[House Hearing, 118 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]






 
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                                HEARING

                               BEFORE THE

                              COMMITTEE ON
                      OVERSIGHT AND ACCOUNTABILITY
                        HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

                    ONE HUNDRED EIGHTEENTH CONGRESS

                             FIRST SESSION

                               __________

                           SEPTEMBER 13, 2023

                               __________

                           Serial No. 118-60

                               __________

  Printed for the use of the Committee on Oversight and Accountability
  
  
  [GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT] 
  


                       Available on: govinfo.gov,
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                             docs.house.gov
                             
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               U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE 
 53-369 PDF               WASHINGTON : 2023 
 
                              
                             
                             
                             
                             
               COMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT AND ACCOUNTABILITY

                    JAMES COMER, Kentucky, Chairman

Jim Jordan, Ohio                     Jamie Raskin, Maryland, Ranking 
Mike Turner, Ohio                        Minority Member
Paul Gosar, Arizona                  Eleanor Holmes Norton, District of 
Virginia Foxx, North Carolina            Columbia
Glenn Grothman, Wisconsin            Stephen F. Lynch, Massachusetts
Gary Palmer, Alabama                 Gerald E. Connolly, Virginia
Clay Higgins, Louisiana              Raja Krishnamoorthi, Illinois
Pete Sessions, Texas                 Ro Khanna, California
Andy Biggs, Arizona                  Kweisi Mfume, Maryland
Nancy Mace, South Carolina           Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, New York
Jake LaTurner, Kansas                Katie Porter, California
Pat Fallon, Texas                    Cori Bush, Missouri
Byron Donalds, Florida               Jimmy Gomez, California
Kelly Armstrong, North Dakota        Shontel Brown, Ohio
Scott Perry, Pennsylvania            Melanie Stansbury, New Mexico
William Timmons, South Carolina      Robert Garcia, California
Tim Burchett, Tennessee              Maxwell Frost, Florida
Marjorie Taylor Greene, Georgia      Summer Lee, Pennsylvania
Lisa McClain, Michigan               Greg Casar, Texas
Lauren Boebert, Colorado             Jasmine Crockett, Texas
Russell Fry, South Carolina          Dan Goldman, New York
Anna Paulina Luna, Florida           Jared Moskowitz, Florida
Chuck Edwards, North Carolina        Vacancy
Nick Langworthy, New York
Eric Burlison, Missouri

                       Mark Marin, Staff Director
       Jessica Donlon, Deputy Staff Director and General Counsel
                        Ryan Giachetti, Counsel
             Jeanne Kuehl, Senior Professional Staff Member
      Mallory Cogar, Deputy Director of Operations and Chief Clerk

                      Contact Number: 202-225-5074

                  Julie Tagen, Minority Staff Director
                      Contact Number: 202-225-5051

                                 ------                                
                         C  O  N  T  E  N  T  S

                              ----------                              
                                                                   Page
Hearing held on September 13, 2023...............................     1

                               WITNESSES

                              ----------                              

Ms. Maya Steinitz, Professor, Boston University School of Law
    Oral Statement...............................................     6

Mr. Erik Milito, President, National Ocean Industries Association
    Oral Statement...............................................     7

Ms. Julie Lucas, Executive Director, MiningMinnesota
    Oral Statement...............................................     9

Ms. Aviva Wein, Assistant General Counsel, Johnson & Johnson
    Oral Statement...............................................    10

Ms. Kathleen Clark (Minority Witness), Professor of Law, 
  Washington University in St. Louis
    Oral Statement...............................................    12

 Opening statements and the prepared statements for the witnesses 
  are available in the U.S. House of Representatives Repository 
  at: docs.house.gov.

                           INDEX OF DOCUMENTS

                              ----------                              

  * Statement for the Record; submitted by Rep. Connolly.

  * Article, Law 360, ``A 'Boogeyman' National Security Threat in 
  Litigation Funding''; submitted by Rep. Comer.

  * Article, US Law Week, ``Breaching a Litigation Funding 
  Agreement - the Sysco/Burford Story''; submitted by Rep. Comer.

  * Article, The Hill, ``Don't Fear Foreign Investment in 
  Lawsuits''; submitted by Rep. Comer.

  * Article, Bloomberg Law, ``Litigation Finance Doesn't Pose a 
  Security Risk: Legal Insight''; submitted by Rep. Comer.

  * Letter, April 12, 2023, to Grassley and Issa from State of 
  Aba Office of Attorney General; submitted by Rep. Comer.

  * Letter, March 1, 2023, to McCarthy and Issa from Underwood 
  Ranches, LP; submitted by Rep. Comer.

  * Statement for the Record, American Property Casualty 
  Insurance Association (APCIA); submitted by Rep. Comer.
                      CONTINUED INDEX OF DOCUMENTS

                              ----------                              

  * Statement for the Record, PhRMA; submitted by Rep. Comer.

  * Statement for the Record, R Street, submitted by Rep. Comer.

  * Statement for the Record, Unified Patents; submitted by Rep. 
  Comer.

  * Statement for the Record, Advanced Medical Technology 
  Association (AdvaMed); submitted by Rep. Mace.

  * Statement for the Record, American Tort Reform Association 
  (ATRA); submitted by Rep. Mace.

  * Statement for the Record, International Legal Finance 
  Association (ILFA); submitted by Rep. Mace.

  * Statement for the Record, U.S. Chamber of Commerce/Institute 
  for Legal Reform; submitted by Rep. Mace.

  * Article, AP News, ``China Grants 18 Trademarks in 2 Months to 
  Trump, Daughter''; submitted by Rep. Raskin.

  * Article, Daily Beast, ``FBI Whistleblowers Admit Taking Money 
  From Ex-Trump Official''; submitted by Rep. Goldman.

  * Questions for the Record: to Ms. Julie Lucas; submitted by 
  Rep. Comer.

  * Questions for the Record: to Ms. Julie Lucas; submitted by 
  Rep. Gosar.

  * Questions for the Record: to Ms. Julie Lucas; submitted by 
  Rep. Foxx.

  * Questions for the Record: to Mr. Milito; submitted by Rep. 
  Gosar.

  * Questions for the Record: to Ms. Steinitz; submitted by Rep. 
  Comer.

  * Questions for the Record: to Ms. Steinitz; submitted by Rep. 
  Gosar.

  * Questions for the Record: to Ms. Wein; submitted by Rep. 
  Comer.

  * Questions for the Record: to Ms. Wein; submitted by Rep. 
  Gosar.

The documents listed are available at: docs.house.gov.


                         UNSUITABLE LITIGATION:



                  OVERSIGHT OF THIRD-PARTY LITIGATION



                                FUNDING

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                           September 13, 2023

                       House of Representatives,

               Committee on Oversight and Accountability

                                           Washington, D.C.

    The Committee met, pursuant to notice, at 10:35 a.m., in 
room 2154, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. James Comer 
[Chairman of the Committee] presiding.
    Present: Representatives Comer, Jordan, Gosar, Foxx, 
Grothman, Palmer, Higgins, Sessions, Biggs, Mace, LaTurner, 
Donalds, Armstrong, Perry, Timmons, Burchett, Greene, McClain, 
Boebert, Fry, Edwards, Burlison, Raskin, Norton, Connolly, 
Krishnamoorthi, Khanna, Ocasio-Cortez, Porter, Brown, 
Stansbury, Garcia, Frost, Lee, Crockett, Goldman, and 
Moskowitz.
    Chairman Comer. The Committee on Oversight and 
Accountability will come to order, and I want to welcome 
everyone.
    Without objection, the Chair may declare a recess at any 
time.
    I recognize myself for an opening statement.
    Today, we examine a growing concern in our Nation's legal 
system. Millions of lawsuits are filed each year. These suits 
range from simple disputes between neighbors to complex, multi-
district litigation spanning the entire country. Many of these 
lawsuits have significant merit, requiring serious analysis by 
courts, but some are frivolous as well. With the millions of 
cases being brought each year, our courts have become 
overburdened, creating delays, and making it difficult and 
expensive for many litigants to prosecute their cases. The 
complexity and expense of some of these cases makes litigation 
funding important. In fact, for some, litigation funding is 
necessary to enable them to pursue justice through the legal 
system, but there are some concerning trends in how litigation 
is funded.
    The spread of untraceable and undisclosed funding of 
lawsuits across the country is raising significant ethical and 
legal questions. For example, many lawsuits are funded by 
progressive activists or private equity seeking to hijack 
America's legal system to implement their policy desires or 
make a quick buck. Lawsuits that impact the mining of critical 
minerals, development of new medications, energy production, 
and our national security, these lawsuits raise concerns about 
attorneys' ethical duties, whether the proper parties are at 
the negotiating table, and whether litigants are being hurt by 
limitations on the funding they receive. They raise concerns 
about whether attorneys are acting in the best interests of 
their clients or those who they are receiving funding from. 
They raise concerns about whether the funders should be 
included at the negotiating table during settlement talks. They 
raise concerns that some litigation financers are not acting in 
the best interests of the litigants.
    We know that activist groups use this funding to push 
policies that they could not enact through the legislative 
process. Some left-wing groups funnels millions to law firms to 
sue companies across the country on questionable legal grounds. 
They are trying to use the courts to put these companies out of 
business or limit their ability to bring new products to 
market. These activist groups will find plaintiffs and pour 
millions into claims against energy, mining, and manufacturing 
companies to the detriment of consumers, innovation, national 
security, the workforce, and even to plaintiffs themselves, all 
in the name of political activism.
    These groups know that their tactics and goals are too 
extreme for the American people to support, so rather than use 
the electoral process, they are implementing their agenda 
through litigation against both the public and private sectors. 
Other groups are entering into funding agreements with 
plaintiffs' attorneys where they pay to support litigation in 
exchange for a significant portion of the money awarded should 
the plaintiffs win. In some cases, these outside groups can 
effectively override a settlement agreement if they do not like 
the payoff amount.
    In fact, a recent study by the Institute for Legal Reform 
found that for every dollar paid in damages through tort 
litigation, a meager $0.53 actually found its way into the 
rightful pockets of the claimants. When American companies are 
under threat of frivolous litigation, those companies must set 
aside hundreds of millions of dollars to fight against claims 
from these groups, and the American people are then affected 
when companies are forced to offset the cost of litigation by 
raising prices. The mass torts litigation sector raked in an 
astonishing $443 billion in 2020 alone, the equivalent of 2.1 
percent of the entire GDP of the United States.
    Today, we are going to hear from American industry to see 
how unnecessary litigation can freeze essential sectors of the 
economy and hurt consumers. We also will hear how activist 
groups use sue-and-settle tactics to encourage government 
agencies to regulate well beyond the laws Congress passed for 
them to administer. These suits cost taxpayers unknown sums in 
attorney fees, settlement payouts, and economic impacts to the 
affected industries.
    Now let me be clear: agencies should not be conducting 
rulemaking via litigation, and activist groups should not be 
legislating via litigation. Today is a first step to 
identifying how pervasive third-party litigation funding is and 
how deep the abuses go. I look forward to hearing the testimony 
of our witnesses and to discussing how we can ensure fairness 
in our legal system. With that, I now yield to Ranking Member 
Raskin.
    Mr. Raskin. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thanks to our 
witnesses for being here today, especially Professor Clark, who 
flew all the way from St. Louis on short notice.
    Mr. Chairman, I spent my recess traveling across America. I 
was in 10 states, including your beautiful Kentucky, and one 
thing I found is that all over America, people are in an uproar 
over the money that billionaires are spending to influence 
justices on the U.S. Supreme Court. Americans see that personal 
gifts to justices from right-wing billionaires sugar daddies, 
like Harlan Crow, and Federalist Society dark money 
expenditures are fundamentally perverting judicial ethics and 
undermining justice and the rule of law.
    Now apparently, responding to the national outcry over this 
ethics crisis on the Court, our colleagues have called a 
hearing today about the influence that wealth exerts on the 
justice system, but they have gone off on a surprising and 
bizarre tangent. The problem, they say, is not the way the 
public is harmed when billionaires bankroll the private lives 
of ethically challenged Supreme Court Justices. The real 
problem is that giant corporations are harmed when Americans, 
injured by toxic torts or environmental crimes, receive 
contributions from donors to help them bring personal injury or 
class action lawsuits. In other words, while Supreme Court 
Justices are jetting all over the world on fancy private family 
vacations paid for by right-wing billionaires, or collecting 
hefty cash gifts from those billionaires for their personal 
museums and family members' private school tuition payments, 
the GOP says the real problem in our legal system is that too 
many victims of corporate wrongdoing are finding access to the 
courts in the first place.
    Now, we say justice is blind because the Greek statue for 
justice wears a blindfold. In solving cases, Justices are 
supposed to be blind to wealth and poverty, personal 
friendship, and political affiliation. A poor person who has 
never met a judge must be treated the same by the courts as 
Harlan Crow, the real estate tycoon chum of Justice and Mrs. 
Clarence Thomas, who had a case before the Supreme Court and 
who has given the Thomases lavish personal gifts, like week-
long luxury travel on his super-yacht and private jets, and 
generous money payments for family tuition over a period of 20 
years ever since Thomas joined the Court. A collector of not-
so-fine art created by dictators who actually owns and displays 
two paintings done by Adolf Hitler, Mr. Crow donated $105,000 
to the Yale Law School in 2018 for another painting he desires, 
writing a check to the ``Justice Thomas Portrait Fund.''
    But Justice Thomas is not unique. He is just emblematic of 
the collapse of legal ethics across the street. Justice Alito 
took a long fishing trip with a hedge fund magnate who has had 
business before the Supreme Court 10 times in the last 15 
years. Neither justice recused themself in the relevant cases 
or made any relevant timely disclosures.
    Justice is supposed to be blind to the blandishments of 
money and class power. It is only supposed to see the facts and 
the law, but in the Roberts Court, judicial vision is clouded 
everywhere by dollar signs and luxury power trips. The facts 
and the law are barely visible when it comes to the rights of 
workers trying to organize a union, or poor women seeking 
abortions, or consumers injured by adhesion contracts and 
corporate rip-offs. Justice is a rich man's game in this Court 
of billionaires. The Bill of Rights has mostly been left in the 
dust. On the Roberts Court, justice is indeed blind but only to 
ethics itself. It is deaf to the pleas of women and working 
people, and it is dumb in its refusal to see how it has 
destroyed its own legitimacy in the eyes of the public. It is 
certainly not mute, however, as Justices Alito and Thomas 
vociferously defend their jet-setting lifestyles in shockingly 
intemperate terms.
    If we are going to return to equal justice under law, as it 
is written over the entrance to the Supreme Court, if we are to 
make justice blind to the wealth and the identity of the 
parties in the courtroom, then our Justices must be held to the 
highest ethical standards. And yet, amazingly, the Justices are 
not even subject to the basic code of conduct for United States 
Judges that all other Federal Judges are subject to. The nine 
Justices are, in fact, not bound by any ethical standards at 
all, much less the comprehensive ethics code that applies to 
all the other Judges. Their decisions can affect or destroy the 
rights of all Americans, but the Justices refuse to abide by 
any written ethical code. They decide on their own if their 
work is impaired by a real or apparent conflict of interest, a 
terrible system which cuts against the key principle of justice 
that Madison articulated in the Federalist Papers: ``No man is 
allowed to be a judge in his own cause in his own case.''
    The highest court in our land now has the lowest ethical 
standards. This is the crisis we should be discussing today, 
but our colleagues have instead called a hearing to assert that 
it is just too easy to haul corporations into court when they 
violate other Americans' rights. The third-party litigation 
funding under attack today is the only way that a lot of 
victims of corporate misconduct can even get into court. Do our 
colleagues really want to make it illegal now to receive 
contributions to vindicate your rights?
    I could understand if they were saying that all the present 
Federal Rules of Civil Procedure against frivolous, vexatious, 
and groundless litigation were not working. I could understand 
if they were arguing that Rule 11 sanctions against baseless 
lawsuits needed to be expanded or fortified, but that is not 
what they are saying. They are not citing any kind of increase 
in frivolous or meritless litigation, nor are they arguing that 
current sanctions do not work, those sanctions are working just 
fine. No, they are looking for ways to reduce the prosecution 
of merit-worthy and successful lawsuits against actual 
corporate wrongdoers, and by pulling the rug out from 
underneath actual tort victims, they hope to keep plaintiffs 
from even getting into court.
    The GOP wants to dramatically reduce accountability and 
liability for corporations that flood our country with opioids 
to make obscene profits, corporations that poison our 
communities with asbestos or lead and other dangerous 
carcinogens, and corporations that inflict lung disease, mass 
oil spills and other lethal injuries on American. Our 
colleagues seem confused. No one has a right to bribe judges or 
load them up with fancy gifts, but people do have every First 
Amendment, due process, and Equal Protection Right to raise 
money to make their case in court. The courts are not just 
there for rich people who can write themselves a big check. 
This is the same reason people have a right to give and receive 
campaign contributions for public offices, not just for the 
independently wealthy.
    Victims bringing these lawsuits, especially those who are 
low-income or unable to work because they are sick or injured, 
often cannot afford to bring the lawsuits at all without 
financial help from other citizens. If their lawsuits have no 
merit, they should be thrown out, but if they have merit, then 
we should all be grateful that they are working to make society 
safer by stopping the wrongdoers before they commit more wrongs 
against society.
    Many landmark cases establishing the basic rights of 
Americans have been funded by contributions from outside 
groups: Brown v. Board of Education, Loving v. Virginia, U.S. 
v. Windsor. The corporate interests represented on the panel 
today who are attacking this basic right are here for an 
obvious reason: they do not like paying damages when their 
victims prove their rights have been violated in court. Johnson 
& Johnson has had to pay billions of dollars for its central 
role in the opioid epidemic and billions more to tens of 
thousands of people who developed cancer because of the 
country's dangerous talcum powder. Mining and offshore drilling 
companies have had to pay billions of dollars for poisoning 
communities' land and water and causing irreparable harm to 
human health. Perhaps one of the biggest environmental cases in 
the history of United States, oil company, BP, agreed to pay 
$20 billion for damages caused by the Deepwater Horizon oil 
spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
    One can only regard with amazement the fact that our 
colleagues are in such a hurry to promote the grievances of 
these big tortfeasors and wrongdoers, that they do not even 
pause to consider that there are hundreds of millions of 
dollars in right-wing, third-party litigation financing 
regularly bankrolling anti-choice, anti-LGBTQ, anti-gun safety 
lawsuits, among many others. Well-funded right-wing networks 
like the Pacific Legal Foundation, the Koch Network, the 
Judicial Crisis Network, have poured hundreds of millions into 
remaking America through the courts on issues ranging from 
attacking public school curricula, to opposing compulsory union 
dues, to repealing the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
    The Alliance Defending Freedom and other right-wing groups 
brought the Dobbs case and are working to completely eliminate 
access to abortion for all Americans that is their right. Our 
colleagues do not complain about that. In fact, they do not 
even mention it. Are they willing to sacrifice the rights of 
their third-party litigation financiers on the right, or are 
they just not serious about this whole thing and simply looking 
for another catchy way to distract everyone from Donald Trump's 
91 different criminal charges in four indictments across the 
land?
    Everyone knows that a fish rots from the head down, and 
everyone knows what stinks to the high heavens in the judicial 
system today is, alas, the Supreme Court itself. Let us focus 
on where the corruption of justice is actually taking place 
today. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I yield back.
    Chairman Comer. The gentleman yields back. And I want to 
remind everyone, we are not asking Congress to stop third-party 
litigation. We are here today to learn from expert witnesses 
about possible abuses in our court system. With that, I am 
pleased to welcome our witnesses for today, and I apologize if 
I mispronounce these names--I am notoriously bad about that--
Maya Steinitz, Erik Milito, Julie Lucas, Aviva Wein, and 
Kathleen Clark.
    Our first witness is Maya Steinitz, who is a professor at 
Boston University School of Law. Our next witness is Erik 
Milito, who is president of the National Ocean Industries 
Association. Then we had Julie Lucas, Executive Director at 
MiningMinnesota. Next is Aviva Wein, Assistant General Counsel 
at Johnson & Johnson, and our last witness today is Kathleen 
Clark, a Professor at the Washington University of St. Louis 
School of Law. We look forward to hearing what each of you have 
to say about today's important subject.
    Pursuant to Committee Rule 9(g), the witnesses will please 
stand and raise their right hands.
    Do you solemnly swear or affirm that the testimony that you 
are about to give is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing 
but the truth, so help you God?
    [A chorus of ayes.]
    Chairman Comer. Let the record show that the witnesses all 
answered in the affirmative. We appreciate all of you being 
here today and look forward to your testimony.
    Now, let me remind the witnesses that we have read your 
written statements, and they will appear in full in the hearing 
record. Please limit your oral statements to 5 minutes. As a 
reminder, please press the button on the microphone in front of 
you so that it is on, and Members can hear you. When you begin 
to speak, the light in front of you will turn green. After 4 
minutes, it will turn yellow. When the red light comes on, your 
5 minutes has expired, and we would ask that you please wrap 
up.
    I recognize Ms. Steinitz to please begin her opening 
statement.

