By It’s likely no coincidence that with Trump enacting DOGE, the Democratic money machine has dried up, and a recent report from The Washington Free Beacon may have shown why.
Democratic attorneys general from at least nine states and Washington, D.C., have turned to a San Francisco law firm, Sher Edling LLP, to lead aggressive lawsuits against the oil industry—while the same firm has quietly pumped $49,000 into the Democratic Attorneys General Association (DAGA), the political arm that bankrolls their campaigns.
A month ago, the Las Vegas Review-Journal explained how the system worked under Biden.
Under Joe Biden, filing lawsuits against energy producers and accusing them of harming the environment was cool….The David vs. Goliath narrative has collapsed on the altar of proof. What had been sold to the public and policymakers as a righteous battle on behalf of the voiceless has been exposed as a series of coordinated political stunts driven by activist law firms, dark-money donors and operatives looking to have left-leaning judges formulate American energy policy from the bench.
Critics say these groups aren’t interested in pursuing justice or protecting the environment. Instead, they’re shaking down the energy industry using the threat of billion-dollar damages to bring about extreme policy changes that voters and lawmakers have both rejected.
In the past few months, judges in Maryland, New Jersey and Pennsylvania have dismissed climate lawsuits as being outside the scope of state law. Pennsylvania Judge Stephen Corr put it this way: The “claims raised … are not justiciable by any state court.” Similar decisions have been rendered by judges in Baltimore; Bucks County, Pennsylvania; and Anne Arundel County, Maryland, all of whom recognized the Clean Air Act delegates the authority to set emissions policy to the federal government, not to trial lawyers acting as climate crusaders.
Cases making the counterargument persist because an activist ecosystem gratuitously props them up. Sher Edling, operating on a contingency fee basis and bankrolled by dark-money funds such as the Collective Action Fund, has filed more than two dozen nearly identical lawsuits on behalf of states and municipalities. The objective is a massive payout emerging from a single court that breaks with the precedent being quickly established.
The mechanics of the arrangement are straightforward: Democratic AGs outsource high-profile climate litigation to Sher Edling, which pursues multibillion-dollar damages against companies like Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, and BP, writes The Washington Free Beacon in a remarkable investigative report. In return, Sher Edling makes sizable political donations to the very group responsible for keeping those attorneys general in power. That DAGA is led by the same AGs—Delaware’s Kathy Jennings, Minnesota’s Keith Ellison, California’s Rob Bonta, and Massachusetts’s Andrea Joy Campbell—only sharpens the appearance of a closed loop.
It is the political equivalent of a money laundering cycle. Instead of dirty cash paid by taxpayers, Sher Edling takes on the cases without charging the public up front, funds its operations with nearly $14 million in grants from environmental foundations—including the Tides Foundation, Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and Rockefeller Brothers Fund—and, if successful, stands to collect a percentage of any settlement or judgment. The AGs, meanwhile, get to posture as climate crusaders without committing state resources, while their political operation benefits from the firm’s direct donations.
The numbers tell the story. Sher Edling’s $49,000 in contributions to DAGA came in two installments—$24,000 in November 2023 and $25,000 in September 2024—its only donations of this kind. The timing aligns neatly with the expansion of its government contracts: at the first donation, the firm represented four states and D.C.; afterward, it added four more states and secured a deal with Michigan. All cases remain pending, but if they succeed, the payout could reach into the billions.
Publicly, many of the same Democratic attorneys general involved have been quick to cast themselves as guardians of democracy. In speeches and campaign literature, they warn of threats to the rule of law, insist on holding powerful actors accountable, and claim to champion transparency. Yet their financial and political entanglements with Sher Edling reveal a system that looks far less like democratic stewardship and far more like political self-dealing.
When pressed, Sher Edling spokesman John Lamson framed the firm’s mission in overtly political terms to The Free Beacon: Democratic attorneys general, he said, “are fighting back against fascism.”
The result is a system in which taxpayer-backed offices hand politically connected private counsel potentially billion-dollar cases, those same lawyers channel money into the officials’ campaign infrastructure, and the cycle repeats. For a liberal political class that so often claims the mantle of “defending democracy,” the optics of this arrangement suggest something else entirely—a closed loop of money, power, and influence that operates with all the transparency of a shell game.
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