalist groups funded by the multitude of left-wing billionaires have disturbing foreign ties,” citing big-money international players such as Neville Roy Singham.

Singham lives in Hong Kong and was investigated by the FBI in 1974 for being “potentially dangerous” because he engaged in “activities inimical to the U.S,” according to Influence Watch. Walter also highlighted Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss, who spent $650 million on left-wing organizations, including “ClimateWorks Foundation, Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund, and Natural Resources Defense Council,” Walter’s testimony cites.

Climate lawfare groups suing American energy have raked in $500 million in 2023 from lawsuits, according to IRS forms Cruz cited during the hearing.

“They are using theories that are preposterous, legally speaking, and most of these theories will eventually hit a wall when they hit the final court,” Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach told The Federalist. Kobach said in his written testimony that some states have overstepped their bounds by “regulating conduct and industries far beyond their borders.”

Cruz said the “third prong” of the assault against American energy is “judicial capture,” primarily by the Environmental Law Institute (ELI), which holds “near total control over climate-related judicial training.” ELI’s Climate Judiciary Project (CJP) seeks “to ‘educate’—from a left-wing perspective—federal and state judges about climate change and related litigation designed to extract billions of dollars from energy companies,” Walter said in his written testimony.

The program claims to be nonpartisan but pressures judges into a specific “predetermined political narrative” and is funded by “left-wing bankrollers,” Cruz said. He said “more than 2,000 judges have participated” in the program.

“I’m skeptical that the CJP wants to help energy,” Walter said in response to a question from Cruz.

The four Democrat senators at the hearing unanimously wrote the CCP allegations off as a “conspiracy theory,” with Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Illinois, saying global warming is the real threat Congress should address. Witness David Arkush, the director of the Public Citizen’s Climate Program at the left-wing Roosevelt Institute, also dismissed the CCP allegations as “conspiracy theory.” Arkush told The Federalist, “I don’t see why [CCP] would be funding litigation against the U.S. oil and gas industry.”

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What Are They Hiding? Judicial Watch Fights Pam Bondi and Kash Patel for Records on Biden Regime’s Twitter Censorship

Judicial Watch has sued the FBI under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to unseal records from meetings between Twitter executives and the Biden FBI to censor the American people. 

The lawsuit was filed in 2023 after the FBI ignored a FOIA request for the records of meetings between June 2020 and December 2022.

For some reason, Trump’s DOJ is still fighting against Biden’s censorship efforts, which specifically targeted conservatives, including The Gateway Pundit’s reporting on election fraud, being exposed.

Via Judicial Watch:

(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced today that a hearing is ordered by U.S. District Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan for June 18 at 11 a.m. ET in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Justice for “Twitter Files” records concerning Hunter Biden’s laptop and other censorship. The only issue remaining in the lawsuit is the FBI’s continued hiding of records documenting two meetings between Twitter and the Biden FBI.

Judicial Watch filed the April 2023 lawsuit against the Justice Department, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence after the FBI failed to respond to a December 2022 FOIA request for the records of any FBI official and key Twitter employees between June 2020 and December 2022 (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Justice(No. 1:23-cv-01163)).

The lawsuit references Yoel Roth, Vijaya Gadde, and Jim Baker, who were prominent in internal discussions at Twitter about censoring the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story, as journalist Matt Taibbi revealed in the December 2022 release of the “Twitter Files.”

“It is frustrating beyond belief for Judicial Watch to have to go to federal court for basic information on Biden’s abuse of the FBI, using Twitter to censor and monitor Americans,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.

Fitton said after the hearing that the DOJ was “arguing why the American people should not be able to see what the Biden FBI was planning with Twitter.”

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FBI Settles Lawsuit Over Biden Era Cover-Up Of Trans Killer Manifesto

More than two years after facing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit for playing politics with a trans killer’s manifesto, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has agreed to a settlement. 

The agreement is a victory for transparency and open government, but it’s personal for this reporter. 

‘Did Not Want the Public to Know’

I was a plaintiff in the federal lawsuit demanding that the FBI release the manifesto of Audrey Hale, the biological woman identifying as a man who in March 2023 burst into a Nashville Christian school and murdered three third-graders and three staff members before being fatally shot by responding police. 

At the time, I was National Political Editor for the Star News Network, which has done some of the best investigative work in bringing to light the dark mind of a mentally deranged mass murderer despite law enforcement efforts to keep the killer’s motives shrouded in secrecy. President Joe Biden’s FBI, which pulled the levers behind the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department’s (MNPD) handling of the politically charged case, denied my FOIA request for Hale’s manifesto. The file includes hundreds of pages of the 28-year-old woman’s journals and other writings. 