                       STATEMENT OF MAYA STEINITZ

                            PROFESSOR OF LAW

                    BOSTON UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF LAW

    Ms. Steinitz. Thank you. Chairman Comer, Ranking Member 
Raskin, and Members of the Committee, thank you for inviting me 
to testify today. My name is Maya Steinitz, and I am a 
Professor of Law at Boston University Law School. I appreciate 
the opportunity to share with you some of what I have learned 
over nearly 15 years of studying and writing about the 
phenomenon of third-party litigation finance.
    Third-party litigation funding is a utility. It can be 
well-used or abused depending on the context. It can be 
beneficial to individuals, to small and large businesses, and 
to the public. It can also be harmful to individuals, to small 
and large businesses, and to the public. In terms of impact 
litigation brought to advance an ideological position or policy 
goal, third-party funding can and, to my understanding, has 
been used to assist plaintiffs pursuing both liberal and 
conservative causes. Like the rest of the finance industry, 
whether the good that litigation funding can serve ultimately 
outweighs the bad will depend largely on whether and how well 
it is regulated.
    Third-party funding is transforming the trajectory of 
individual cases, for example, by determining which cases are 
brought, how long they last, and how much they settle for. For 
this reason, it can also affect the work of the judicial branch 
at both the state and Federal level. It is also affecting the 
practice of law. It could help increase efficiency and lower 
the cost of legal services available to Americans, but it can 
also introduce conflicts of interest between lawyers and 
clients that did not use to exist, especially when lawyers and 
funders have ongoing relationships that may have started before 
a given client's case commenced or may continue thereafter.
    Therefore, the systemic effects of litigation funding 
implicate democracy at large, affecting as it does all of civil 
justice, an entire branch of government and the structure and 
core tenants of the legal profession and of the attorney-client 
relationship which is a central and, therefore, protected 
relationship in a free society. Third-party funding's proper 
regulation, neither overregulation, nor under regulation, and 
regulation of the right kind should, therefore, be a matter of 
broad concern cutting across usual political divisions. 
Litigation finance can help increase access to justice that 
parties cannot afford to bring their disputes to court, such as 
individuals, startup companies, and small businesses.
    The ability to acquire financing can level the playing 
field between such under-resourced players and significantly 
better-resourced opponents. Litigation funding can also serve 
as a form of corporate finance for small and large businesses, 
allowing them to manage balance sheets and to obtain operating 
capital during a time when litigation otherwise limits access 
to such capital. By shifting the risk of litigation or 
assigning claims altogether, a corporate claimant can reduce 
the impact of that litigation on normal business activities.
    While empirical data about third-party funding is extremely 
limited, the downsides of third-party funding are well 
understood and increasingly documented. The ways litigation 
funding can structurally create conflicts of interest between 
lawyers and their clients protracts certain litigation, create 
incentives to bundle non-meritorious cases with meritorious 
cases when cases are aggregated rather than pursued 
individually, affect defendants' due process rights, and, of 
course, the risk of predatory financing practices are all well 
understood.
    While litigation finance is a relatively new industry, it 
is part of and its functions overlap with established industry 
that we in the U.S. know well how to regulate: the finance and 
banking industry, the legal industry, and the insurance 
industry. In those industries, there are various ethical 
requirements, context-specific disclosure requirements, and 
protections against predatory practices. I welcome your 
questions.

                        STATEMENT OF ERIK MILITO

                               PRESIDENT

                 NATIONAL OCEAN INDUSTRIES ASSOCIATION

    Mr. Milito. Chairman Comer, Ranking Member Raskin, and 
Members of the Committee, thank you for the opportunity to 
testify. I am Erik Milito, President of the National Ocean 
Industries Association, or NOIA. NOIA represents all segments 
of the offshore energy industry, including oil and gas, wind, 
minerals, and carbon sequestration. For the foreseeable future, 
our economy will depend upon affordable and reliable supplies 
of oil and gas. The U.S. Gulf of Mexico oil and gas sector 
supports more than 350,000 good-paying jobs throughout the 
country and produces among the lowest carbon intensity barrels 
in the world.
    Currently, global oil demand is near record levels at more 
than 100 million barrels per day. Various scenarios forecast 
global oil consumption through 2050 and beyond. Nearly all of 
them predict substantial oil production will be necessary 
through at least 2050. The empirical data in our industries' 
track record underscore the significance of the U.S. offshore 
region, particularly the Gulf of Mexico and securing these 
vital energy resources.
    However, our industry faces considerable obstacles stemming 
from excessive litigation and sue-and-settle agreements. 
Opponents of American energy projects have managed to bypass 
Congress and their public regulatory process through what has 
become regulation through litigation. While litigation is an 
important tool for holding Federal agencies accountable to 
their statutory responsibilities, its misuse to disrupt energy 
development ultimately harms the American consumer more than 
anyone else, and simply shifts production to foreign suppliers. 
Litigation abuse imposes a real barrier to America's energy 
production potential at a time when it is needed more than 
ever, with inflation driving up the cost of everything for 
Americans, including gasoline at the pump.
    One of the most recent sue-and-settle examples between 
activists and the Administration involves the Rice's whale. The 
Rice's whale is a species already protected under both the 
Endangered Species Act and the Marine Mammal Protection Act. 
However, activist groups sued the National Marine Fisheries 
Service, or NMFS, over whale protections, resulting in a 
stipulated stay agreement which proceeded without public or 
congressional input. The agreement locks away millions of prime 
Gulf of Mexico acres from oil and gas development and imposes 
unwarranted vessel restrictions based upon insufficient 
scientific support and a failure to consider the economic and 
national security impacts.
    Most significantly, the government itself is contradicting 
its own findings, that expansion of the protected area for the 
whale is, in fact, not justified. In a proposed rulemaking from 
January of this year, NMFS determined that expansion of the 
protected area for the whale is not warranted stating, 
``Therefore, while we expect that some individual Rice's whales 
occur outside the core habitat area, and/or that whales from 
the eastern Gulf of Mexico occasionally travel outside the 
area, the currently available data support NMFS determination 
that the area currently considered core habitat is an adequate 
representation.''
    Expanding the Rice's whale critical habitat to include 
areas where there is only negligible or no presence of the 
whale is contrary to the science and dilutes conservation 
resources that should be going toward protecting actual habitat 
areas. According to NMFS, only a single Rice's whale has been 
observed in this expanded area. An additional survey effort was 
conducted for the expanded area after the 2017 sighting, and no 
additional sightings were recorded. The additional mitigation 
measures include narrower transit windows that will naturally 
increase vessel traffic in daylight, carrying added risks. 
Vessels will idle, potentially for hours, waiting for daylight 
or better visibility. There will be unavoidable and, yet again, 
unnecessary increases in emissions, undermining the Gulf's 
status as one of the lowest carbon emission basins in the 
world.
    The Federal Government is also considering expanding 
mitigation measures to encompass all Gulf maritime vessel 
traffic, including cargo vessels, cruise lines, and fishing 
boats. This will initiate a chain reaction of delays. As 
vessels finally reach port past the bottlenecks created by 
transit windows, new bottlenecks will emerge as everyone rushes 
to unload goods on trains and tracks simultaneously, delaying 
the distribution of critical goods throughout the Nation.
    Wildlife protection is a universal goal of every Gulf Coast 
resident, the industry, and the workers of our industry, yet 
the Administration's approach lacks transparency and excludes 
the voices of broad-based stakeholders and experts. Thank you, 
and I look forward to your questions.

                        STATEMENT OF JULIE LUCAS

                           EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

                            MININGMINNESOTA

    Ms. Lucas. Chair Comer, Ranking Member Raskin, and Members 
of the Committee, my name is Julie Lucas. I am here today from 
the land of 10,000 Lakes, Lake Superior, the Boundary Waters 
Canoe Area Wilderness, and the headwaters of the Mighty 
Mississippi. In Northern Minnesota, home first and still to the 
Ojibwe people, we are defined by our clean, plentiful water, 
and we hold immense pride in that identity. Our identity has 
also been shaped by the land beneath our feet and the abundant 
minerals found within it.
    I am the Executive Director of MiningMinnesota, a coalition 
of industry leaders who advocate for safe, responsible, and 
well-regulated mining in our state. I am here today to share 
our region's hope for the development of a mineral resource 
essential to building a clean energy economy, a resource 
containing copper, nickel, cobalt, platinum, palladium, and 
gold. Much as the Nation has depended on Minnesota for iron 
ore, our country could turn to Minnesota-sourced minerals to 
build the batteries, windmills, solar panels, and other 
products needed to achieve carbon-free energy goals. These 
resources would be under development today if not for extended, 
repeated litigation, and continued appeals focused on delaying 
this progress.
    We currently have three proposed critical minerals projects 
in Minnesota. These projects are all in different phases of 
development and include NewRange Copper Nickel near the 
communities of Aurora and Hoyt Lakes, Twin Metals Minnesota in 
Ely and Babbit, and Talon Metals in Tamarack. These are small, 
rural communities with only Ely topping 3,000 people. The near 
constant act of litigation or threat of other legal challenges 
does more than impact a project. It negatively impacts our 
communities.
    The first impact is a loss of funding for local communities 
and local schools. Minnesota law requires non-iron mining 
companies to pay an additional tax as soon as projects are 
permitted and able to begin construction. With those millions 
of dollars in taxes going directly to support local communities 
and schools, litigation delays those investments. The second 
impact is on students statewide. School trust lands are 
publicly managed lands, established within Minnesota State 
Constitution with the sole goal of generating revenue for 
public schools throughout the entire state through different 
means, including mineral development. The third impact is 
uncertainty, uncertainty about our future. As lawyers battle 
over how a process-focused decision was or was not made or 
attempt to use the courts to make new policy, people in our 
communities are forced to make and consider other decisions. 
Should a town build additional housing for new workers? Should 
childcare opportunities be expanded? Will a recent graduate 
have to leave their beloved community behind to seek employment 
hundreds of miles away?
    As neighbors to propose projects, we value stringent 
environmental review and permitting processes. We recognize the 
importance of a litigation process as originally envisioned to 
ensure regulators and regulated entities are held accountable 
to protecting and minimizing the effects on our air, water, and 
our land. However, the litigation process that was developed to 
protect communities like ours is being abused today. Too often, 
it is solely used to delay projects and drain the funding of 
companies with the hope investors will give up and leave 
Minnesota. These actions are not designed to make a project 
stronger. They are actions by groups who will never support or 
accept that not only do we need Minnesota's minerals, but that 
there are proven and effective ways to realize the potential of 
this resource.
    As time and money is increasingly invested into litigation 
and legal support teams, our communities are held in limbo. Too 
often we watch in frustration as our Nation looks overseas for 
minerals we could provide. The environmental review and 
permitting processes allow for extensive community engagement 
and multiple checkpoints along the way. Trust must be restored 
in our regulatory process. If there are known flaws to be 
challenged on a legal basis, they are known prior to or 
immediately following issuance of permits. The timeline for 
filing lawsuits could be shortened significantly while still 
meeting the intent and spirit of the laws as originally 
designed. Too often they are strategically filed at the last 
moment and nearly 5 years after a decision to maximize delay.
    If our Nation is going to drive the unprecedented demand 
for these minerals, we must be responsible for our own 
consumption and we cannot be afraid to say yes: Yes, to a low-
carbon future, yes to protection of natural resources, yes to 
high labor standards, yes to our communities, and yes to 
accessing these minerals domestically. Thank you, and I look 
forward to your questions.

                        STATEMENT OF AVIVA WEIN

                       ASSISTANT GENERAL COUNSEL

                           JOHNSON & JOHNSON

    Ms. Wein. Chairman Comer, Ranking Member Raskin, and 
Members of the Committee, my name is Aviva Wein, and I am an 
Assistant General Counsel at Johnson & Johnson, and I lead our 
Litigation Policy and Risk Mitigation Group. I applaud your 
Committee's efforts to shine light on the growing threat to our 
civil justice system and the U.S. economy. Outside money and 
influence over mass tort litigation are compromising the 
ability of both plaintiffs and defendants to achieve justice, 
and Federal courts are struggling to manage the barrage of 
cases fairly and efficiently. These concerns threaten the 
integrity of the civil justice system and are among the most 
significant challenges facing companies that manufacture 
critical lifesaving and life enhancing medicines and medical 
devices.
    I appreciate your inviting me here to testify today. My 
views are informed by my work, first at a law firm and then for 
the past approximately 11 years handling product litigation for 
Johnson & Johnson.
    There may have been a time when tort litigation was about 
individuals seeking out a lawyer to vindicate his or her rights 
and to recover for wrongfully caused harms. That is how civil 
justice is supposed to work. Today's mass tort system, however, 
works in reverse. Lawyers develop a tort theory, recruit 
investors, use that money to advertise for plaintiffs, work 
with paid experts to publish junk science, and amass thousands 
of claims without proper vetting. All of this has one intended 
result: profit to the lawyers and the investors. That is not 
how the civil justice system should work. It turns mass tort 
litigation into a money play, driven, funded, and distorted by 
lawyers and investors regardless of the merits of the claims 
they assert.
    What makes this litigation possible is the involvement of 
hedge funds and other litigation funders. Spending by 
litigation funders in the United States has been estimated at 
$2.3 billion to $5 billion per year, and 70 percent of this 
capital is reportedly invested in what they call portfolio or 
mass tort litigation. Yet typically, litigation financing is 
largely unregulated, and such investments are hidden from 
courts and the parties, even when lawyers need investors' 
approval to settle cases.
    So how does this outside money distort justice? First, it 
funds sophisticated media campaigns, urging people to call or 
click for a chance at a jackpot. All day, every day, we are 
bombarded on television, our tablets, our phones with ads, 
urging us to sue. It has been estimated that nearly a billion 
dollars is spent per year on advertising on TV ads, soliciting 
people to file lawsuits. Second, these ads generate massive 
numbers of insufficiently vetted claims. People call or click, 
fill-out forms, and claims are filed with little, if any, 
vetting. Often the claims are collected by lead generators and 
sold to law firms who file them.
    The lawyers have never met or spoken to these clients. They 
just get a name and file a claim without knowing the basics. 
Did they use the product? Did they suffer the alleged injury? 
As a result, according to the Federal Advisory Committee on 
Civil Rules, 20 to 30 percent of mass tort claims are wholly 
unsupportable. In some litigations, this may be as high as 40 
to 50 percent. Let us pause there. Forty to 50 percent of all 
mass tort claims should never have been filed, they are 
meritless.
    Third, judges are increasingly recognizing that the 
scientific basis for entire mass torts may be largely a figment 
of this business model. The Wall Street Journal reported that 
the lab behind studies alleging Zantac and other products 
contain dangerous levels of cancer-causing chemicals had ties 
to plaintiff lawyers. 50,000 claims were generated, but then 
were dismissed after it was uncovered the lab's testing methods 
actually generated the alleged cancer causing chemical, but the 
damage was already done. Zantac was recalled from the market.
    Finally, aside from the obvious impact on U.S. businesses, 
large and small, this mass tort business model driven by this 
outside funding has other significant consequences. The MDL 
system which Congress enacted to address mass torts is 
overwhelmed and breaking down. Today, upward of 70 percent of 
all civil actions in our Federal Courts nationwide are mass 
tort lawsuits. Facing thousands of cases, MDL judges tend to 
prioritize settlement rather than rigorously reviewing the 
plaintiffs' theories or winnowing claims.
    Further, ads that mislead about healthcare decisions have 
harmed people. The American Medical Association and AARP have 
cautioned that fear-mongering and lawsuit ads is dangerous and 
frightening. Sadly, these components of a modern-day mass tort 
system have little to do with vindicating rights or 
compensating consumers. Plaintiffs have become mere pawns in a 
game. The primary beneficiaries are plaintiffs' counsel and 
their investors. The losers are the courts, American 
businesses, consumers, and the people seeking redress.
    Again, I very much appreciate the opportunity to provide my 
experiences and perspectives, and I look forward to the 
questions.

