The American judges who have attended the Environmental Law Institute’s Climate Judiciary Project since 2018 now sit at the center of a national security concern. There are more than 2,000 of them. They did not sign up for counterintelligence scrutiny.
They attended seminars on environmental law. But a federal watchdog has now formally asked Congress to investigate ELI, citing historical partnerships with entities it identifies as tied to the Chinese government and the Chinese Communist Party.
The watchdog’s request lands weeks after the Environmental Protection Agency cut its own ties with ELI. EPA Deputy Administrator Fotouhi issued a memo in autumn 2025. It declared it “no longer in the Agency’s interest for employees to participate in their official capacity in any conference, program or other event organized by the Environmental Law Institute.” That ban covered the Climate Judiciary Project.
It covered ELI’s Annual Award Dinner, scheduled for October 7, 2025, in Washington, D.C. The judges trained through that project are not named in the report. They are federal and state jurists.
They handle cases on clean water, air standards, emissions, and climate litigation. The watchdog’s framing is blunt. This is a counterintelligence problem, the report states, not merely another Washington review.
Political leaders must treat it as such. ELI’s China-related work spanned decades. The organization cultivated partnerships with groups the report says are tied to Beijing.
The watchdog’s report describes those relationships in detail. It calls them relationships with Chinese government-affiliated and CCP-linked entities.
The EPA’s earlier decision to cut ties cited concerns about alleged attempts to “inappropriately influence the judiciary,” specifically in climate litigation and judicial education programming. The judges themselves now face a murky situation. They attended programs that a national security agency says warrant a congressional investigation.
They did not vet their trainers. They did not check funding streams.
They learned about environmental law. That is all ELI’s own website says the project does. But the context has shifted sharply.
The watchdog carries institutional weight. Its job is exactly this: flag vulnerabilities that could compromise national security. Whether lawmakers open a formal investigation, and how deep that probe might go, is the next question.
The answer will determine whether those 2,000 judges face interviews, background checks, or something else entirely. ELI’s Climate Judiciary Project has no public list of participating judges.
The organization’s website says it has trained more than 2,000 judges since 2018. That number is the only concrete figure available. It is a large number.
It covers eight years of programming. It means every federal judicial district likely has at least one judge who attended.
The EPA’s October 2025 memo did not name individual judges. It did not suggest any judge acted improperly. It simply barred EPA employees from participating in ELI events in their official capacity.
The watchdog’s request goes further. It asks Congress to investigate the organization itself. But the judges are the human consequence.
They are the ones who attended. They are the ones whose participation now sits inside a counterintelligence frame.
No judge has been accused of wrongdoing. No judge has been named. But the report’s language is direct.
It does not hedge. It calls the partnerships a problem.
It calls for a congressional investigation. The judges who attended the Climate Judiciary Project are not the target of that investigation. They are the people affected by it.
Sources
- Climate group scrubs judges' names from website after …
- Report: How Radical Environmental Special Interests …