In May 2023, Star News CEO and Editor-in-Chief Michael Patrick Leahy and I filed a lawsuit seeking the documents. Star News also sued the Nashville Police Department, joining the Tennessean newspaper and other groups in what became a combined complaint. 

We were represented by the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL), a nonprofit conservative law firm based in Milwaukee. On Wednesday, WILL announced the settlement, in which the FBI has agreed to turn over 120 pages of the shooter’s manifesto and to pay the law firm more than $86,000 in legal fees. 

The lawsuit would likely still be tied up in federal court had the FBI, under new management, not agreed to end the Biden FBI’s prolonged fight to keep the public in the dark. FBI Director Kash Patel ultimately ended an empty “investigation” into a trans school shooter who died at the scene and had no accomplices. 

“This was a case in which the Biden administration did not want the public to know what motivated this transgender shooter to shoot up the school and kill six people,” Dan Lennington, WILL’s deputy counsel, told me Wednesday on the Dan O’Donnell Show. 

The trans-centric Biden administration wanted to protect the trans agenda, and, as the Star News Network reported, the FBI advised against releasing information that it believed could put males pretending to be females and females identifying as males at risk. As The Federalist reported, four days after the shooting at the Christian elementary school, Biden issued a statement insisting that “Transgender Americans shape our Nation’s soul.” New York Post columnist Miranda Devine at the time noted that the far-left president railed against “MAGA extremists [who] are advancing hundreds of hateful and extreme state laws that target transgender kids and their families. … These attacks are un-American and must end.” He said nothing about a twisted trans Nashville area resident indoctrinated in hate. 

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80 Percent Of Anti-Trump Lawsuits Are Filed In Courts Ruled By Democrat Appointees

As the Trump administration faces substantial pushback in the courts, including an unprecedented wave of nationwide injunctions halting its policies, some are claiming that his opponents are tilting the scales of justice by selectively bringing their lawsuits before sympathetic courts in a practice called “forum shopping.” They note that three-quarters of the lower court justices who have blocked Trump policies were appointed by Democrats.

Gaming the federal justice system, however, is harder than it sounds because plaintiffs bring cases before courts rather than judges. Most federal courts have a mix of judges appointed by Democrats and Republicans. The plaintiff’s goal in forum shopping is to launch their suit in a district where they are more likely to draw a sympathetic justice — ideally, this district would also include an appellate court stacked with like-minded judges.

To see whether Trump’s adversaries are engaging in forum shopping, RealClearInvestigations analyzed 350 cases brought against the administration. We found that plaintiffs have brought 80 percent of those cases before just 11 of the nation’s 91 district courts. While Democrat presidents have appointed roughly 60 percent of all active district court judges, each of the 11 district courts where the anti-Trump challenges have been clustered boasts an even higher percentage of Democrat appointees. In several of these venues, the administration’s challengers are almost guaranteed that a judge picked by Joe Biden, Barack Obama, or Bill Clinton will preside over their case.

The analysis of these 350 cases, which covers all those identified in popular litigation trackers and RCI’s independent research as of last week, lends credence to claims that anti-Trump litigants may be strategically filing suit in courts where they are most likely to receive a favorable ruling — a practice that has been both pursued and decried by Democrats and Republicans.

RCI also analyzed three dozen cases in which judges imposed the most extreme restraint on the Trump administration by entering a nationwide or universal injunction — prohibiting the administration from enforcing its policy not only against the party bringing the case, but anyone, everywhere. The analysis shows that these injunctions have disproportionately emerged from Democrat-leaning courts where plaintiffs have brought the lion’s share of suits, and that Democrat-appointed judges are overwhelmingly responsible for ordering them.

This is consistent with other analyses indicating that Democrat-appointed judges have handed down the bulk of all adverse rulings against the Trump administration.

Trump critics note that Republican-appointed judges have also ruled against the administration. They contend that the courts have halted Trump’s policies at an unprecedented scale because of his administration’s unprecedented overreach.

Nevertheless, evidence shows that the anti-Trump cases used to stymie policies in areas ranging from immigration to DEI and the administrative state have overwhelmingly come before courts that, on their face, would appear unfriendly. Plaintiffs have brought roughly 60 percent of all cases against Trump in three district courts with a disproportionate number of active judges appointed by Democratic presidents: the District of Columbia, Massachusetts, and Maryland.