                      STATEMENT OF KATHLEEN CLARK

                            PROFESSOR OF LAW

            WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY OF ST. LOUIS SCHOOL OF LAW

    Ms. Clark. Chairman Comer, Ranking Member Raskin, Members 
of the Committee, thank you for inviting me to testify today. I 
am here to talk about ethics. As a law professor and a lawyer, 
most of my work over the last 30 years has focused on legal and 
government ethics. I have taught courses on these subjects and 
written articles about them. I have conducted ethics trainings 
and provided ethics advice to government officials and 
agencies.
    This hearing is about third-party litigation funding, a 
practice that currently affects a small but growing portion of 
court cases. As a matter of legal ethics, third-party 
litigation funding does pose ethical risk such as conflicts of 
interest. At the same time, this funding mechanism can benefit 
clients, particularly those who would not otherwise be able to 
access our courts. While ethics issues do arise in this 
context, in my professional opinion, these issues are nowhere 
near the top of the list of significant ethics concerns facing 
our courts. Instead, I would place at the top of that list the 
ethics crisis currently facing the U.S. Supreme Court.
    According to media reports, certain Supreme Court Justices 
have repeatedly accepted lavish gifts from wealthy patrons, 
refused to recuse from cases affecting those patrons, and then 
failed to disclose those gifts and other transactions as 
required by the Ethics and Government Act. The Court's refusal 
to address these revelations and its failure to incorporate 
basic and widely accepted ethical safeguards indicate that the 
Supreme Court has a very significant ethics problem. Let me 
provide just a few examples.
    Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas accepted extravagant 
gifts from Harlan Crow, including an Indonesian vacation, 
apparently valued at hundreds of thousands of dollars, and 
accepted private school tuition valued at tens of thousands of 
dollars for Thomas' grandnephew, for whom Thomas, as legal 
guardian, was responsible. In addition, Justice Thomas allowed 
Harlan Crow to purchase several properties that Thomas co-
owned, including the home where Thomas' mother lives. Even more 
troubling, Thomas failed to disclose these gifts and the 
property transaction as he was legally required to do by the 
Ethics in Government Act. In fact, Justice Thomas has filed 
inaccurate financial disclosures more than a dozen times, 
correcting his disclosures only after journalists or non-
government organizations have publicized his inaccuracies. And 
Justice Thomas is not alone. Justice Alito also has accepted 
private jet flights, for example, from billionaire financier 
Paul Singer, and then failed to disclose those flights, as 
required by law, and then Alito failed to recuse from a Supreme 
Court case involving Singer.
    These are not just missteps of individual Justices. 
Instead, this pattern of behavior reflects institutional 
failure at the Supreme Court, which has refused to adopt 
measures that could prevent ethical missteps and hold 
accountable those who violate ethics standards. The Court does 
not even have the same ethics standards that apply to lower 
court judges. Rather than vilifying individual Justices, I want 
to focus on the need for an institutional response, the need 
for robust ethics standards and accountability mechanisms to 
apply at the Supreme Court. Our Nation deserves a Court that is 
worthy of the public's trust, and Congress has the 
constitutional authority to help make that happen.
    Thank you for considering my testimony. I look forward to 
your questions.
    Chairman Comer. Thank you. Now we will begin the question 
phase. The Chair recognizes Mr. Palmer from Alabama for 5 
minutes.
    Mr. Palmer. I thank the Chairman and thank the witnesses 
for being here. Just listening to testimony raises some serious 
concerns. I really appreciate testimony of Ms. Wein about this 
massive advertising campaign by plaintiff attorneys and how it 
has impacted science. I think it is leading to some major 
problems for the national economy but also for our national 
security because it is denying us access to certain key 
materials.
    But also, I would like to address the testimony of Ms. 
Lucas about how these lawsuits are impacting the states' 
ability to self-govern. Our Constitution reserves most of the 
powers for government to the states, and is it your experience 
in Minnesota that you have got outside groups and, in some 
cases, Federal agencies basically usurping the authority of the 
state and overturning state laws in regard to the management of 
your own resources?
    Ms. Lucas. Thank you for the question. In Minnesota, some 
of our environmental regulations, the state has the 
authorization for them, but in some cases, we do still have 
Federal agencies that will have the oversight and issue the 
permits, for example, our wetland permits under the 404 Clean 
Water. And so, we have not had that happen as far as the way 
you described it, but we have had the challenge of getting our 
Federal permits through after we already do have our state 
permits.
    Mr. Palmer. You also have a situation where the Federal 
Government has shut down our Nation's largest reserves of 
cobalt. Is that true?
    Ms. Lucas. The Twin Metals project is the one you are 
referencing. I am not sure that that is the largest cobalt, but 
I will get back to you on that one.
    Mr. Palmer. It is.
    Ms. Lucas. It is a significant resource.
    Mr. Palmer. I believe it is the largest U.S. reserves of 
cobalt, which is absolutely critical to the Democrat agenda for 
completely restructuring our power grid and going to all 
renewables, which will be an economic and national security 
disaster because it makes us 100 percent reliant on China.
    I want to address a couple of other things, and it is in 
the context of sue-and-settle. I ran a think tank for almost 24 
years, and one of the issues that we addressed was how state 
legislatures could protect themselves from consent decrees from 
sue-and-settle. Otherwise, I think a lot on the left call it 
institutional reform litigation. And the thing is, is that if 
any of you are elected to a state office--Attorney General, 
Governor, Mayor, local office like Mayor, County Commission--
and you wanted to know how much you were spending on consent 
decrees, unless you know the case number, there is no Federal 
data base that would provide you that information.
    One of the things that, and I will say this in a bipartisan 
way, that this Congress has passed is the Settlement Agreement 
Information Data base so that we have a clear picture of all of 
these settlement agreements and what they are costing us. Do 
you think that would be of any help to any of you, and any of 
you can respond to this, in regard to addressing this issue of 
institutional litigation, otherwise known as consent decrees?
    Mr. Milito. Thank you, Congressman. I would say that 
oftentimes it is too late if you are just looking at the 
research and the data to see, you know, what the trend is for 
sue-and-settled type agreements or settlements. I think our 
concern is that you have subject matter that is under 
litigation, and the settlement ultimately expands way beyond 
that, unknowingly, to the public and a regulated community that 
has to end up abiding by it. It is good to have the information 
data to follow those trends, and there is probably some good 
think tanks out there to do that work so that they can then 
engage with----
    Mr. Palmer. Well, there really is not, because unless you 
know the case number, there is no way to know how many of these 
consent decrees are out there. And consent decree is not only 
an expense, it is also a form of legislating through a special 
master or through a control group, which, again, I think, in my 
opinion, is a threat to representative government because 
nobody elected these people to do this. They circumvent the 
legislative process. So, I think it is extremely important that 
we have some ability to know what we are dealing with in terms 
of the settlement agreements, and I think clarity on the part 
of the Federal Government would be a huge help. Thank you, Mr. 
Chairman. I yield back.
    Chairman Comer. The gentleman yields back. The Chair now 
recognizes Ms. Norton from D.C.
    Ms. Norton. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I am glad that my 
Republican friends have called this hearing to discuss the 
money and resources in the judicial system, but as usual, they 
come down on the side of corporations and billionaires, not 
people.
    My question is for Professor Clark. What my colleagues seem 
to take issue with is access to the courts that is sometimes 
made possible by third-party litigation funding. Republicans 
have a problem with ordinary Americans being able to afford 
lawsuits after they are injured or their loved ones killed by 
major corporations. Professor Steinitz said it best, and I am 
quoting, ``Litigation funding will reduce systemic inequalities 
in our legal system by altering the bargaining position of 
individual class and sovereign plaintiffs and corporate 
defendants.''
    Third-party litigation funding levels the playing field. It 
is as simple as that. It gives plaintiffs, in other words, the 
people who have been harmed, the opportunity to have their case 
heard and obtain justice. Fundamentally, a lack of money should 
not prevent any individual American from seeking justice when 
they have been harmed. Likewise, on the complete opposite side 
of the spectrum, money should not be the determining factor in 
receiving the attention of and fairness from the Supreme Court. 
The notion that you need to be wealthy in order to access 
justice is completely at odds with the idea that justice is 
blind, which is central to the American legal system.
    Sadly, the reality is that some of the wealthiest people in 
our country have apparently brought an audience with some of 
our Supreme Court justices. Justices Thomas and Alito have 
accepted extravagant gifts and have benefited from favors and 
donations worth millions of dollars. They have attended lavish 
vacations thrown on private jets and received expensive gifts 
from billionaires, all while failing to disclose any of it to 
the American people. This in part is enabled by the Supreme 
Court refusal to abide by a binding code of ethics. Professor 
Clark, how does the lack of a judicial code of ethics invite 
money and influence into the Supreme Court?
    Ms. Clark. Thank you, Member Norton. As you indicated and 
as I testified, the Supreme Court is not bound by the same code 
of conduct that applies to other Federal judges. And the lack 
of accountability mechanisms for, you know, violating or 
effective accountability mechanisms for, say, violating recusal 
rules or disclosure obligations, I believe has invited, has 
made almost inevitable the kind of activities that we have seen 
in recent news reports. And that is why, as I testified, I 
think it is important to focus not just on the individual 
Justices and what they have done wrong, but the need for an 
institutional response because, frankly, the problem is larger 
than just one or two Justices. It is the lack of effective 
ethics standards and enforcement mechanisms for the Court.
    Ms. Norton. The revelations that members of the highest 
court in the land may be compromised by immense wealth is 
fundamentally at odds with the principle that justice is blind. 
Without any immediate course correction by the U.S. Supreme 
Court, including by abiding by a binding code of ethics, the 
impartiality and neutrality of our justice system is at risk. 
Money should not be a barrier to accessing the judicial system, 
and wealth should not be what buys you an audience with the 
Judges sitting on the Nation's highest court. I yield back.
    Chairman Comer. The Chair now recognizes the gentleman from 
Arizona, Mr. Biggs, for 5 minutes.
    Mr. Biggs. Thanks, Mr. Chairman. It is always fun to hear 
an attempt to create new narrative from some of our colleagues 
in the left. I just got a kick out of your attack on the U.S. 
Supreme Court, but, you know, the goddess of the left, Ruth 
Bader Ginsburg, 2018, multiple trips, in fact, even with one of 
the individuals that the Ranking Member named as a tourist 
guest trying to derail this hearing because this problem is 
real. It is real. The problem is this. Let us talk to you, Mr. 
Milito, first. I would like you to give us, if you will, a 
timeline from when an offshore energy project, whether it is 
fossil fuel or renewable, is proposed to when energy is 
actually produced. How long does it take?
    Mr. Milito. It can range anywhere from 5 to 10 years, 
depending upon the location and the complexity of the project. 
Right now, the wind projects have taken about 7 to 10 years, 
but deepwater oil and gas projects about 7 to 10.
    Mr. Biggs. Yes, and in fact the U.K. just had an offshore 
wind farm sale for licenses that went with no bidders. Let us 
talk about the litigation, though. What does litigation do to 
the timeline?
    Mr. Milito. It extends it dramatically and sometimes makes 
it impossible to move forward and construct the projects and 
sanction the projects.
    Mr. Biggs. Are you familiar with sue-and-settle practices?
    Mr. Milito. Yes, we are.
    Mr. Biggs. How do those work?
    Mr. Milito. Well, an activist group files a lawsuit under 
one of the existing statutes, normally NEPA or Endangered 
Species Act along with Administrative Procedure Act, and then 
after the case is filed, negotiations begin, and government, 
through Department of Justice, settles the case and creates new 
requirements or restrictions based upon that settlement.
    Mr. Biggs. And so, you are stuck absolutely having to adapt 
or change the previously understood regulatory path because of 
the sue-and-settle litigation?
    Mr. Milito. Yes. And the case we are talking about today 
with the Rice's whale, there is actually a process under 
Endangered Species Act to determine what the critical habitat 
is, and they circumvented that completely, decided what that 
was to resettlement, which is going to take off the table 
millions of acres of potential oil and gas production for quite 
a while.
    Mr. Biggs. Ms. Steinitz, the groups engaged in sue-and-
settle arrangements with government ever received taxpayer 
funding through monetary payouts?
    Ms. Steinitz. I do not know, sir.
    Mr. Biggs. OK. Do you know, Mr. Milito?
    Mr. Milito. I do not know. We have not tracked the funding.
    Mr. Biggs. Ms. Lucas?
    Ms. Lucas. No, sir. I am not aware of.
    Mr. Biggs. Ms. Wein?
    Ms. Wein. It is not something I am aware of.
    Mr. Biggs. OK. So, when we read that in 1 year the Sierra 
Club proudly proclaims that it has brought 200 lawsuits 
against--to stop, including renewable fuel projects, what does 
that mean for the folks who really want to get into renewable 
energy? What is that, Mr. Milito? What do they do?
    Mr. Milito. Well, at its core, these are job-destroying 
actions. We support more than 350,000 jobs along the Gulf Coast 
and throughout the country: 94,000 in Louisiana; 20,000 in 
Mississippi; 28,000, Alabama; 147,000 in Texas. These are high-
paying jobs, and when you are taking action to restrict the 
production of oil and gas in the U.S., it is a regressive 
action because it is pushing the price of a commodity up, and 
it hurts disproportionately those who can least afford that. It 
is an inflationary action that really hurts everyone and 
American consumers.
    Mr. Biggs. What is the remedy, Ms. Steinitz?
    Ms. Steinitz. The remedy is not necessarily to preclude 
plaintiffs from being able to access funding, but it is to 
allow judges to regulate and defendants to have, under certain 
circumstances, visibility into how litigation funding may 
affect the course of a given litigation.
    Mr. Biggs. Are any of you familiar with the company, 
Tribeca? It is a mass tort litigation funding company. Just go 
to their website. It is very interesting. They list the number 
of cases that they have funded for mass tort litigation. Ms. 
Wein, are you familiar with Tribeca or other third-party 
litigation funders?
    Ms. Wein. Congressman, yes, I am.
    Mr. Biggs. Please tell us what the impact is.
    Ms. Wein. The impact of litigation funding on mass tort 
litigation is essentially turning mass tort litigation into an 
investment vehicle. It has taken the civil justice system and 
turned it into a market that third-party litigation funders can 
use to see a huge return on investment. In fact, third-party 
litigation funders in the GAO report said that they saw a 
return on investment of 91 to 93 percent. So, what it has done 
is enable third-party litigation funders to turn the civil 
justice system into an investment vehicle where they are able 
to manipulate the market conditions.
    Mr. Biggs. Thank you. I yield back.
    Chairman Comer. The gentleman yields back. The Chair now 
recognizes Mr. Connolly from Virginia for 5 minutes.
    Mr. Connolly. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Here is another 
hearing where my Republican friends say look over here, but do 
not look over there. Professor Clark, you are a professor at 
Washington University in St. Louis. Is that correct? So, you 
got a lot of book learning about this stuff. I am going to try 
to take advantage of that. The Constitution of the United 
States created a Supreme Court. Is that correct?
    Ms. Clark. That is correct.
    Mr. Connolly. But who established the Supreme Court? The 
Congress of the United States by statute.
    Ms. Clark. Right.
    Mr. Connolly. And in that statute, we determined, in the 
first Congress, written by pretty much James Madison, how many 
Members there would be, and that could fluctuate.
    Ms. Clark. Correct.
    Mr. Connolly. What their jurisdiction would be, and that 
could fluctuate.
    Ms. Clark. Correct.
    Mr. Connolly. And we made them circuit court riders at that 
time, which they hated, but we made them do it. That one 
suggests, under the Constitution, we had wide latitude to set 
parameters for the Supreme Court. Would you agree with that?
    Ms. Clark. I agree with that.
    Mr. Connolly. Including ethics.
    Ms. Clark. Absolutely.
    Mr. Connolly. So, Mr. Alito, in making an extraordinary 
statement that Congress has no jurisdiction with respect to the 
Supreme Court and ethics, would seem to fly in the face of the 
Constitution itself, and precedent going back to the very first 
Congress, fair?
    Ms. Clark. I agree.
    Mr. Connolly. By the way, Mr. Alito--just a digression--he 
cited the fact among other things in Dobbs, that there was no 
right to an abortion contained in the Constitution, therefore, 
there is no right to an abortion in the United States, correct?
    Ms. Clark. That is my understanding.
    Mr. Connolly. Inter alia, but that was a key argument. By 
the way, I am not a constitutional scholar, but is there any 
provision in the Constitution expressly granting a Supreme 
Court the right to review and rule on the constitutionality of 
legislation passed by Congress?
    Ms. Clark. No.
    Mr. Connolly. No.
    Ms. Clark. That came into existence with----
    Mr. Connolly. No, that came in 1804 when Chief Justice 
Marshall made it up. And the first time it was ever used, by 
the way, an invidious moment of our history, was Dred Scott in 
1857.
    Ms. Clark. Are you sure you are not a constitutional 
scholar, sir?
    Mr. Connolly. I play one sometimes. So, the highest court 
of the land is?
    Ms. Clark. U.S. Supreme Court.
    Mr. Connolly. OK. And, we need to be concerned, do we not, 
given the fact that there are lifetime appointments, about any 
outside or undue influence, real or even perceived, for the 
sake of the perception of real justice in America among the 
people that Supreme Court serves. Would that be a fair 
statement?
    Ms. Clark. Yes, sir.
    Mr. Connolly. Do you know who Ginni Thomas is?
    Ms. Clark. I do.
    Mr. Connolly. Who is she?
    Ms. Clark. I believe that Ginni Thomas is the spouse of 
Justice Clarence Thomas.
    Mr. Connolly. So, according to news reports, the longtime 
Vice President of the Federalist Society, Leonard Leo, used the 
firm belonging to Kellyanne Conway, former adviser to President 
Trump, to conceal tens of thousands of dollars of secret 
payments to that same Ginni Thomas from his nonprofit called 
the Judicial Education Project. Furthermore, Leo was found to 
have explicitly requested that the paperwork ``have no mention 
of Ginni Thomas, of course.'' Now, Leonard Leo is not just 
anybody. Every single Trump judicial nomination and subsequent 
appointment was, in fact, vetted by and recommended by that 
same Federalist Society, of which Mr. Leo was the longtime vice 
president and still is. Should we be concerned about that----
    Ms. Clark. Yes, I think that we----
    Mr. Connolly [continuing]. From an ethics point of view?
    Ms. Clark. Absolutely. I think we do need to be concerned 
about this ecosystem that Leonard Leo has created, including 
the connections to billionaires, but also these payments to 
