A left-wing dark money operation has been flying judges to luxury retreats in Hawaii, Napa Valley, and Palm Beach.
Those judges never had to report a dime of it.
Now internal documents have blown the operation wide open and what they reveal is worse than anyone suspected: they didn't lobby politicians, they bought the judges.
The Climate Judiciary Project's Secret Judge Recruitment Network
The Climate Judiciary Project (CJP), a subsidiary of the Environmental Law Institute, has quietly recruited and "trained" over 2,000 state and federal judges since 2018 – running what amounts to a judicial Tupperware party designed to spread climate activist ideology across the bench.
Newly obtained documents, secured through open records requests by the Patriots Foundation and other nonprofits and shared exclusively with the Washington Free Beacon, expose the mechanics of the scheme in stark detail.
Judges who attended CJP's "Judicial Leaders in Climate Science" seminars weren't just educated – they were recruited. Upon attending, each judge was required to sign a year-long commitment to participate in CJP programming, complete online courses, and – most critically – identify and recruit other judges.
CJP founder Paul Hanle, a former Obama adviser, wrote in a February 2022 internal email that he was "very pleased that all but one of our target states opted in." Another email listed priority states in bold – including Florida, Maine, and Colorado – where active climate litigation was underway.
Federal Judge Ann Aiken Attended Climate Litigation Seminar While Presiding Over Juliana Case
The documents expose exactly how this worked in practice – and Oregon federal district judge Ann Aiken is the case study.
Records show the Environmental Law Institute paid $645 for Aiken's stay at the Holiday Inn Express Waikiki to attend a 2020 climate conference in Honolulu. At that same conference, activist attorney Julia Olson – lead counsel for the plaintiffs in Juliana v. United States – gave a presentation.
Aiken was, at that moment, the presiding judge in Juliana v. United States.
She attended the conference anyway, sat through Olson's presentation, and never disclosed a word of it.
Then she kept ruling in Olson's favor – repeatedly defying the Ninth Circuit, which ordered her to dismiss the case multiple times.
When the Ninth Circuit threw out Juliana in 2020, Aiken allowed the plaintiffs to amend their complaint and keep going. When the court ordered her again in 2024 to end the case "forthwith," she finally complied.
Nine years. One judge. Funded by the same network as the lawyers she was ruling on.
How the Environmental Law Institute Bypassed Federal Judicial Ethics Disclosure Rules
Judicial ethics rules normally require judges to disclose privately funded travel and seminars. The CJP found a workaround: by partnering with nominally "educational" institutions like the Federal Judicial Center, it masked its activism as continuing legal education – exempt from disclosure requirements.
The Federal Judicial Center has since pulled the climate chapter from its reference manual for judges after more than two dozen Republican attorneys general called it "tainted by biased authors, reviewers, and sources involved in ongoing litigation."
In January 2026, Jim Jordan and Darrell Issa opened a formal House Judiciary Committee investigation – letters went to the Judicial Conference of the United States demanding the full picture. Jordan's verdict on the CJP's curriculum: it "appear[s] to be designed to bias judges in climate-related cases."
The surveillance went further than seminars. CJP Manager Jared Mummert demanded that a participating Oregon judge send him a full attendance list and a "debrief" after she hosted a local event – telling her explicitly that the organization "track[s] judges" it interacts with. CJP also quietly monitored visitors to its own website, according to internal slideshow documents obtained by the Free Beacon.
Judges were also placed in small group sessions and instructed to analyze a case study depicting a colleague who believed courts were "constrained" by existing law in climate cases – then asked to discuss "what went wrong."
The message was explicit: judges who defer to law rather than climate activism are the problem.
The Dark Money Behind the Robes
The CJP's parent organization, the Environmental Law Institute, claims to be nonpartisan. The donors tell a different story.
The left-wing Picower Foundation – now renamed the Freedom Together Foundation, focused on "democracy, gender, and racial justice" – is among the backers. The foundation's wealth traces to the late Jeffry Picower, the single largest beneficiary of Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme.
In 2020, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation gave $500,000 to ELI specifically for the Climate Judiciary Project. The American Energy Institute has documented that CJP's funders overlap directly with the same left-wing money behind climate lawsuits targeting oil companies.
The people funding the lawsuits are also funding the training of the judges who hear them.
ELI also sought to hide its ties to ClientEarth – an activist group that works with the Chinese government on environmental regulations. ELI President Scott Fulton wrote in a 2020 email that he hoped ClientEarth wouldn't appear as a sponsor at a Hawaii conference because of their "advocacy profile" and asked that their involvement stay "a bit under the radar."
An organization caught keeping its Chinese-linked partners under the radar is lecturing America about judicial neutrality.
Twenty-three Republican attorneys general called on the Trump administration this week to investigate whether federal grants to the National Academies of Sciences were used to produce a rigged climate chapter in the judges' reference manual – one developed in partnership with the same CJP activists who wrote the seminar curriculum.
This isn't a rogue NGO operating on the margins. It's a coordinated, funded, structured campaign to reshape the American judiciary from the inside – targeting the judges who will decide the trillion-dollar climate liability cases now moving toward the Supreme Court.
Paul Hanle built the machine. Jim Jordan is tearing it open. Ann Aiken took the trip – and nine years of rulings followed.
Sources:
- Alana Goodman, "Inside the Left-Wing Operation to 'Train' Judges About Climate Change," Washington Free Beacon, March 12, 2026.
- "House GOP Launches Probe Into Alleged Climate Group Influence on Federal Judges," House Judiciary Committee, January 15, 2026.
- "Taxpayer Dollars, Climate Advocacy, and Judges – AGs Raise Alarms Over Federal Grant," Daily Signal, March 13, 2026.
- "Climate Judiciary Project," InfluenceWatch, September 2025.
- "'Corruptly Influencing the Courts': Climate Justice Group That Trains Federal Judges Under Scrutiny," Fox News, August 15, 2024.
- "Federal Judicial Center Pulls Climate Change Chapter From Official Manual for U.S. Judges," ProPublica, February 2026.