Plaintiffs filed 41 percent of all cases RCI identified — 143 in all — in the D.C. District Court, where Democratic presidents appointed 73 percent of active judges.

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Alabama Judge Will Hear Lawsuit From Parents Over State’s Medical Marijuana Delays

A judge will hold a hearing later this month in a lawsuit filed by parents of children potentially eligible to receive medical cannabis under Alabama’s long-delayed program.

The five parents—Dustin Chandler, Cristina Cain, Catherine Hall, Megan Jackson and Kari Forsyth—want the court to require the Alabama Medical Cannabis Commission (AMCC) to establish a patient registry for medical cannabis, citing delays in access to the program.

“Plaintiffs also bring this petition in their individual capacities because they have suffered specific injuries as a result of the Commissioner’s failure to establish the patient and caregiver registry and seek to vindicate their own private rights,” the parents claimed in the lawsuit. The are also suing “in the name of the State of Alabama to uphold the Compassion Act’s requirement.”

The commission argued in a motion to dismiss filed in May that the lawsuit lacks standing and asks the AMCC to take steps already taken or beyond its control.

“The Commission applauds the early advocacy of those among the Petitioners who supported passage of the [Compassion Act]. Regretfully, it appears the Petitioners have been misinformed about the status of the Patient Registry and why it has not yet been populated with the names of eligible patients,” counsel for AMCC wrote in the motion.

The plaintiffs said in their filing that each child “has a condition that is treatable with medical cannabis” but does not provide any further details.

The AMCC states in the motion that a patient registry has, in fact, been established and is being maintained at a significant expense. But according to the motion to dismiss, no patients are currently registered because physicians cannot be certified until certain licensing requirements for cultivators, processors, transporters and dispensaries are met.

According to the AMCC’s filing, rules established by the Alabama Board of Medical Examiners (BME) dictate that physician certification is dependent on issuing at least one license in each of the licensing categories, or to one integrated facility.

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Supreme Court: US Gun Makers Not Liable For Cartel Violence

In a unanimous blow to gun control advocacy groups, the Supreme Court shut down Mexico’s $10 billion claim targeting U.S. gun makers in a cross-border lawsuit.

Mexico originally filed the suit in 2021, arguing that U.S. gun companies were responsible for the weapons that fueled cartel violence. Mexico received support in its lawsuit from American gun control advocacy groups such as Everytown and March for our Lives Action Fund.

The Supreme Court ruling, written by Justice Elena Kagan, found that the manufacturer’s alleged failure to exercise “reasonable care” does not meet the standard necessary to be found liable for “aiding and abetting” the sale of illegal firearms in Mexico.

Mexico had asked the court for $10 billion in damages and additional court-imposed injunctive relief in the form of restrictions on manufacturers. According to a lawyer who spoke to RCP, siding with Mexico on the injunctive relief “would have likely severely prohibited the distribution of the manufacturer’s products” within the United States.

A federal district court judge initially ruled that the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act protected the gun manufacturers from the suit. In 2024, the First Circuit Court of Appeals revitalized the lawsuit. In response, gun manufacturer Smith & Wesson brought the case to the Supreme Court.

The PLCAA, signed into law in 2005 by President George W. Bush, shields gun manufacturers and dealers from liability when crimes are committed with their products. The law includes exceptions which Mexico’s lawyers sought to invoke.

The original suit by Mexico, which named multiple U.S.-based gun manufacturers as defendants, claimed that Mexicans “have been victimized by a deadly flood of military-style and other particularly lethal guns that flows from the U.S. across the border.” It also argued that U.S. companies were negligent in their sales practices, claiming that the gun companies “are not accidental or unintentional players in this tragedy; they are deliberate and willing participants, reaping profits from the criminal market they knowingly supply.”

In response, lawyers for Smith & Wesson argued in a filing that the lawsuit “faults the defendants for producing common firearms” and for “failing to restrict the purchase of firearms by regular citizens.” They made the case that “aiding and abetting criminal activity must involve something more than making products generally.” Ultimately, the Supreme Court agreed with this reasoning.

In reference to the injunctive relief that Mexico asked the court to grant, lawyers for Smith & Wesson asserted that the lawsuit was “inflicting costly and intrusive discovery at the hands of a foreign sovereign that is trying to bully the industry into adopting a host of gun-control measures that have been repeatedly rejected by American voters.”

According to some estimates, more than 250,000 firearms are smuggled from the United States into Mexico each year. In contrast, Mexico has one gun store and issues fewer than 50 new gun permits each year. The U.S. is the largest firearm exporter in the world, partly due to relaxed gun laws within the country.