Ginni Thomas.
    Mr. Connolly. Why? I mean, that is just the spouse of a 
member of the Supreme Court. Why should we be concerned about 
that?
    Ms. Clark. Well, one of the sort of motivating factors of 
the disclosure obligations and the recusal obligations, as you 
alluded to, is to ensure not just the reality of impartiality 
on the part of justices and judges, but the perception of 
impartiality. We cannot look inside a judge or a justice's 
mind, but we can look at the circumstances.
    Mr. Connolly. And presumably, there is some reason why Mr. 
Leo would want to conceal payments. I mean, if it is all above 
board, why don't I just pay her?
    Ms. Clark. You would have to ask Leonard Leo about that.
    Mr. Connolly. But an inference could be drawn.
    Ms. Clark. It is curious that he wanted to ensure that that 
be secret.
    Mr. Connolly. Yes. You know, we have a lot of 
investigations floating around here in the first week back 
after the August break. I think one of those investigations 
ought to be about Clarence Thomas and the serious ethical 
breaches he and his spouse have engaged in. I yield back.
    Chairman Comer. The Chair now recognizes Mr. Grothman from 
Wisconsin for 5 minutes.
    Mr. Grothman. Sure. First question, I guess I will go with 
Mr. Milito, but I guess anyone else can jump in. Obviously, we 
have heard a lot of stories today about third-party groups 
funding lawsuits and lawsuits that probably if you went through 
all the litigation, you may win. Have any of you had any 
experience as an attorney in which the plaintiffs in a lawsuit 
wound up, in your opinion, paying a price for filing a suit 
that probably was not meritorious? Is there a cost, in other 
words, for filing a marginal lawsuit that, as a practical 
matter, is imposed?
    Mr. Milito. There can be, but I have not, in my 
experience--I am not able to provide any examples of that with 
the cases that we have been involved with.
    Mr. Grothman. That is kind of what I am talking about here. 
There is none that you are aware of. Can you think of, in your 
mind, cases in which there should have been a price paid for 
filing them, but as a practical matter under our system, it is 
not? You do not have to give me the name of the case. You 
just----
    Mr. Milito. Well, I think what we are faced with is a 
legislative system whereby under each of these statutes, there 
is a right to bring suit, and I am not here to say that we 
should not be able to sue Federal agencies to hold them 
accountable. We should. We should be able to do that. What our 
problem is that through the settlements, the parties, 
plaintiffs and Department of Justice, agreed to settlements 
that go well beyond the subject matter and create requirements 
and restrictions that really serve to shut down economic 
activity in the country. And I think what in the end we need is 
congressional work to make sure we are kind of putting 
boundaries around that so that we are not discouraging 
investment in the U.S. and pushing that investment to other 
parts of the world where they do things in a much worse way.
    Mr. Grothman. That is what I was going to talk about here. 
We have heard a little bit about how the system works in 
America. We all know that we would be better off if things were 
produced in America or grown in America, mined in America. Is 
there any other country around the world that has anything like 
this as far as kind of the ability to file lawsuits and have 
the government kind of in cahoots with the plaintiffs, perhaps 
changing the rules and putting us at disadvantages compared to 
other countries?
    Mr. Milito. I am not aware. I am not sure if our academic 
experts----
    Mr. Grothman. Any of the others have examples? Can you 
think of any? Can you think of no examples? In other countries, 
they would be just stunned by what our businesses have to put 
up with.
    Mr. Milito. Well, it is a good point, though, because we do 
have a strong legal and regulatory system that provides 
oversight and enforcement of our industries, of our activities 
to make sure we have clean water, clean air, and that we are 
straining and constraining emissions, and we are taking those 
types of actions. Other countries do not have what we have, and 
so when we ship investments to those countries, it is going to 
activities that are much less regulated and generally have 
higher environmental impacts----
    Mr. Grothman. You deal with oceans. As a practical matter 
then, is one of the products of this type of lawsuit that we 
are shifting, mining or whatever, to countries with a lot lower 
standards than ours?
    Ms. Lucas. Yes, sir. I think this is why we see the U.S. 
going overseas to get minerals that we have in Minnesota. I 
think that is one of the critical reasons, and it is one of the 
reasons I am proud to be here today to let folks know we do not 
have to go and make deals with countries that we should not be 
making deals with.
    Mr. Grothman. Yes. And can you tell me, as far as the 
environmental steps you have to go through in Minnesota 
compared to the environmental steps you have to go through in 
other countries of the world, could you give a comment as to 
the difference?
    Ms. Lucas. I am incredibly proud of the standards we have 
in Minnesota and the standards that we have in the U.S. We have 
rigorous standards. We care deeply about water in Minnesota. It 
is our brand, it is our thing, and we make it tough for mining 
companies, and we hold them accountable. And our regulators 
work really hard to find a way where we can manage to protect 
those resources and bring mineral resources into being for 
everything.
    Mr. Grothman. And a lot of times, if those minerals are not 
mined in Minnesota, are they mined in countries in which the 
protections are not there, and, therefore, worldwide we are 
hurting the environment by pushing economic activity outside 
the United States?
    Ms. Lucas. That is correct, sir.
    Mr. Grothman. Any other comments?
    [No response.]
    Mr. Grothman. Thank you.
    Chairman Comer. The time has expired. The Chair now 
recognizes Mr. Krishnamoorthi from Illinois for 5 minutes.
    Mr. Krishnamoorthi. Thank you, Mr. Chair. On December 10, 
2019, this Committee held a hearing to examine and investigate 
widespread complaints from patients, physicians, scientists, 
and others that talc found in many consumer products, including 
in Johnson & Johnson talc-based baby powder, contained 
carcinogens such as asbestos and other materials. This followed 
a Reuters 2018 investigation, saying that internal documents 
examined by Reuters show that the company, namely Johnson & 
Johnson's baby powder, was ``sometimes tainted with 
carcinogenic asbestos, and that J&J kept that information from 
regulators and the public.'' As part of this Committee's 
investigation, the Committee uncovered that there were indeed 
carcinogens and talc, that there was merit to Reuters 
allegations, and that FDA testing was inadequate to determine 
its presence. Johnson & Johnson was invited to testify at this 
hearing, but declined to do so.
    According to a May 2020 Reuters article, more than 19,000 
lawsuits had been filed by that point in time, and according to 
recent statements by J&J, the company ``continues to believe 
that these claims are specious and lacks scientific merit.'' 
And that is your , Ms. Wein, right?
    Ms. Wein. Congressman, thank you for the question.
    Mr. Krishnamoorthi. I cannot hear you.
    Ms. Wein. Apologies. Congressman, thank you for the 
question.
    Mr. Krishnamoorthi. That these claims lack scientific merit 
and are specious, correct?
    Ms. Wein. That is correct. Talc does not cause cancer.
    Mr. Krishnamoorthi. Correct. Well, that is your position. 
Interestingly, in May 2020, J&J announced that it would stop 
selling talc-based baby powder in U.S. and Canada, correct? And 
it does not' sell talc-based baby powder in U.S. or Canada, 
correct?
    Ms. Wein. Congressman, talc----
    Mr. Krishnamoorthi. It is just a simple question, ma'am.
    Ms. Wein. Talc was discontinued due to lack of consumer 
demand. That was a result of the widespread advertising funded 
by third-party litigation funders to spread the narrative that 
talc contains asbestos----
    Mr. Krishnamoorthi. And all these lawsuits, the 19,000 
lawsuits, are specious and lacks scientific merit, correct?
    Ms. Wein. Congressman, talc does not contain asbestos and 
does not cause----
    Mr. Krishnamoorthi. And that is your position. I 
understand, and that is why you stopped selling baby powder. 
Now, let us see. In a recent interesting release, can you 
please put up the announcement that was publicized in the New 
York Times?
    [Chart]
    Mr. Krishnamoorthi. ``Johnson & Johnson Reaches Deal For 
$8.9 Billion Talc Settlement in April of This Year,'' and you 
have not' disputed this piece of news, correct?
    Ms. Wein. Congressman, that was a proposed settlement 
proposal.
    Mr. Krishnamoorthi. So, you are withdrawing from the 
settlement?
    Ms. Wein. Congressman, the settlement was never agreed to 
by any of the parties. It was proposed in the context of a 
bankruptcy filing.
    Mr. Krishnamoorthi. So, is this proposed settlement 
something that you are walking away from?
    Ms. Wein. Congressman, pursuant to the bankruptcy judge's 
urging, we continue to engage in settlement discussions. 
However----
    Mr. Krishnamoorthi. Did you walk away from this settlement 
offer or not?
    Ms. Wein. Congressman----
    Mr. Krishnamoorthi. Eight-point-nine billion dollars has 
been put on the table.
    Ms. Wein. Congressman----
    Mr. Krishnamoorthi. Do you dispute the accuracy of this 
headline? ``Yes'' or ``no.'' It is very simple.
    Ms. Wein. Congressman, we put a proposal forth in the 
context of a litigation matter for the settlement, which over--
--
    Mr. Krishnamoorthi. Sixty thousand claimants have now 
agreed to that. Now, have you put forward the proposal or not?
    Ms. Wein. Congressman, the proposal was put forth in the 
context of the bankruptcy.
    Mr. Krishnamoorthi. And you have not withdrawn from it, and 
60,000 claimants have agreed to this so far, according to your 
press release dated April 4, 2023, correct?
    Ms. Wein. Congressman----
    Mr. Krishnamoorthi. This is your statement.
    Ms. Wein. Yes, Congressman----
    Mr. Krishnamoorthi. Yes. So, the answer is a proposal for 
$8.9 billion settling over 60,000 claimants' allegations has 
been put forward. Now it is your position, of course, that the 
claims of the 19,000 lawsuits and more are specious and lack 
scientific merit, but your claims that somehow your product, 
Johnson & Johnson's baby powder, is somehow life-enhancing and 
that these claims are specious and lack merit are themselves 
specious. And you should think very carefully about casting all 
of these lawsuits as being somehow wholly lacking merit in 
themselves. Thank you so much. I yield back.
    Chairman Comer. The Chair recognizes Ms. Foxx, or Dr. Foxx, 
from North Carolina for 5 minutes.
    Ms. Foxx. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I want to thank our 
witnesses for being here today.
    Mr. Milito, in Congress, we constantly have to guard our 
legislative powers to make sure the courts and executive 
branches do not usurp those powers through excessive 
regulations and rulemakings and activist litigation. One 
popular approach for third-party groups to achieve goals they 
cannot otherwise enact democratically through the legislative 
process is to use sue-and-settle tactics. The Trump 
Administration sought to end sue-and-settle practices, but the 
Biden Administration permitted its use once more. Mr. Milito, 
can you describe the effects that sue-and-settle arrangements 
have had on America's ability to provide domestic energy 
sources and create jobs?
    Mr. Milito. Yes. The end result is an inability to move 
forward with investment in U.S. energy projects, and the 
outcome of that is a shift in investment and production to 
other parts of the world. We were on track in the U.S. Gulf of 
Mexico to, you know, get up to 2.2, 2.4 million barrels of oil 
a day, and that would have a tremendous impact on global 
markets in terms of putting downward pressure on prices to help 
consumers, on track to increase from 370,000 jobs to perhaps 
420,000 or 430,000.
    And at the same time, you know, the recent research out of 
Mackenzie, Wood Mackenzie, Rystad, and most recently ICF 
International, shows that when you produce oil out of the Gulf 
of Mexico, you are getting significantly lower carbon emissions 
from that production. If you do it in other parts of the world, 
it is much higher. So overall, the benefits of doing this in 
the U.S. Gulf of Mexico are better than anywhere else in the 
world.
    I mean, the money that comes in, we generate billions of 
dollars for the Land and Water Conservation Fund, for urban 
parks and recreation, for national parks, that comes in because 
of offshore oil and gas development. But when you have the 
lawsuits and the twisting of the statutes, the Outer 
Continental Shelf Lands Act, the leasing pauses, you are 
diminishing all those benefits, and you are preventing us from 
moving forward with this valuable activity. And I would say 
that it is counterproductive to the end game that a lot of the 
activist groups are trying to achieve when we are all trying to 
move forward together to reduce emissions.
    Ms. Foxx. Right. I hear you saying there is no stakeholder 
input and comments taken into account in those sue-and-
settlement agreements. Is that correct?
    Mr. Milito. For the most part, that is correct. You really 
cannot get into how the negotiations go, but I can just say 
that being an intervener in a lawsuit when a plaintiff files a 
case to kind of shut down energy production against the Federal 
Government, industry often intervenes. That does not 
necessarily give those industry parties who represent the 
workers of this country the opportunity to prevent the 
settlement from moving forward. The public and Congress 
generally know it all.
    Ms. Foxx. Thank you. Ms. Lucas, in your testimony you state 
that too often we watch in frustration as our Nation looks 
overseas for minerals we could provide. With this week's news 
that a deposit of lithium was found along the Nevada-Oregon 
border that could be among the largest deposits of its kind in 
the world, what advice do you have for the communities near 
these newly discovered deposits? And how can we make sure the 
U.S. is able to reap the benefits of those metals, rather than 
allowing overseas competitors to supply our economic needs?
    Ms. Lucas. Thank you for that question. When the U.S. has 
the minerals, we have the opportunity to do things differently 
than we did in the past. We have the opportunity to engage in 
stakeholders, to bring environmental voices to the room where 
decisions are made on how we permit. We have the chance to have 
really complicated discussions about where minerals come out of 
the ground and how they come out of the ground. I am excited 
about that opportunity out West. I ask that people who care 
about the environment get involved in these discussions on how 
we do it differently, not should we, how do we, because the 
universe did not put these minerals everywhere. They are 
limited spaces. We have to be very thoughtful on how we utilize 
those minerals. Thank you.
    Ms. Foxx. I happen to think that the Lord has provided us 
in this country just the kinds of things we need. We have to be 
able to use them.
    You also stated in your testimony that trust must be 
restored in our regulatory process, and I completely agree. In 
fact, I have introduced in this Committee, passed H.R. 3230, 
the Unfunded Mandates Accountability and Transparency Act, or 
UMATA, as we call it, that aims to restore trust in our 
regulatory process. What suggestions do you have for Congress 
to continue working to restore trust in the regulatory process?
    Ms. Lucas. I think I touched on them already, and I would 
love to put that in writing for you after this hearing.
    Ms. Foxx. Thank you very much. I appreciate it.
    Ms. Foxx. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I yield back.
    Chairman Comer. The gentlelady yields back. The Chair 
recognizes Mr. Khanna from California for 5 minutes.
    Mr. Khanna. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Ms. Wein, what drug 
does Imbruvica, what does it treat?
    Ms. Wein. Congressman, I recognize Imbruvica is one of the 
products that we do market. I am not exactly sure what it 
treats.
    Mr. Khanna. It is OK. I am not trying to trick you. It 
treats leukemia. Do you know what the price that Johnson & 
Johnson has set for it?
    Ms. Wein. I do not have that on my fingertips.
    Mr. Khanna. It is $484 per capsule per tablet, which works 
out to about $14,000 per month, which works out to about 
$160,000 per year for leukemia patients. Now, do you know, or I 
can tell you, how much money gross revenue that Johnson & 
Johnson has made from this drug over the last 10 years?
    Ms. Wein. Congressman, it is not something that I am an 
expert at, not something I am here to testify to today.
    Mr. Khanna. Twenty-two billion dollars. Do you know the 
gross profits of Johnson & Johnson in 2023?
    Ms. Wein. I could not tell you that.
    Mr. Khanna. Sixty-five billion dollars. So just to recap, 
you have got a pill for leukemia patients. You sell it at $484 
per capsule. That is $160,000 a year. You make $22 billion over 
that over the last 10 years, and you are making $65 billion in 
profit. Now, we have passed as a Congress, and the President 
has signed a bill saying, you know what? Let Medicare negotiate 
to try to bring that price down, and you and your department, 
because you are Assistant General Counsel, have filed a lawsuit 
saying that that negotiation would be an unjust taking. Let me 
ask you this. Do you believe when the Veterans Administration 
negotiates for drug prices with you that that is a violation of 
the Takings Clause?
    Ms. Wein. Congressman, I appreciate the question. The bases 
for our litigation against HHS with respect to the Inflation 
Reduction Act are fully disclosed in our complaint. I am not an 
expert in this area.
    Mr. Khanna. You are here. You are the Assistant General 
Counsel for a company that is accusing the U.S. Government of 
taking your property because we are negotiating, and you cannot 
answer a simple question. Just a ``yes'' or ``no.'' Does the 
Veterans Affairs negotiation with Johnson & Johnson constitute 
a taking?
    Ms. Wein. Congressman, we believe that the IRA constraint--
--
    Mr. Khanna. I am not asking about that the IRA. I am asking 
you about do you believe the Veterans Affairs, when they 
negotiate, does that constitute a taking?
    Ms. Wein. Congressman, again, that is not a litigation that 
I have great familiarity with.
    Mr. Khanna. OK. So, I will just say you do not want to 
answer that question. Do you believe when Medicaid negotiates 
and gets a rebate for anything over the price of inflation, do 
you believe that that constitutes a taking?
    Ms. Wein. Congressman, again, it is not an area that I 
specialize in.
    Mr. Khanna. I guess I do not understand how being the 
Assistant General Counsel, you can come before the U.S. 
Congress when you are suing the U.S. Government saying that we 
are taking your property, and that is a very serious charge. 
``Taking'' means, like, if I came, with the government, with a 
force, took your property, and you do not know whether it is a 
taking when the Veterans Administration negotiates, you do not 
know whether it is a taking whether Medicaid negotiates. I 
assumed you would say it is not a taking because obviously it 
is not a taking. These administrations have been negotiating 
for years, and yet you are arguing that Medicare, when they 
negotiate, it is a taking. Medicaid. Do you know how many 
percent of the American population is on Medicare?
    Ms. Wein. Congressman, no.
    Mr. Khanna. It is 18 percent about. Do you know how many 
are on Medicaid?
    Ms. Wein. Congressman, no.
    Mr. Khanna. About 18 percent, so, it is not like Medicare 
has a bigger market. Medicaid negotiates with 18 percent. Do 
you know about how many of our people are veterans? It is about 
6 percent. So, you have already a larger population when you 
combine Medicaid and Veteran Affairs negotiating with your 
company so that you do not make $65 billion in profits every 
year and so leukemia patients do not pay $160,000.
    You have filed a lawsuit. I think it is shameful what you 
and the pharmaceutical companies have done in suing the U.S. 
Government to protect those profits, and you are totally 
unprepared to answer a single question about what the Takings 
Clause is and a justification for that lawsuit. I mean, I 
really believe hopefully someone in the company and these other 
pharmaceutical companies can provide the American people with 
an explanation why you consider Medicare negotiating those 
drugs to lower those profits, those obscene profits, a taking, 
when you do not consider that for the Veterans Affairs 
Administration or Medicaid. Mr. Chairman, I hope someone will 
answer my questions on that, and I yield back my time.
