Teaching the tricks of his trade as an investigative reporter, the late Trent Seibert used to advise against fixating on legalities. “A lot of the worst scandals,” he would warn, “arise from what is perfectly legal, yet completely wrong!”
California Attorney General Rob Bonta’s lawfare against ExxonMobil meets the Seibert standard.
What’s Legal
During a six-day period through June 18, 2024, Bonta’s 2026 re-election committee raked in $39,000 from attorneys affiliated with the law firm Cotchett, Pitre & McCarthy, LLP.
Lawyers are permitted to write big checks to the campaigns of judges, prosecutors, and attorneys general. Although this raises questions about our judicial system, it is a legal and even encouraged part of our politics. Lawyers are under professional pressure to pay up.
During a six-month period through September 2024, the Cotchett law firm reported accepting nearly $250,000 from the Intergenerational Environment Justice Fund (IEJF), an Australian advocacy nonprofit. The payments were reported by Cotchett to the U.S. Department of Justice in October 2024, fulfilling a disclosure requirement under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).
Again, nothing illegal. Foreign parties are permitted to hire American lawyers.
But coincidentally, nearly $100,000 of the payments Cotchett received from the Aussies occurred during a two-week period through June 28, 2024. This corresponds closely with the six-day period through June 18 in which Cotchett lawyers were stuffing that $39,000 into Bonta’s political war chest.
These facts do not establish that an American politician was indirectly receiving foreign campaign donations. And this is not an allegation that the Cotchett firm facilitated such a transfer. Because, according to Grok, that wouldn’t have been a good idea: “It is generally illegal for an Australian NGO (or any foreign entity) to contribute to a California political campaign due to strict U.S. and California laws prohibiting foreign contributions to political campaigns.”
Cotchett’s FARA filing also identifies the Intergenerational Environment Justice Fund as owned and controlled by the Minderoo Foundation, another nongovernmental organization (NGO) that is funded and was founded by Australian billionaire Andrew Forrest.
Forrest has publicly blamed Exxon for global temperature increases and plastic pollution (nearly all plastics are made as a byproduct of petroleum production.) His firm has invested in “green hydrogen” energy, a controversial, and so far, futile effort to replace oil and natural gas.
And Minderoo has been a world leader in opposing plastic production.
A December 2023 contract between IEJF and Cotchett stipulates the law firm will engage in the “investigation and prosecution of a lawsuit against companies potentially responsible for the production and sale of plastics, polymers and additives commonly used in problematic, unnecessary and single-use plastics.”
What’s Wrong?
On September 23, 2024, Cotchett filed just such a lawsuit against Exxon on behalf of four American anti-energy nonprofits: Surfrider, the Sierra Club, Heal the Bay, and San Francisco Baykeeper. According to a Cotchett news release, the four NGOs alleged that “Exxon systematically led the public to believe that plastic waste is easily and safely disposable via recycling, incineration or landfills.”
Independent analysis reveals Exxon was telling the truth about proper plastic disposal. According to Our World in Data, it is “when plastic waste is mismanaged—not recycled, incinerated, or kept in sealed landfills”—that it “becomes an environmental pollutant.”
But the plaintiffs disagreed and claimed the energy firm had “exacerbated the environmental crises of plastic pollution.”
After the lawsuit was filed, IEJF claimed that they are not under the control of Forrest’s Minderoo Foundation. But IEJF didn’t dispute the allegation that—like Minderoo—they were also under the influence of Forrest.
This legal parsing doesn’t change the main facts of the scandal but could mean that IEJF is contradicting what its American lawyers—“under penalty of perjury”—told the U.S. Department of Justice.
The Sierra Club v. ExxonMobil lawsuit was filed just a few weeks after Cotchett banked the last of the $250,000 payments from IEJF, and one month before they filed the FARA statement.
In another coincidence, the Cotchett news release about the lawsuit noted (correctly) that Bonta would be filing a nearly identical lawsuit against Exxon on the same day.
Exxon has since filed a defamation countersuit against Bonta, the four American climate nonprofits, and IEJF. As part of the complaint, Exxon asserted it was “also a case about the corrupting influence of foreign money in the American legal system and about the sordid for-profit incentives and outright greed that tries to hide behind so-called public impact litigation.”
Regardless of how this litigation and counter litigation turns out, the circumstantial evidence shows that:
- California’s attorney general and the Cotchett firm coordinated to sue Exxon;
- Cotchett pocketed $250,000 from Australia to launch such lawsuits;
- Cotchett’s lawyers put $39,000 into Bonta’s political committee just as the Aussie money was coming in; and
- it’s illegal for Australians, Chinese, Russians or anyone else not an American to contribute to American political committees.
Neither Attorney General Bonta nor the Cotchett firm have been eager to publicize these financial connections for the public they are so publicly claiming to protect.
That’s not illegal.
But if you’re supposed to be the people’s lawyer, then what is perfectly legal shouldn’t be the litmus test for what is clearly wrong.