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Kash Patel Sues MSNBC Hack Frank Figliuzzi for Spreading Wild, Unverified Claim That FBI Director Spent More Time in Nightclubs Than His Office

FBI Director Kash Patel has filed a defamation lawsuit in Texas against MSNBC’s resident deep state mouthpiece Frank Figliuzzi, accusing him of fabricating a vicious lie designed to smear Patel’s reputation and sabotage his leadership at the Bureau.

Figliuzzi, a disgraced former FBI official-turned-leftist propagandist, claimed on live television that Patel had “been visible at nightclubs far more than he has been on the seventh floor of the Hoover Building,” the New York Post reported.

Figliuzzi continued, “There are reports that daily briefings to him have been changed from every day to maybe twice weekly. So this is both a blessing and a curse, because if he’s really trying to run things without any experience level, things could be bad.”

According to Patel’s legal team, that claim is not only false—it was knowingly made up out of thin air.

“Defendant knew that this was a lie when he said it,” the lawsuit reads. “Since becoming Director of the FBI, Director Patel has not spent a single minute inside of a nightclub.”

The complaint further blasts Figliuzzi’s pathetic attempt to shield himself with the classic fake news escape hatch—saying “reportedly”—when there was never a single report, source, or shred of evidence.

Patel’s attorneys made it clear:  “Defendant made up the story out of whole cloth, and by using the word ‘reportedly,’ attempts to distance himself from what is a maliciously false and defamatory statement.”

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US Gun Makers Notch Win Against Mexico In Unanimous SCOTUS Ruling Authored By Liberal Justice

The Supreme Court unanimously rejected on Thursday the Mexican government’s lawsuit against American gun manufacturers.

The court held that Mexico’s 2021 lawsuit against seven U.S. gun manufacturers is barred under the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA).

“As required by a federal statute, Mexico seeks to show (among other things) that the defendant companies participated in the unlawful sale or marketing of firearms,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote in the court’s opinion. “More specifically, Mexico alleges that the companies aided and abetted unlawful sales routing guns to Mexican drug cartels. The question presented is whether Mexico’s complaint plausibly pleads that conduct. We conclude it does not.”

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Michigan House Sues Secretary of State Over Subpoenaed Election-Worker Training Materials

The Office of Legal Counsel for the Michigan House of Representatives filed a lawsuit on June 4 against Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, over her refusal to turn over subpoenaed election materials to the House Oversight Committee.

The lawsuit, filed in the Michigan Court of Claims, requests a declaratory judgment from the court that the Michigan House has issued a valid subpoena and that Benson must comply with it. The lawsuit also requests an injunction prohibiting Benson or the Michigan Department of State from modifying any relevant records.

The House Legal Counsel filed the verified complaint for declaratory judgment and injunctive relief under the authority of House Resolution 117, which states that the “House Office of Legal Counsel is directed to take steps necessary and proper to ensuring compliance with the House’s subpoenas, including the initiation of legal action.”

The filing also requests immediate and expedited consideration by the Court of Claims, the judicial body that resolves all disputes where the state or its agencies are the defendant.

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State criminalizes political memes, gets sued by popular satire site

The Babylon Bee, a popular satire website, has filed a lawsuit against the state of Hawaii challenging a state law that censors online content, “including political satire and parody.”

An announcement from the ADF, which is representing the publication as well as a Hawaii resident in the case, said, “The law violates fundamental free speech and due process rights by using vague and overbroad standards to punish people for posting certain political content online, including political memes and parodies of politicians.”

The ADF explained Gov. Josh Green signed S2687 into law in July 2024, and it bans the distribution of “materially deceptive media” that portrays politicians in a way that risks harming “the reputation or electoral prospects of a candidate.”

Further, the state forces satire artists to post disclaimers, destroying the purpose of satire.

“Hawaii’s war against political memes and satire is censorship, pure and simple,” said ADF lawyer Mathew Hoffmann. “Satire has served as an important vehicle to deliver truth with a smile for centuries, and this kind of speech receives the utmost protection under the Constitution. The First Amendment doesn’t allow Hawaii to choose what political speech is acceptable, and we are urging the court to cancel this unnecessary censorship.”

Seth Dillon, chief of the Bee, said, “We’re used to getting pulled over by the joke police, but comedy isn’t a crime. The First Amendment protects our right to tell jokes, whether it’s election season or not. We’ll never stop fighting to defend that freedom.”

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