    Chairman Comer. The Chair now recognizes Mr. Armstrong from 
North Dakota for 5 minutes.
    Mr. Armstrong. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I find the subject 
of this hearing fascinating. As an old street lawyer, I do not 
always ask for influence and advice from law school professors, 
but this is a pretty interesting conversation. And I probably 
have a little different take than a lot of my friends on my 
side of the aisle in that, one, I think we should be very 
careful about distinguishing between marginal cases and bad 
faith cases. I think we should be very careful about dealing 
with excessive judgments versus unreasonable judgments.
    And I think we talk a lot about capping judgments in tort 
reform and plaintiff's fees, but we never actually talk about 
the other side of the aisle and the cozy relationship between 
insurance companies and insurance defense firms. And I have 
been a part of cases that should have settled for policy limits 
on the second day they were litigated, and, quite frankly, my 
clients should have never had to hire a lawyer, but instead, we 
go through the litigation process solely for the purpose of 
billable hours and all the other asides.
    So, I think we have to have a global conversation about 
what this looks like, but a fundamental bedrock of our judicial 
system is that a client has a right to engage with a lawyer in 
a manner of his or her choosing. Now, we do put some 
restrictions on that. We do not allow for contingency fees in 
family law cases in North Dakota.
    I was in the middle of a fight about our state bar 
association trying to take away flat fee or transactional 
billing for criminal lawyers. As somebody who did that work, I 
adamantly opposed that in that the client hires you at the 
beginning of the case, you settle on an agreement, the case 
goes where it goes. They do not not go to trial because they 
cannot afford not to go to trial, and there are a lot of 
different ways in which you function in those things.
    But the second part of that bedrock is that a client has 
autonomy over the course of their litigation. And I do not care 
if it is an environmental justice firm dealing in a sue-and-
settle pipeline case or if it is an investment banking firm 
trying to weigh in on a settlement because the return does not 
exist in the same manner, or a mom who is paying the bill for 
18-year-old kid who got a driving under the influence and is an 
aviation major student in Grand Forks, North Dakota. That 
client hires me, his mother pays the bill, that client and I 
have the relationship.
    So, my question when we are doing all of this and in this 
theoretical place is, what is the role of Congress and what is 
the role of the attorney who is taking that case because 
functionally, to me, it eventually it comes down to that. 
Anybody who is licensed to practice law in any jurisdiction in 
this country has to take an ethics exam, and you can be a 
criminal defense lawyer--prosecutors have a little different 
version; we should talk about that some time, too--but civil 
plaintiff's lawyer, civil defense lawyer, and you are 
representing a client. Who is paying your bills are irrelevant, 
and if it is not irrelevant, you should not be representing 
your client. I mean, it is that simple. And when we get 
ourselves involved in this in a congressional manner, I am 
worried we do more harm than good. And I am just interested in, 
and I am going to just go down the road because I did something 
very dangerous when you do congressional hearings: I 
disregarded all of my staff's questioning, and I sat here, and 
I thought about this. And I am interested in why aren't we just 
focusing on the fundamental nature of this problem, which is a 
lawyer who is licensed to practice law and takes a client, has 
a duty to represent that client. They do not have a duty to 
represent an NGO. They do not have a duty to represent an 
investment firm. They do not have the duty to represent the 
mother of that client. They have a duty to represent that 
client. And wouldn't we be better served by doing something and 
having a more robust version of what that looks like through 
the American Bar Association and every state bar association in 
this country than having congressional involvement in something 
that quite frankly we will do poorly. Ms. Steinitz?
    Ms. Steinitz. Thank you. Yes, I agree with you completely 
that a fundamental feature of our civil justice system is that 
the plaintiffs' control their case because the cases are about 
their legal rights. The issue is what happens when we are 
entering into a situation where there are third parties who 
obtained the right to control directly or indirectly that 
litigation, and that is done through an industry that is 
entirely unregulated, unlike lawyers who are regulated. Legal 
ethics do not apply.
    Mr. Armstrong. Well, except they still apply to the lawyer 
in that case. That is my point. I mean, I think you----
    Ms. Steinitz. Yes.
    Mr. Armstrong [continuing]. Can invest in whatever you want 
to invest in. But I mean, I have had a lot of uncomfortable 
conversations with people who have paid my bills versus people 
who I was representing, and mostly it was, I cannot talk to 
you, you are not my client. What my client and I talked about 
for an hour and a half is completely unavailable to you, and I 
do not care what my clients signed. Mr. Milito?
    Mr. Milito. No, I agree. We do need to continue to have the 
ability to bring cases in the Federal system over Federal 
agency action. Industry does it, environmental groups does it, 
citizens do it. So, our focus here is not on the attorney-
client relationship and the ethics around that. It is about the 
expansion of the litigation and judicial activism that occurs, 
that takes it well beyond what is in the underlying statute to 
really stifle investment in U.S. project and really create 
these inflationary pressures and job destruction results that 
we all want to avoid. The idea here is to look at something 
like the debt ceiling bill where they took action focused on 
NEPA to make sure, OK, let us put some definition around it so 
we understand that there are bounds to these laws.
    Mr. Armstrong. If we want to do statutory definition to the 
standing and litigation reform, I am all in. I just worry about 
when we interfere with the attorney-client relationship in a 
way that we are trying to solve a problem, we are creating a 
whole another one. I am sorry. I yield back.
    Chairman Comer. Thank you. The Chair now recognizes Ms. 
Brown from Ohio for 5 minutes.
    Ms. Brown. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Once again, my 
colleagues on the other side of the aisle are carrying the 
weight for giant corporations and special interests, putting 
their needs over those of the American people. There are many 
pressing issues facing our Nation, from the epidemic of gun 
violence to protecting a woman's right to make her own 
healthcare decisions, and yet, this Committee, under Republican 
leadership, continues to spend its time working on behalf of 
the wealthiest, well-connected, and most powerful.
    At the direction of these large corporations, my Republican 
colleagues are pushing to outlaw, undo, and overturn rules that 
benefit low-income Americans who are seeking justice. Right 
now, all across the country there are right-wing coalitions 
attempting to advance a conservative legal agenda, undermine 
judicial ethics and standards, and take this country back in 
time when people who look like me were not afforded the same 
rights and privileges of my Caucasian counterparts. That is 
what led most recently to the Supreme Court banning affirmative 
action in college admissions, and not to mention the Republican 
effort to implement a nationwide ban on mifepristone, the 
abortion medications.
    Republicans want to cut funding for the judiciary and 
Federal defender services because they believe it is more 
important to game the system to their advantage rather than to 
ensure the system is fair for everyone. How far will they go? 
What is next? See, they have used the courts to rip up the 
constitutional protection for a woman's right to make her own 
healthcare decision. They have used the courts to throw out all 
kinds of commonsense gun violence prevention measures, doing 
the bidding of the gun lobby. They have used the courts to 
attack a fundamental tenets of our democracy, the Voting Rights 
Act, and the ability of the people to choose their 
representatives rather than the other way around.
    So, Ms. Clark, you actually touched on something that I 
would like you to elaborate a little bit more on, which is how 
the court system is used and abused by large corporations and 
powerful special interests in ways the average person does not 
have access to.
    Ms. Clark. Congresswoman Brown, as I mentioned in my 
testimony, the revelations over the last 6 months from 
journalists indicate that some members of the Supreme Court 
have accepted repeatedly rather lavish gifts from very wealthy 
patrons. And this practice of, one might say fraternizing with 
this group, including, at least in a few cases, people who have 
matters before the Court or whose interests could be affected 
by Court decisions, this phenomenon absolutely undermines 
public trust in the Supreme Court. So, I would just say that is 
why I think it is important for there to be an institutional 
response rather than simply vilifying the Justices who have 
engaged in this behavior.
    Ms. Brown. Thank you so much. Well, I want to end by 
echoing Ranking Member Raskin and a call for a hearing on 
judicial ethics and conflicts of interests posed by Justices 
Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito receiving gifts from GOP mega 
donors who have business before the highest court. I would 
think these significant issues of actual proven conflicts of 
interest would be of the utmost concern of my Republican 
colleagues given the time, attention, and resources this 
Committee has dedicated to futile, fabricated, and reckless 
rumors about the President, which I will happily remind 
everyone, have been a dead end every single time. And with 
that, Mr. Chairman, I yield back.
    Chairman Comer. You can yield back, but that statement was 
completely false. We are not going to strike it from the record 
because it is your opinion. You can have an opinion, but bank 
records do not lie. You should go to the Treasury Department 
and read, like we have, the 150 bank violations from this 
family, and I am excited about this Committee's newfound----
    Ms. Brown. Four indictments.
    Chairman Comer. You can go. You want to go, Ms. Crockett?
    Ms. Brown. Ninety-one counts.
    Chairman Comer. That what?
    Ms. Brown. Four indictments, 91 counts.
    Chairman Comer. We are very excited about your newfound 
desire and concern about influence peddling. And to answer your 
request, we are going to have plenty of opportunities to talk 
about influence peddling, and you are more than welcome to 
bring up the Supreme Court. You are more than welcome to bring 
up the previous Administration----
    Mr. Raskin. Point of order, Mr. Chairman, but where exactly 
are we in the order of things? Whose time is being used right 
now?
    Chairman Comer. Well, we are now yielding to me. It is my 
time to ask questions. Ms. Wein, I think it is important, the 
purpose of this hearing. Can you briefly summarize how third-
party litigation funding works because I do not think everyone 
understands that.
    Ms. Wein. Congressman, based on my experience, what is 
happening is that law firms will contract with third-party 
litigation funders, get a significant amount of cash from them, 
use that money to generate huge media and advertising campaigns 
alleging that a product is defective. They then collect those 
cases, sell those cases, funnel those cases into a multi-
district litigation and wait around for settlement.
    What is very interesting about this, Congressman, is that 
there is no transparency, no disclosure and no, to Congressman 
Armstrong's point, no ethics obligations between the funder and 
the ultimate claimant, which is what is so troubling.
    Chairman Comer. How long has this been going on, and I 
assume this is a very fast-growing industry because of the rate 
of return that you mentioned in your opening statement.
    Ms. Wein. Yes, Congressman. Globally, it is estimated that 
the litigation funding is about $39 billion, within the U.S., 
about $13 billion of assets under management.
    Chairman Comer. I would say that the overwhelming majority 
of investors, if not a hundred percent, are institutional 
investors, in other words, high-net-worth investors.
    Ms. Wein. Hedge funds, private equity, and just pure 
litigation funders, again, with no transparency, no disclosure. 
Defendants do not know who is negotiating at the table. 
Defendants do not know who has control over the litigation, 
neither in many cases do the actual claimants because there is 
no disclosure requirement.
    Chairman Comer. This is the purpose of the hearing. We are 
certainly learning about this industry. This is something that 
has an impact on consumers. It has an impact on the entire 
judicial system. As we know, we are bogged down and behind in 
these cases. How much do frivolous lawsuits, would you say, 
cost the average consumer for prescription drugs? Do you have 
any idea?
    Ms. Wein. Congressman, that is a very hard number to give 
you. I do not have that at my fingertips, but what I can tell 
you is that over the last 10 years, with the introduction of 
third-party litigation funding into the pharmaceutical and 
medical device mass tort litigation sphere, we have seen an 
exponential increase in the number of claims. And also, as I 
mentioned in my opening statement, about 20 percent to 30 
percent to 50 percent of those claims are entirely meritless 
and do not belong there.
    Chairman Comer. And I would assume that a big company like 
yours, if you have to pay out a lawsuit or a frivolous claim, 
that you just pass that on to consumers because one of the 
biggest issues in America right now, and the polling shows 
that, is inflation. The cost of healthcare is certainly a big 
part of inflation, and we are going to have a hearing next week 
on the pharmacy benefit managers, an area where I think the 
majority of this Committee actually agrees on, which is great 
that we actually agree on an issue. So, I think this is 
something that we need to continue to study and evaluate and 
try to determine through probing what this costs and the impact 
on the overall judicial system.
    Ms. Lucas, we are concerned also about energy policy in 
America, and there is a push by this Administration, and, quite 
frankly, there are a lot of consumers that want to have 
electric vehicles, for example. To be able to be successful in 
converting to electric vehicles, we are going to have to have 
rare earth minerals. And your state has an abundance of 
reserves, but it is my understanding that because of lawsuits, 
it has become very difficult to get permits and to mine. Can 
you briefly kind of give us a summary of what is going on in 
your state?
    Ms. Lucas. Yes. So, we are primarily copper, nickel, 
platinum, palladium, gold, cobalt.
    Chairman Comer. Which are very important for batteries.
    Ms. Lucas. Which are very important for batteries. Our one 
project was permitted, or I will say our front-running project 
was permitted in 2018 and 2019, and they are still tied up in 
litigation.
    Chairman Comer. So, where are we getting those rare earth 
minerals for the batteries that Ford and Toyota are in the 
process of building massive plants? One in my home state, we 
are very happy to have that investment, but where are they 
getting the rare earth minerals?
    Ms. Lucas. Not from my state.
    Chairman Comer. They get them from China, from Africa.
    Ms. Lucas. China, Africa.
    Chairman Comer. And that is a problem, and as we move 
forward and talk about energy policy and the push for electric 
vehicles, I am fine if the market wants that. I am a free 
market guy, but I am concerned about the capacity of our grid. 
I am concerned about our reliance on China because China has 
been purchasing many of these rare earth mineral mines in 
Africa, and it is a concern. So, this is something that we need 
to communicate further about to see what we can do to assist in 
helping utilize our own resources, our own rare earth mineral 
mining and all of the capacity and potential we have in the 
United States.
    My time has expired. The Chair now recognizes Ms. Stansbury 
from New Mexico for 5 minutes.
    Ms. Stansbury. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I am grateful 
that the Oversight is having a hearing today on judicial 
activism and dark money influences, especially when we are 
seeing one of the most corrupt dark money influence courts ever 
in American history. Of course, I am disappointed to see that 
the Chair and the GOP Majority, as usual, has been propping up 
these dark money actors and calling industry witnesses to 
testify at this hearing today.
    It is, as the Ranking Member said, truly a moral and, I 
believe, constitutional crisis in our legal system as we are 
seeing a Supreme Court and Justices who are taking lavish 
vacations and kickbacks from wealthy donors, hearing cases that 
are funded directly and indirectly by right-wing donors and 
organizations, and in the process, systematically gutting the 
American judicial system and undermining our fundamental 
rights, rights like the right to control our own bodies, to be 
safe in our communities, and rights to live free and healthy 
lives in our communities. So, as they say, let us follow the 
money.
    First, let us start with abortion and reproductive rights. 
As we know, last year, the Supreme Court handed down the Dobbs 
decision, which upended 50 years of settled law, protecting our 
right to control our own bodies, and who funded this 
litigation? Organizations like the Alliance Defending Freedom, 
bankrolled by organizations like Leonard Leo and Harlan Crow. 
Yes, that Harlan Crow, who we know has been wining and dining 
Supreme Court justices for years.
    Second, let us talk about the right of our tribal nations 
to be sovereign and to protect their communities. Last year, 
the Supreme Court handed down the Castro-Huerta decision, 
gutting Federal recognition of tribal sovereignty in criminal 
jurisdiction and overturning over 100 years of settled law, and 
agreed to hear a case involving the Indian Child Welfare Act 
and the right of tribal communities to control who can adopt 
children from their own communities. Who funded these efforts 
against the Child Welfare Act? It was organizations like the 
Goldwater Institute, funded by the Koch brothers and the Mercer 
family, which, as you all know, has direct ties to 
organizations and folks like Betsy DeVos, who tried to gut our 
education system in the Trump Administration, and the Pacific 
Legal Foundation that is funded by companies like ExxonMobil. 
Can you imagine dark money organizations suing to take 
indigenous children out of their communities? I mean, it does 
not get much darker than that, does it? Really.
    Finally, let us talk about our right to clean water, you 
know, that basic right to live. Months ago, the Supreme Court 
gutted the Clean Water Act when they handed down the Sackett 
decision. Guess what? This case was funded in part by groups 
like the Searle Foundation Trust and Donors Capital Fund, which 
poured money into that case from organizations and donors also 
tied to Leo Mercer, and the Koch families, and organizations 
which have been actively undermining climate action for years. 
And at the end of the day, it resulted in a decision that the 
Court handed down that essentially said that our rivers and 
streams and wetlands should not be protected, including over 90 
percent in the state of New Mexico, which I represent, going 
even further than Donald Trump went in gutting the Clean Water 
Act.
    So, if the Majority wants to talk about dark money and 
activist courts, I am so here for it. And let us talk about the 
ways that it is actually undermining our fundamental rights, 
our Constitution, and our judicial system right now in this 
country because I have to say that I have never in my lifetime 
seen a more activist Court and a Court that is more influenced 
by dark money than what we are seeing in this country right 
now, and I believe that it is one of the most significant 
threats to our democracy.
    So let us talk about it. That is what we should be talking 
about today, not a bunch of industry folks sitting in front of 
us talking about frivolous lawsuits. And that is why we need to 
be reforming the courts, enforcing judicial ethics and removing 
judges who violate their oath because literally, our democracy 
and our rights as a country depend on it. And I yield back.
    Mr. Higgins. [Presiding] The gentlewoman yields. The 
gentleman from Florida, Mr. Donalds, is recognized for 5 
minutes for question.
    Mr. Donalds. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I think it is 
important to first note out for the record that the use of 
``dark money'', especially since 2020, has actually been 
dominated by my colleagues on the other side of the aisle. The 
New York Times has reported on this, The Hill has reported on 
this, that most dark money, whether you want to talk about the 
Court, or politics, or whatever the case might be, actually 
comes from the political left and the Democrat Party. It has 
not been written about in the pages of the New York Post. That 
comes actually from publications that typically lean left in 
the United States.
    Real quick, Mr. Chairman, I want to actually kind of change 
speeds a little bit in some of what we have been discussing and 
do talk about some potentials that may exist, affecting our 
judicial system. This is really for all the witnesses. Are you 
aware of any specific examples or instances of the Chinese 
Government paying American law firms to sue for certain causes 
that would actually embolden the CCP's policy here in the 
United States? Anybody?
    Ms. Wein. Congressman, thank you for the question. I am 
not. However, the reason for that primarily is because we do 
not have access to third-party litigation funding agreements. 
We do not know in many cases who is funding these litigations, 
and that is why transparency, disclosure, regulation around 
this industry is so very important.
    Mr. Donalds. OK. Thank you for that. Quick follow-up on 
that one. Do you guys believe that third-party litigation has 
the potential to discourage and hamper American innovation?
    Mr. Milito. Absolutely. I would look at the Gulf of Mexico 
as one of the most premier innovative energy hubs in the world. 
We are ready to deploy carbon capture and storage, ready to 
invest in hydrogen, offshore wind, oil and gas. We can do it 
all, but every one of those forms of energy, whether it is oil 
and gas, wind, carbon capture and storage, is subject to 
litigation, and that threatens the ability of the U.S. to be 
the leader when it comes to deploying and advancing new 
technologies, and it sends that overseas. Our companies are 
doing it, they are ready to do it, and they want to keep doing 
it, but the court system holds it up.
    Mr. Donalds. All right. Let us build off that a little bit 
because one of the main topics when you are talking about some 
of the renewable energy sources, it also delves into critical 
minerals, and rare earth minerals are part of that. We know 
that China basically controls the green tech supply chain. No 
matter how we want to talk about it here in the United States, 
those are the facts. Do you believe that China is a vital 
linchpin in the solar and wind supply chain in the United 
States?
    Ms. Lucas. Yes. Thank you for that question. Right now, the 
vast majority of our renewable energy technologies come from 
China, and we have very limited manufacturing capability in the 
U.S. I am proud to say our state has one and soon to be a 
second solar panel manufacturer, but a lot of their materials 
are still coming from China. And I hope we can be honest about 
that and think about how we change that situation.
    Mr. Donalds. If we took China out of the supply chain 
equation, can the United States currently build an offshore 
wind farm? Mr. Miloto?
    Mr. Milito. We are moving in a direction of being able to 
do more and more of that in the U.S. We are building 
manufacturing plants. We are----
    Mr. Donalds. Well, hold on, real quick, real quick, because 
one of the things in Congress we hear a lot is, and it is not 
just here in hearings. We hear in meetings all the time, ``we 
are positioning ourselves, ``we are on our way to do that.'' 
Today, if China was removed from the supply chain equation, 
could we today build an offshore wind farm?
    Mr. Milito. I do not know, to be honest.
    Mr. Donalds. I would actually probably say that if you do 
not know, then the answer is there is no way it is going to 
happen. In your personal opinion, do you think prices of the 
electricity generated from offshore wind would go up or down if 
the United States had the capability of domestically mining 
important minerals and the ability to manufacture critical 
components? So, if we basically did it all internally here in 
the United States, do you think the cost per kilowatt hour 
would go up or down?
    Mr. Milito. The movement of the sector continues to drive 
costs down because of efficiency and cost effectiveness over 
time, and the scale is driving toward greater and greater 
efficiency, so doing it in the U.S. should not slow that down.
    Mr. Donalds. OK. All right. Listen, I think that is all I 
need right now. I think one of the things we should be 
concerned about, and, Ms. Wein, I think you said it initially, 
is that one of the issues we are clearly seeing with third-
party litigation is that there are ``dark pools'' that are 
funding all kind of lawsuits on all kind of sides of the aisle. 
And I do think that there are some levels of transparency that 
we need to find around this because we should not be using the 
civil litigation system to create policy that, frankly, belongs 
here in the halls of Congress and in state capitals across the 
country. With that, I yield back.
    Mr. Higgins. The gentleman yields. The gentleman from 
Florida, Mr. Frost, is recognized for 5 minutes for question.
    Mr. Frost. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. In my district in 
Central Florida, I have met with countless families, children, 
and seniors whose lives have been devastated by the opioid 
addiction and epidemic. In 2019, a driver in a community that 
is in my district called Bithlo, pulled into a stranger's 
driveway, abandoned the car, and in the car left two overdosed 
women in the back. When they found the car and they found the 
women, they were barely breathing.
    I will say recently, thanks to the tireless work of folks 
like Project Opioid, Transformation Village, leaders like Tim 
McKinney and other local organizations in Central Florida, 
things are trending in a better direction, but it is still 
dire. And Republicans are showing us today exactly what they 
actually care about. Today, they have had the chance to hold 
big corporations accountable for the damage they have done to 
our communities, but instead of looking into that, have invited 
big corporations here to air their grievances about how 
everyday Americans are bullying them. This was supposed to be 
the Oversight Committee, and so far, the only oversight we have 
done is into the municipality of Washington D.C., into the 
President--nothing coming out of that--seeing Hunter Biden's 
dick pic. I mean, this is the stuff we have been doing here.
    And recently, more than 100,000 people have died from 
opioid overdoses in 2022, and pharmaceutical companies that 
push prescription opioids were partly responsible. In the 
lawsuits that followed, Johnson & Johnson were forced to pay $5 
billion in a settlement. Following that very public settlement, 
for some reason, Johnson & Johnson decided it would be a good 
idea to send their assistant general counsel to Congress to 
complain about these and other lawsuits that Johnson and 
Johnson have been a part of.
    Johnson & Johnson have a market cap of over $400 billion. 
The 2021 lawsuits and the countless Americans who were impacted 
by the opioid epidemic only set Johnson & Johnson back a cool 
$5 billion, yet today, my Republican colleagues turn a blind 
eye to the opioid crisis. They would rather use the gavel to 
amplify corporate demands that seek to deny Americans access to 
the resources needed to hold corporations and companies like 
Johnson & Johnson accountable. Of the $26 billion that four 
major drug companies agreed to pay for their role in the opioid 
epidemic, about $2 billion went toward lawyer fees. Now in this 
community in my district of Bithlo, the per capita income is 
roughly $30,000 dollars a year.
    Ms. Steinitz, I have some pretty straightforward questions 
for you. If someone in Bithlo in my district had a family 
member that was mismarketed opioids and suffered life-changing 
addiction or even worse, death, how would they normally seek 
redress from the pharmaceutical companies that were partly 
responsible for the mismarketing?
    Ms. Steinitz. Through lawsuits.
    Mr. Frost. Through lawsuits. If they got into this lawsuit, 
could they represent themself?
    Ms. Steinitz. They would need counsel.
    Mr. Frost. But they have the right to also represent 
themself, right?
    Ms. Steinitz. Yes, they have the right to represent 
themself.
    Mr. Frost. Against an army of pharmaceutical lawyers, how 
would that go if someone was representing themself if they did 
not have the means necessary to accrue tens of thousands, 
hundreds of thousands of dollars in lawyers' fees?
    Ms. Steinitz. Pro se litigants who represent themselves are 
rarely successful.
    Mr. Frost. Rarely successful. Many of these lawsuits are 
complicated and last for years, right? I mean, you know, how do 
you think one of my constituents in Bithlo making $30 grand a 
year would be able to afford tens of thousands, hundred 
thousand dollars in lawyers fees? Do you think that might be 
possible for them or no?
    Ms. Steinitz. I do think that plaintiffs should be able to 
access financing, whether it is through the contingency fee or 
through third-party funding litigation. I do have a concern 
that sometimes these people are the ones who are preyed on the 
most.
    Mr. Frost. And, Ms. Steinitz, last question. In civil 
cases, if someone who needs to file a lawsuit cannot afford an 
attorney, is there a constitutional right that one be provided 
to them?
    Ms. Steinitz. In civil cases? No.
    Mr. Frost. In civil cases, no, there is not. By holding 
this hearing, Republicans on this Committee have shown that 
they care more about putting profits over people, that they 
care more about perpetrating a myth that people in communities 
around the country who have been exposed to toxic chemicals, 
sold contaminated baby powder, and flooded with opioids in 
their communities are demanding too much by demanding justice. 
These folks are not the villains. The American people are not 
the villains. They are people in our communities fighting back 
against wealthy corporations, and they are the real heroes.
    And to Johnson & Johnson, I want to say loud and clear, you 
paid $5 billion for your role in the opioid epidemic and 
acknowledge no wrongdoing. No. 1, there was wrongdoing. No. 2, 
it should have been a hell of a lot easier to take Johnson & 
Johnson to task, and I think they should have had to pay a lot 
more money. Shame on Republicans for holding this hearing to 
vilify the people who are helping poor and working-class 
Americans level the playing field and stand up for themselves. 
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I yield back.
    Mr. Higgins. The gentleman yields. The gentlewoman from 
Michigan, Mrs. McClain, is recognized for 5 minutes for 
questioning.
    Mrs. McClain. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I first just 
want to share my excitement that my colleagues on the other 
side of the aisle are so concerned about ethics. I am extremely 
excited to hear about that since this Committee has uncovered 
that the Biden family has received over $20 million from 
foreign nationals and they cannot say one thing they did to 
earn that money. So, I am looking forward to this ethics talk. 
But, I would prefer to talk about something that maybe we can 
agree upon and move, and get some clarity around.
    I think we all can agree that the lack of transparency in 
third-party litigation funding is concerning, whether it is 
dark money on either side, right? That is never a positive. The 
lack of monetary reporting requirements in third-party 
litigation funding opens the door for foreign entities. This is 
my concern, for foreign entities to influence the U.S. court 
proceedings for their own political and perhaps monetary gain.
    Foreign adversaries could access, I believe, privileged 
information, including sensitive government information, 
patents, or confidential business information via the 
litigation process because of the lack thereof of transparency. 
So, my question, Professor Steinitz, is, are there loopholes in 
the current legal system by which a foreign adversary, such as 
China, could gain access to highly confidential information via 
the discovery process?
    Ms. Steinitz. The discovery process does allow litigants to 
seek the information of their adversaries, and so that is a 
possibility.
    Mrs. McClain. OK, so yes. So, we should all be concerned 
that there are loopholes that our foreign adversaries could 
gain access to critical information that may end up hurting us. 
Could this impact U.S. companies' intellectual property or even 
our national security with this information that they could 
obtain?
    Ms. Steinitz. It could happen in any individual case. I do 
not know that we have a systemic problem with that and there 
are no reported cases of that sort, but it is a scenario that 
could come to pass.
    Mrs. McClain. OK. Do you believe that updating reporting 
requirements disclosing lawsuit funding sources could be a 
potential remedy for this situation?
    Ms. Steinitz. Yes, clarifying under what conditions third-
party funding should be disclosed would be helpful.
    Mrs. McClain. Let me ask my question in a different way. 
What would the harm be in updating the reporting requirements 
for disclosing lawsuit funding? What would the harm in that be?
    Ms. Steinitz. The harm could be if there is over-
disclosure. So, for example, requiring plaintiffs to disclose 
how much finance is available for them to pursue their claim is 
oftentimes not relevant and can be misused in a given 
litigation context.
    Mrs. McClain. Thank you. In 2022, 14 State Attorney 
Generals sent a letter to Merrick Garland that stated, 
``Foreign countries, such as China and Russia, could use third-
party litigation funding to fuel targeted lawsuits designed to 
weaken U.S. national defense companies in the business of 
protecting our national security interest. Likewise, costly 
litigation aimed at sabotaging major energy sectors that are 
vital to our economy poses a direct threat to our economic 
security interest and global independence.'' Mr. Milito, can 
you explain how costly litigation is already impacting our 
economic security and weakening our energy independence?
    Mr. Milito. Yes. The U.S. has risen from being energy 
scarce back in 2009, producing, like, 5 million barrels a day 
to close to 13 million barrels a day, and that has shaken the 
world markets. Geopolitically, we are in a much more powerful 
position today than we have ever been in when it comes to 
energy, and we could see Ukraine, Russia, how Russia uses it. 
We know China wants to dominate energy, and Iran, Iraq, you 
name it. You know, they use energy as a tool. So, when we see 
efforts through the court system to constrain U.S. energy 
production, we are providing, you know, a shift in those 
benefits and a shift in that geopolitical control to our 
enemies. And it hurts us from a national security standpoint 
because energy security is national security, and these are 
long-term needs that we have. And when we fail to replenish our 
oil and gas potential through leasing and other activities, we 
are really hurting us for near term, midterm, and long term.
    Mrs. McClain. I believe the lack of transparency in third-
party litigation is not only a threat to our legal system, but 
clearly a potential threat to our national security. And I am 
out of time, so I yield back. Thank you.
    Mr. Higgins. The gentlewoman yields. The gentleman from 
California, Mr. Garcia, is recognized for 5 minutes for 
question.
    Mr. Garcia. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I want to 
thank all of our witnesses for being here today, and it is 
apparent that we are here today because our Republican 
colleagues are worried that it is too easy for the American 
people to bring legitimate claims against big corporations that 
poison and pollute our communities. And as they put it in their 
press release when they announced this hearing today, they are 
concerned that ``financiers are hijacking America's 
courtrooms.''
    Now, I think my colleagues, of course, might be projecting. 
Big corporations, as we all know, are doing just fine. 
Meanwhile, Republicans are willfully ignoring the fact that 
wealthy conservative donors are lavishing gifts on the 
conservative Justices of the Supreme Court. So, if they want to 
talk about money in the Court, let us talk about Justice 
Clarence Thomas and the many allegations of ethical lapses and 
conflicts of interest that came to light just a few months ago. 
So, we are going to keep this simple.
    [Slide]
    Mr. Garcia. Now first, I have a photo here. We see Justice 
Thomas with his very generous friend, Harlan Crow, who we have 
heard a lot about. We know that Crow is a conservative 
billionaire who has poured enormous amounts of money into 
Republican causes, funded right-wing advocacy organizations, 
including those, of course, run by Justice Thomas's wife, Ginni 
Thomas, who has had, of course, cases before the Court. Now, 
some of these gifts that have been given to Crow by Thomas--let 
us list those.
    Justice Thomas regularly stays at Harlan Crow's private 
Lakeside Resort in New York, which I hear is very lovely. In 
2017, Justice Thomas stayed at the resort with fellow guests 
from Verizon, the American Enterprise Institute, and 
PricewaterhouseCoopers, to name a few. In 2019, Justice Thomas 
flew on Harlan Crow's private jets and enjoyed 9 days of island 
hopping in Indonesia on Crow's 160-foot yacht, which I have 
never seen a yacht that large. I am sure it is very lovely. It 
came with servants and private chefs. If Justice Thomas had 
actually chartered that yacht himself, it would cost him half a 
million dollars.
    Now, Justice Thomas also accepted a $19,000 Bible from 
Harlan Crow, of course that once belonged to Frederick 
Douglass, apparently it must be the same Bible that the Justice 
is using to take away rights from women and gay people. Now, 
Harlan Crow's foundation also made an over $100,000 donation to 
Yale Law School for Justice Thomas' portrait fund. Now, Harlan 
Crow purchased Justice Thomas' family home and a property where 
Thomas' mother has lived rent free, and Thomas Crow also paid 
the boarding school tuition of Thomas' grandnephew, Harlan 
Crow, valued at over $100,000. So, the list, of course, goes on 
and on and on, and if this is not corruption, I mean, I do not 
know what is.
    Now, Professor Clark, I want to thank you for your 
testimony today. How was Justice Thomas able to accept these 
lavish gifts, and how is it possible that a sitting Supreme 
Court justice can take so much without scrutiny?
    Ms. Clark. Congressman Garcia, Supreme Court Justice Thomas 
has engaged in his practice of receiving these lavish gifts, as 
you outlined, and even more disturbing, in my view, is the fact 
that he failed to disclose those gifts or many of them. And he 
has gotten away with failing to disclose until these gifts and 
other inaccuracies were discovered by journalists or other non-
government organizations. So, there is a lack of----
    Mr. Garcia. And we are to assume that that Justice Thomas 
is trying to keep these things hidden from the public. I mean, 
he did not disclose his gifts. Is that your assessment?
    Ms. Clark. Yes, it is true that he did not disclose these 
gifts.
    Mr. Garcia. And so, what he chose not to disclose was 
traveling on lavish large yachts, was being treated to the best 
food, was traveling in Indonesia, was getting a $20,000 Bibles, 
was gifts to his favorite charities, and he chose to not 
disclose any of these information to the public. Is that 
correct?
    Ms. Clark. Congressman Garcia, I believe that the Bible may 
have been included on one of his financial----
    Mr. Garcia. Good for him. That is good for him.
    Ms. Clark. I think that everything else you mentioned, he 
did not disclose until a call to account.
    Mr. Garcia. Absolutely. And, of course, we know the issue, 
of course, is not just the gift themselves, but it is actually 
the disclosure process. Another issue is that some of these 
gifts have had connections to cases that have been in front of 
the Justice, himself, and so these are--and with other 
businesses was tied to Mr. Crow. Now, Republicans claimed to be 
concerned with outside money influencing the legal system but 
only when it hurts their corporate backers. When right-wing 
billionaires create conflicts of interest for the highest court 
in our country, they are completely silent. So, I look forward 
to the many hearings that we have on Clarence Thomas and the 
justices and their illegal gifts that they are receiving and 
not disclosing.
    Now, this is what happens when we combine big money donors 
with weak judicial ethics rules. We must do more to bolster the 
integrity of the Supreme Court. I want to thank Ms. Clark for 
your work in these efforts. Like all of us on our side of the 
aisle, we want to put the American people before corporations 
and put the Constitution above conflicts of interest. Thank 
you, and I yield back.
    Mr. Higgins. The gentleman yields. I recognize myself for 5 
minutes for questioning.
    Mr. Milito, I am going to be questioning you, but first Ms. 
Wein, may I suggest to you, ma'am, I would likely not be 
welcome on one of your boards, but let me just say I think that 
this should be solid advice regarding veterans and our elders: 
just give them the drugs that they need. I am talking about 
maybe 75 million Americans. Most of them do not use a lot of 
medicine, and most of that medicine is not super expensive. 
Just going to go on record saying this is common opinion of a 
regular American. Across the country, Big Pharma has challenges 
with reputation, hearings like this, and unending lawsuits, 
billions of dollars. Billion is a thousand million. You know, 
Americans cannot get their heads wrapped around that. And 
meanwhile, you got veterans, you got our elders, struggling to 
get drugs. Just give them what they need. You will find it to 
be a win.
    Mr. Milito, you are familiar with the Rice's whale 
situation?
    Mr. Milito. Yes, sir, I am.
    Mr. Higgins. I am going to be questioning you on that. 
America suffers from a toxic legal climate for industry and 
insured businesses. This is well-known, and litigation has a 
particular specialty of the modern era is weaponization of the 
executive branch against American citizens when you have 
Federal departments and agencies like the EPA, DOL, NOAA, 
working with activist organizations and recruiting and, in many 
cases, training plaintiffs and those plaintiffs file lawsuits 
and they sit back and wait for their settlements. There is 
quite a ruckus going out to the transportation industry, our 
airports, our maritime ports, oil and gas industry, agriculture 
industry, community banks and credit unions, trucking, rail, it 
is a growing racket, and it is disturbing.
    So, today's hearing is entitled, ``Unsuitable Litigation: 
Oversight of Third-Party Litigation Funding,'' and we are going 
to dive into something called Rice's whales regulation through 
litigation, as you refer to it, Mr. Milito. So, by background, 
early this year, a coalition of environmental protection groups 
filed a petition with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric 
Administration, NOAA, to establish a year-round 10-knot--that 
is about 11-and-a-half miles per hour--vessel speed restriction 
zone and other vessel-related mitigation measures in the Rice's 
whale core habitat area, which is a large swath of the Gulf of 
Mexico. So, for Americans watching, you are talking about 
whales that were essentially determined to use that area as a 
habitat a few years ago by NOAA. This is the major corridor for 
commerce in the Gulf of Mexico. You are talking about keeping 
vessels at under 10 knots, and talking about them not operating 
at all at night. It would be like a deathblow to American 
industry. You think inflation is bad now. If these rules go 
into effect, it is going to be exponentially worse.
    So, Mr. Milito, you stated that the agreement does two 
things: it removes millions of acres from the upcoming offshore 
lease and sale in Gulf of Mexico for oil and gas, and places 
new unwanted restriction on oil and gas activities in that 
region, and targets things like vessel speed. Explain to 
America, please, why this example of regulation through 
litigation is bad for every American.
    Mr. Milito. Right now, it is preventing our industry from 
being able to produce the energy that our country relies on for 
a high quality of life. It impacts jobs for everyone along the 
Gulf Coast and in states throughout the country that support 
that region, and it eliminates the ability for the government 
to get billions of dollars in funding for Land and Water 
Conservation Fund, urban parks and recreation, for coastal 
restoration, national parks, it has a huge impact on that. That 
is just a short term.
    In the long term, you are looking at an entire barrier put 
across the entire Gulf of Mexico, from the Texas and Mexico 
border all the way around to the Florida Keys where vessels are 
going to be impacted in a way that that whole region is going 
to have its commerce disrupted and that will ripple through the 
U.S. economy.
    Mr. Higgins. Thank you, sir, for that clarification. Ms. 
Wein, did you like to respond to my suggestion for your board?
    Ms. Wein. Congressman, thank you for the suggestion. 
Johnson & Johnson leads accessible and affordable healthcare as 
evidenced by the fact their net prices have declined for the 
past 6 years. I urge you to look at our 2022 transparency 
report that is available on our website, but I thank you for 
the comment.
    Mr. Higgins. Yes, ma'am, and thank you, and I urge you and 
your company to look at American veterans and elders through a 
special light. They are treasures for us. Let us take care of 
them. I yield. I yield, and I move to Ms. Lee from Pennsylvania 
is recognized for 5 minutes.
    Ms. Lee. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. While I am thrilled with 
any and all opportunities to talk about judicial ethics, I also 
find it very telling that my Republican colleagues only want to 
discuss that when corporate CEOs are the so called victims, not 
when dark money funded and fueled the overturning of Roe, or 
the rollback of LGBTQI+ protections, or the reverse of student 
loan relief and the end of race-conscious college admissions, 
not when it was revealed that two of our most right-wing 
Supreme Court Justices, Alito and Thomas, had been bought and 
paid for by billionaires like Harlan Crow, who among other 
things I will get to shortly, footed the bill for Justice 
Thomas' flights and private jets and lavish vacations, and not 
when the same dark money mega donors pushed radical, often 
unqualified judges onto the Federal bench, further eroding the 
legitimacy of our court system.
    We all know that wealthy right-wing donors have 
increasingly formed covert operations using money and 
relationships with powerful people in Washington to support 
strategic litigation for Republican cultural war causes, such 
as ending the acknowledgment of systemic racism in college 
admissions. One of these operations is Donors Trust, funded by 
a largely anonymous group of Republican mega donors, though it 
has been linked to major right-wing funders, such as the Koch 
brothers and Leonard Leo. Professor Clark, why do you think 
dark money organizations, such as Donors Trust, want to hide 
where their money is coming from, and do you think that is 
ethical?
    Ms. Clark. Congresswoman Lee, I believe that the record is 
rife with examples of wealthy trusts and institutions and 
foundations attempting to exercise influence and also 
attempting to hide their exercise of influence because the 
degree to which the public knows about it, there can be a 
backlash against it.
    Ms. Lee. So, throwing a stone and hiding your hand.
    Ms. Clark. There is, I believe, a long record of that.
    Ms. Lee. Thank you. According to their 2019 IRS filings, 
Students for Fair Admissions, the organization behind the end 
of affirmative action, received 65 percent of their funding 
from just three mega donors, including Donors Trust. Professor 
Clark, what are the ethical concerns of dark money groups, and 
do you think the affirmative action and student debt cases, for 
instance, ruled on this summer would have made it as far or 
been as successful without these donors?
    Ms. Clark. Congresswoman Lee, I believe that dark money and 
hidden financial influences on our political system and on our 
judicial system can undermine the ability of people at large to 
exercise their rights, participate. And so, while this is not a 
matter of legal ethics as such, I think that scrutiny of how 
hidden large expenditures influence our political system and 
judicial system is important.
    Ms. Lee. Thank you. In the last decade, billionaire hedge 
fund manager, Paul Singer, has contributed over $80 million to 
Republican political groups. Specifically, Singer gifted 
millions to the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank 
where he has served as chairman since 2008. The institute 
regularly files friend of the court amicus briefs with the 
Supreme Court, at least 15 this term, including one asking the 
Court to block student loan relief. Singer also gifted a luxury 
fishing trip to Alaska on a private jet to Supreme Court 
Justice Alito, who went on to decide the case blocking student 
loan relief for 40 million Americans, including me.
    So, to sum all this up, back in 2009, as the Supreme Court 
prepared to decide Citizens United, one Nazi-obsessed vacation 
funding billionaire named Harlan Crow began funding Federalist 
Society leader, Leonard Leo's, scheme with Justice Thomas' wife 
to exploit the anticipated outcome of her husband's rulings. 
Their goal was to build a right-wing money machine allowing 
billionaires to fund changes to the judiciary and overturn 
years of judicial rulings they disagreed with, from abortion to 
environmental protections to LGBTQIA+ rights.
    One of these Leo-and Koch-backed dark money operations, 
Donors Trust, then became the deep pockets, funding the end of 
affirmative action decided by the Court in July. And another 
billionaire hedge fund tycoon who flew another Supreme Court 
Justice Alito to another luxury vacation by another private jet 
as he gave to another conservative think tank working to block 
Biden's student loan forgiveness plan, got his way to the cases 
before the Supreme Court that same day in July, blocking debt 
relief for 40 million Americans.
    To conclude, I want to say, like so many Black Americans, 
the one-two punch of student loan forgiveness and burden of 
action designed to cement this country's already existing 
racial wealth gap left me feeling deflated, and they punch down 
on so much talent, so much brilliance by shutting Black 
students out, it leaves us feeling like we are running out of 
options. Like, we are powerless against those with endless 
money and power to rig our legal systems to benefit themselves. 
And yet, my Republican colleagues seem far more concerned with 
protecting Johnson & Johnson's ability to shield themselves 
against liability from their carcinogenic talcum powder that 
caused Black and Brown women to develop ovarian cancer than 
protecting the American people against the capture of our 
courts by dark money networks and the business of selling out 
our freedoms in exchange for control of our judiciary.
    Ms. Mace. [Presiding]. The gentlelady's time is up.
    Ms. Lee. Thank you, but someone went 23 seconds over the 
last----
    Ms. Mace. You sound great. I know you sound great. You 
sound great.
    Ms. Lee. Ms. Mace, but the last here went 23 seconds over.
    Ms. Mace. Forty-five seconds over time. You are fantastic. 
We are over. We are done here. We are moving on.
    Ms. Lee. Just used 15 of those seconds for me. I just want 
to make sure that we are fair.
    Ms. Mace. OK. I would like to recognize my fellow 
Congressman from South Carolina, Representative Timmons.
    Mr. Timmons. Thank you, Madam Chair. Professor Steinitz, 
litigation funders are waging litigation campaigns, even when 
there is, at least occasionally, no basis for liability. How 
are they able to make money if there is no factual basis for 
the lawsuit, and can you give us some examples of this?
    Ms. Steinitz. Well, in funding individual cases, there is 
generally no money to be made from funding non-meritorious 
cases or cases without a factual basis. But when cases are 
aggregated, either through the mass or class tort system or 
through portfolios, it is possible to increase profitability 
just by increasing the size of the pool, and it can be hard to 
figure out for defendants, how many of these cases are 
meritorious and which are not, and so that increases the 
leverage.
    Mr. Timmons. And that increases the potential liability 
and, therefore, increases the incentive to settle for some 
amount, regardless of the facts of the case?
    Ms. Steinitz. It increases leverage against defendants, 
yes.
    Mr. Timmons. So, the English law system has loser pays. A 
number of states have either adopted in part or in whole loser 
pay systems. Would it be reasonable for Congress to consider 
some sort of a loser pays model if certain thresholds are met?
    Ms. Steinitz. I think that loser pay would be an overkill, 
quite frankly.
    Mr. Timmons. I am not saying across the board. So, you 
would just be opposed to any kind of a loser pays model at the 
Federal level entirely?
    Ms. Steinitz. I would have to think more closely about 
whether there is a way to tailor it to mass actions where there 
is, you know, there has been a finding----
    Mr. Timmons. OK.
    Ms. Steinitz [continuing]. That funding has----
    Mr. Timmons. Does anybody else want to comment on loser 
pays as it relates to this or----
    Ms. Wein. Congressman, I think one thing that we have to 
keep in mind is in mass torts, we are not talking about class 
actions, right, or one decision affects the thousands of 
potentially similarly situated individuals. In mass tort 
litigations in the United States today, we are talking about 
tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of claims amassed by lawyer 
advertising backed by litigation funding, the majority of which 
are meritless, even if you accept the premise that there is the 
probable claim.
    Mr. Timmons. OK. Thank you for that. Could you give an 
estimate of the legal costs Johnson & Johnson typically 
incurred when defending against a mass tort claim, Ms. Wein?
    Ms. Wein. Congressman, it is a difficult question to 
answer, particularly because each claim is different in size 
and mass. However, we do publicly disclose that. I mean, we 
publicly disclose our litigation expenses in our public 
filings. The one thing that is very interesting about 
disclosure is that, in the litigation, defendants are required 
to disclose their insurance coverage under Rule 26. Plaintiff 
lawyers are not required to disclose their third-party 
litigation funding, so equity parody in that space is what we 
are talking about here. We are talking about transparency. We 
are talking about disclosure. We are talking about regulating 
the ethical and fiduciary obligation between the funder and 
ultimately the claimant.
    Mr. Timmons. What other avenues would you suggest Congress 
go down to curb the incentive structure for filing these 
claims?
    Ms. Wein. Congressman, I think there are a couple of areas 
to explore. The disclosure transparency, ethical obligations, 
and third-party litigation funding is one. The second I would 
recommend is some regulation around attorney advertising. There 
is data that shows that the attorney advertising that occurs, 
particularly with respect to medicines and medical devices 
harms patients, gets between the patient and doctor 
relationship and actually can cause immediate harm to patients 
when they see these advertisements and get scared.
    There was a New York Times article in 2018 that I would 
refer you to that talked about how plaintiff lawyers were 
contacting patients, and encouraging them to get revision 
surgeries of their medical devices regardless of whether they 
needed them or not to create that mass. Another example I would 
point you to is in an anticoagulant litigation, where reports 
were submitted to FDA and the drug sponsor, demonstrating that 
patients went off their anticoagulant medication because they 
saw lawyer ads on television. They went off that medication, 
and the immediate result of going off an anticoagulant is 
stroke or, unfortunately, death.
    Mr. Timmons. So, my understanding is the attorney fees 
structure on these cases are fairly aggressive. Is attorneys' 
fees structures an area that you would consider because, I 
mean, that is ultimately why they are pursuing these efforts 
because they can make enormous amounts of money if successful?
    Ms. Wein. Congressman, it is something that I think needs 
to be explored. If you think about the way mass torts are 
structured, ultimately what happens is a few cases are tried, 
but the thousands and thousands of cases that are not' tried 
but are parked in that litigation
    Mr. Timmons. I do not want to get in trouble. Time is up. 
Thank you.
    Ms. Wein. Understood.
    Mr. Timmons. I yield back.
    Ms. Mace. Thank you, Mr. Timmons. All right. I would like 
to recognize Congresswoman Crockett next for 5 minutes.
    Ms. Crockett. Thank you so much. I think my colleagues have 
made it clear that we have a corrupt Supreme Court, so I am 
going to spare you on that part. I do want to make sure that 
people understand how confused I have been in this hearing. No. 
1, it sounds like my colleagues from across the aisle are 
somehow believing in climate change now, so I am excited to 
hear this because I thought it was a farce and a hoax, but we 
are talking about renewables and we care, so that is really 
good that we got that going.
    Interestingly enough, I had the privilege or maybe not so 
much, when I started my legal career, my first job was to 
actually defend a large pharmaceutical company. I hated 
practicing law. I decided I needed to do something else. And 
so, most people only know me for doing civil rights or criminal 
defense or the things that really matter to individual people 
versus doing the bidding of large corporations. And so, I want 
to walk through this just a little bit and lawyer out a little 
bit because I am going to tell you from the onset, one of my 
issues with this whole concept is, No. 1, we have a little 
thing called attorney-client privilege.
    And, in my opinion, we are starting to get dangerously 
close to piercing that privilege, that relationship between the 
attorney and their client when you start saying, well, how are 
you funding this and things like that, because let us say I am 
using my own money. Fine. Let us say I am using a third party. 
Why is it that the opposition has the right to know what my 
strategy is, or why it is, or who is helping me to do what. 
That is No. 1.
    No. 2, if we are complaining about frivolous lawsuits, we 
have a thing called sanctions. For the lawyers here, has anyone 
heard of sanctions? Please raise your hand.
    [Hands raised.]
    Ms. Crockett. OK. Thank you. Have we heard of a thing 
called a 12(b)(6) motion? This is for anyone that practices on 
the Federal level, but it is a motion to dismiss. Unless you 
want to have a problem with your bar card, most defendants file 
a 12(b)(6) motion to dismiss for failure to state a claim very 
early on if there is a problem with litigation. Is that true or 
not? Can I get a raised hand?
    [Hand raised.]
    Ms. Crockett. OK. All right. Ms. Clark agrees with me. So, 
part of my issue was that we have certain mechanisms in place 
already, and the only thing that we have talked about, or 
seemingly one of the things that has been an overarching theme 
today, has been about the client advertisement, talking about 
the commercials, but the cost of actually prosecuting a case is 
more than a commercial. In fact, the commercial is not 
necessarily required from my experience. I have only been out 
of practice for a little less than a year now, but has anyone 
ever been involved in a lawsuit, same as Wein, where maybe an 
expert report was required?
    Ms. Wein. Congresswoman, in most of the cases----
    Ms. Crockett. Especially mass tort. Uh-huh.
    Ms. Wein [continuing]. Expert reports are required.
    Ms. Crockett. OK.
    Ms. Wein. The position in all mass tort cases today, 
millions, if not hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on 
advertising.
    Ms. Crockett. I hear you because you have made that clear, 
but the reality is that people use third-party financing for 
things other than just advertising, and let me be clear: it is 
not just going to affect Johnson & Johnson, who last time I 
checked is doing OK on their profits. But as I switch over and 
talk about my life as a civil rights lawyer, a lot of times you 
have a family who has someone who has potentially been killed 
by law enforcement. And a lot of times, we do not necessarily 
have the money to front for all the experts that are required 
just for you to have your day in court.
    And so, this has been couched as something frivolous.
    But if we want to be honest about it, it is my 
understanding that there was an $18.8 million verdict that was 
just handed down by a jury to a man in California against your 
corporation as it relates to talcum powder. That was just in 
July, I believe, of this year. And so, this idea that the 
third-party financing or seeing something on TV, somehow then 
validates the claim, they still have to go through court, they 
still have to have expert reports, they still have to have 
attorneys, they still have to make sure that they take 
depositions, they still have to go through the entire discovery 
process. And a lot of times, at least in my experience, when it 
comes to defense, you end up with so much paperwork that you 
may end up needing a doc review team to go through all of the 
paperwork that is thrown on a simple plaintiff that may not 
have a large law firm that is behind them.
    And so, what we are doing is saying if you have money, then 
you can access justice in this country, but if you do not have 
money, oh well, because we want to make sure that we know where 
your money is coming from, and that is just not fair. And the 
one thing that justice is supposed to be that, unfortunately, 
we still are trying to get to in this country, justice is 
supposed to be blind, and, unfortunately, I believe that this 
is the wrong venue. This is also the wrong body because we do 
have bar associations. We do have courts and judges that have 
the ability to issue sanctions. They have the ability to 
dismiss cases. And if we have some issues with the 
qualifications of judges, which I do, we know who we need to 
talk to about that as well. With that, I will yield.
    Ms. Mace. Thank you. I will now yield 5 minutes to 
Congressman Fry.
    Mr. Fry. Thank you, Madam Chair. Yes, aware, prior to 
Congress, I kind of have, I would say, an experience on both 
ends of this, right, both as a practicing lawyer and as a 
member of the General Assembly. From a practicing standpoint, I 
often saw times where a client or a prospective client might 
actually have a really great case in whatever they are doing, 
but they do not have the financial means in which to challenge 
or to get to a trial. You always quote a fee based on what you 
think it might cost to get to a trial because once you are in, 
it is oftentimes hard to get out as a lawyer if your client is 
not paying.
    On the flip side, in the statehouse, I saw times, in Ms. 
Mace's district as an example, where the state of South 
Carolina paid an environmental group $5 million not to 
challenge the dredging of the Port of Charleston. It was kind 
of a pre-suit agreement, and we have seen this a lot. We have 
seen where third parties, at least on the state policy side, 
where environmental groups will come in and challenge a permit 
for a road construction project or construction of a shopping 
mall, whatever the issue is, and in at least in South Carolina 
at that time, there were so many cases devoid of actual facts 
so that if they were tried that day, if everything was on the 
table, they would have not succeeded on the merits, but it is 
always the threat of litigation, the threat of the delays in a 
project that really concern me.
    And so, when we talk about third-party funding, you know, I 
am kind of struck. Where do we find that balance? Where we get 
rid of the B.S. that is out there and get to the merits of a 
case, but also preserving, quite frankly, a David versus 
Goliath type of mentality where you might have a great case and 
it needs to be litigated in the courts. And you probably will 
prevail on the merits, but the financial costs--I mean, 
sometimes trials or courts turn into a war of attrition, who 
has the most resources in which to succeed on the case.
    And so, to me, Ms. Steinitz, your testimony, you state that 
litigation funding is a utility, and it can be used or abused, 
depending on the context. Do you believe that there is a line 
that can be drawn around third-party funding, and if so, where 
might that be?
    Ms. Steinitz. Well, there are a bundle of issues with 
respect to litigation funding. So, one issue is disclosure, and 
that has to be context-specific, and it may be best to empower 
but also leave it to judges to tailor it to the specific 
context. There are issues with plaintiffs losing control, and 
that requires imposing ethical obligations on funders so that 
we have a realignment such that clients have the----
    Ms. Mace. Can you speak into the microphone, please? We 
cannot hear you.
    Ms. Steinitz. Yes, then I cannot see the Congressman, but 
yes. So, that we have a realignment that we had before third-
party funding entered into the space, so that whoever is on the 
plaintiff side, lawyer and funding, has ethical obligations 
toward the party that they are funding, so that is another 
issue. So, there are multiple issues that would need to be 
addressed.
    Mr. Fry. On the ethical thing, just curious. Do you think 
that those exist right now on the defense side? So, on the 
defense side, oftentimes you see maybe the insurance company 
come in. Do you think that their standards are very different 
than the plaintiffs' world?
    Ms. Steinitz. Yes, their standards are very different. The 
insurance industry is heavily regulated, including through 
ethics and in certain circumstances fiduciary duties, and there 
is nothing equivalent to that on the plaintiff side.
    Mr. Fry. You have proposed for both legislators and courts 
that there needs to be kind of flexible, discretionary 
balancing test. Can you expand on that, what you mean by that?
    Ms. Steinitz. Yes, with respect to disclosure because 
disclosure can be a valuable tool to sort of understanding 
whether there is problems in terms of who is providing the 
funding or under what terms in some instances, but in other 
instances, disclosure can be used just for tactical reasons, in 
order to make it more difficult for plaintiffs to pursue their 
case and figure out how much funding they have to just spend 
that money down. And so, it is very hard, and, in fact, 
impossible to just draw a clear line that would be applicable 
and fair in all cases. So, it is best to let judges and empower 
judges to balance the various private and public interests of 
all of the litigants and the court system with respect to the 
type of case that is before them.
    Mr. Fry. Thank you, Ms. Wein--is it Wein or Wein?
    Ms. Wein. It is Wein, Congressman.
    Mr. Fry. Wein. Thank you. I want to ask you a question. Can 
you elaborate on the types of control that third parties often 
exert over the direction of a case?
    Ms. Wein. Congressman, it is hard to tell you the answer to 
that question because we do not generally have access to the 
contracts that set forth those control provisions. But what I 
would say, in the interest of time, I direct you to the Cisco 
v. Burford case, which gives us some insight, the IMF Bentham 
best practices guide, the White Lily case, the Bolling case, 
those give us some insight into the control that can be 
exerted.
    Mr. Fry. Thank you, Madam Chair, and with that, I yield my 
time.
    Ms. Mace. Thank you. I would now like to yield 5 minutes to 
my friend across the aisle, Mr. Moskowitz.
    Mr. Moskowitz. Thank you, Madam Chair. I appreciate it, and 
it is a pleasure to be here at this lovely filler hearing. It 
has not gone, I do not think, exactly as my colleagues thought 
it would go.
    You know, sometimes when I sit here, I often think to 
myself, who is in the room when these things get planned out 
and let us decide who we are going to call. Like, I do not 
know, let me find some sympathetic people to bring to this 
hearing today. Let me find a giant bankrupt corporation. Let me 
find an oil guy to talk about the Gulf of Mexico 12 times and 
how our national parks are getting better because of the Gulf 
of Mexico, not really during the BP oil spill, but we will not 
go into that.
    I mean, we talk about judicial activism. I mean, I just I 
often think to myself, like, was it not judicial activism when 
we had a judge meet with U.S. Senators, and say privately that 
Roe v. Wade was precedent on precedent, and then go in front of 
the Senate, under oath, and say the same thing, and then in 
their very first time, right, take back a law that had been 
there for 50 years. That is not judicial activism.
    And by the way, it would be an anomaly except that did not 
happen once. It happened twice. Two judges, appointed by Donald 
Trump that went and met with Senators and said Roe v. Wade was 
precedent on precedent, and then went in front of the Senate 
under oath and said the same thing and then get on the Court, 
and in their very first couple of years, what do they do? They 
get rid of a law that had been there for 50 years.
    And so, listen, I am more than happy to listen to the cries 
of judicial activism, but we can no longer sit here and just 
pick when we like it and when we do not because it fits the 
politics of our time or the narrative that we are interested 
in. We sit here and we hear about transparency. We want 
judicial transparency. I mean, it is almost like when this 
hearing was decided, maybe it was so long ago now that it was 
not in the news. I mean, boy, judicial transparency is really 
timely.
    So, yes, thank you for bringing that forward about 
transparency in the legal system. I am not sure that the 
American people are wondering about third-party litigation 
funding, but they are definitely worried about transparency 
with the highest court in the land where there is no remedy 
when you have ethical violations other than impeaching a judge 
and the Senate.
    And so, listen, we should do a whole hearing on judicial 
transparency because I think it is timely. I think the American 
people want to hear about it. You know, it is just fascinating 
to me as we continue to sit in these hearings in Oversight. I 
mean, we have had 9 months of hearings on a very specific 
topic. Those have gone so well. We are going to rebrand those 
hearings and hit the video game reset button, start all over 
again, right? I mean, it is just interesting. We sit here, we 
hear our colleagues bring up certain things like, oh, the Biden 
family took money from a foreign entity, right? And it is just 
like, well, really? I mean, do they really not know that Jared 
Kushner took $2 billion from the Saudis? I mean, by the way, 
they go on Twitter and blame the Saudis for 9/11. But, then 
Jared Kushner, who, by the way, was not a wealth expert before 
he worked in the White House, nor was he a Middle East expert 
before he worked there, gets $2 billion from the Saudis, and 
they do not have any questions.
    And I just think that the American people recognize that 
they have no credibility. It is why the stuff they have been 
selling in this Committee for 9 months has not translated, 
which is why we have got to start all over again. You do not 
have any credibility when you only want to look at one side of 
the coin, right?
    And so, listen, I appreciate the time, Madam Chairwoman, 
but I just feel like I am not going to beat up on you guys 
anymore. I think that it has been quite obvious the way this 
hearing has gone, and so I want to thank all the witnesses for 
coming today. It is probably not what you bargained for, what 
they told you this would be like, but I appreciate you all for 
coming, and I yield back.
    Ms. Mace. Thank you. I appreciate that, and I will now 
recognize myself for 5 minutes. It has been an interesting 
hearing. You know, it has been a race of how many times can you 
say the word ``Donald Trump.'' It is just Trump this, Trump 
that, Harlan Crow this, Harlan Crow that, Justice Thomas, and 
then then we just heard the Kushner. You know, if the left 
wanted to investigate Jared Kushner, they had the White House, 
the House, and the Senate, they had every ability to do that in 
the last Congress, and they chose not to, so I have very little 
patience for that.
    And you know, how many times is the left going to talk 
about dark money? Well, let me tell you, Joe Biden is the 
definition of dark money. How much money did his family get 
paid off, and how are his bills paid? And we are not starting 
over with an impeachment inquiry, and impeachment inquiry 
actually expands our subpoena power and will allow us to 
hopefully get more access to more bank records to prove out the 
SARS report, which we are not allowed to share. That is the 
elephant in the room. Joe Biden got bribed, and it was to the 
tune of millions and millions of dollars, and the left wants to 
normalize the bullshit of bribery. Like, I just cannot get over 
the fact that we are going to normalize this, and we are 
calling Joe Biden's bribery, ``a specific topic.'' No, it is 
bribery. It is money laundering, it is prostitution rings, and 
I am not a conspiracy theorist for putting these theories out 
there.
    Our investigation, there is evidence and it is not, you 
know, hard evidence is what they are saying now. They are 
moving the goalposts from, oh, we just need evidence. Now, oh, 
you need hard evidence. You do not have it. There are texts, 
there are emails, there are phone calls. There are lies that 
Joe Biden has told. Every single time the President has been 
asked about these bribery allegations, that guy has lied to the 
American people. He has lied to the mainstream media, and the 
mainstream media and the left just want to sweep this under the 
rug and pretend it has not happened, and it has, and this 
Committee will continue its investigation.
    We will have the impeachment inquiry, and we will 
ultimately get to the bottom of it because the American people 
deserve the truth and nothing but the truth, and you should not 
trust our words of Congress up here. Trust the evidence that 
has come out. Look at it for yourself. Look at the fact that 
there were over 50 intel officers that wrote a letter, put it 
on paper, and lied to the American people to tell you the 
laptop was fake. The laptop was real, and, like, I am just 
tired of the bullshit. I know the American people are tired of 
the bullshit. It is time to tell the American people the truth, 
no matter your political affiliation or party. It does not 
matter.
    And so, I wish that we could be nonpartisan in the way that 
we do this. I wish that we could call out both sides. I am 
someone who has called out my party. I have voted to hold my 
own party in contempt before Congress. I have dealt with the 
fallout from that because I am calling the balls and strikes, 
and it would be really great if both sides of the aisle could 
do the same thing as well.
    So, with that, I will try to get back on topic here and ask 
a few questions of our witnesses today, and I will try to pull 
them up. I want to talk about EVs just a little bit. In 
Charleston, South Carolina, low country in South Carolina, we 
rely on fossil fuels for vehicles. We also rely on electric 
vehicles. I have both. And my first question I would like to 
ask Ms. Lucas is that EVs require 6 times more critical 
minerals than their internal combustion engine counterparts. 
Due to skyrocketing global demand for these resources, the 
prices of components necessary to produce an EV battery rose 
200 percent in 2022. So, if domestic mining projects are halted 
due to ongoing litigation, which is happening, you know, how 
will this impact the prices of vehicles for consumers looking 
to purchase an EV, in your opinion?
    Ms. Lucas. Every mile that those minerals have to travel is 
extra cost. Every mile that those minerals have to travel is 
extra CO2 into the atmosphere, so the cost is not' just about 
what we as consumers pay.
    Ms. Mace. Uh-huh.
    Ms. Lucas. The cost is what our conscience pays as to who 
is digging those minerals up out of the ground and what 
protections are in place. The true cost of our consumerism: it 
is not as simple as the cost of the vehicle.
    Ms. Mace. And then your critical minerals are used in 
infrastructure projects as well as, like, electrical 
transmission lines. How could increase mineral prices impact 
electricity prices for consumers?
    Ms. Lucas. As we look at transitioning our Nation to one 
powered more by clean energy, the solar panels and the 
windmills are going to be put in places where the energy is not 
necessarily being used. So, we are going to have to increase 
transmission lines across our country, and copper is the metal 
of electrification. It is the one that carries, so we can 
expect that those costs will increase as we need to bring in 
more of those minerals into the supply chain.
    Ms. Mace. All right. Thank you, and one last note of 
business. I would like to say thank you to the many groups and 
organizations that reached out in anticipation of this hearing 
today with letters outlining their stances on the issue. I 
would like to enter into the record letters to the Committee 
from the American Tort Reform Association, American Property 
Casualty Insurance Association, the Advanced Medical Technology 
Association, the Institute for Legal Reform, the International 
Legal Finance Association, National Association of 
Manufacturers, Jerry Theodorou at the R Street Institute.
    Without objection, so ordered.
    Ms. Mace. All right. OK, I would now like to yield 5 
minutes to Ms. Ocasio-Cortez.
    Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. Thank you, and I thank you for the 
listing of all the special interests involved in addition in 
this hearing.
    Now, when I first heard that the Republican side was going 
to be calling a hearing on third-party influence in our courts, 
I was so excited because I thought, finally, we are going to 
address the biggest scandal in American democracy that we are 
currently having right now, which is the extraordinary 
corruption and wholesale purchase of members of the Supreme 
Court. And I also find it amusing that we just heard from the 
Republican side, oh, why do we want to talk about this? Because 
women have lost the right to choose, because indigenous people 
have lost rights, because minorities have lost rights, because 
working people across the country have lost rights due to this 
level of corruption.
    And if we are going to talk about third parties, let us 
talk about the Federalist Society, which has not only had deep 
ties to Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife Ginni, but has 
also helped choose judicial nominees for the Republican Party 
and directed multimillion dollar media campaigns to confirm 
them, including a multimillion dollar media campaign for 
Justice Alito, who seems to like using the Wall Street Journal 
as his personal press secretary, but I want to dig into a 
little bit about the influence here.
    In 2008, Leonard Leo, who has ties to the Federalist 
Society, also organized a luxury fishing trip to Alaska 
inviting a billionaire to join, Paul Singer, and when Paul 
Singer accepted, Leo asked if he could fly Justice Alito on his 
private jet to Alaska. So, right here is Paul Singer, a 
multibillionaire, and a head of a hedge fund, works in hedge 
funds, and here is Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, a/k/a 
one of the justices turning over student loan cancellation and 
turning over women's rights to choose over their own body and 
more. Now, Professor Clark, are you familiar with 5 U.S. Code 
13104?
    Ms. Clark. I am so sorry, 5 USC 131----
    Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. Zero-four.
    Ms. Clark. Is that the new codification of the Ethics in 
Government Act?
    Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. Yes. It is specifically on, and it 
requires reporting and disclosure requirements to government 
officials, yes.
    Ms. Clark. Yes.
    Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. And I am going to draw attention to 
13104 (A)(2)A. This section requires disclosure of the identity 
of the source, a brief description and a value of all gifts 
exceeding minimum value. Professor Clark, are you aware how 
much the minimum value of gifts was in 2008?
    Ms. Clark. I would guess it would be about $400.
    Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. Yes, a little bit under, $335 as the 
amount of gifts in gifts that Supreme Court justices are 
allowed to receive, which is actually balling compared to 
Members of Congress, we only are allowed to receive gifts under 
$50. So, the Supreme Court, you can give them free air pods, 
you can give them really nice dinners, and they do not have to 
report any of that. But so we are clear, any gifts above that 
do need to be disclosed, correct?
    Ms. Clark. Correct.
    Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. Yet, according to ProPublica's 
reporting, Justice Alito was flown on a private jet on this 
luxury trip, and if he had chartered a similar jet, it would 
have cost more than $100,000 each way, a 100 grand. Now, 
Professor Clark with the cost of about $100,000 per flight, 
would Justice Scalia be required to disclose this trip?
    Ms. Clark. I believe you are referring to Justice Alito.
    Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. Alito, yes.
    Ms. Clark. Under the Ethics in Government Act, disclosure 
would be required.
    Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. And did he?
    Ms. Clark. My understanding is that he did not.
    Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. He did not. So, we have a billionaire 
who runs a hedge fund with business before the court. In fact, 
we saw several cases before the court, and on top of that, he 
also had 3 days at a luxury retreat, which would charge over 
$1,000 a night, and he did not disclose that either.
    Now, in the years since we have actually seen the 
billionaire who generously sponsored this trip, Paul Singer did 
business before the court at least 10 times in cases where the 
legal press and mainstream media often covered his role. So, it 
was publicly known that he had business before the court, and 
in 2014, in fact, Justice Samuel Alito, along with the Court, 
agreed to resolve a vital issue in a decade's long battle 
between Singer's hedge fund and the Nation of Argentina. And do 
you know if Alito recused himself from this case?
    Ms. Clark. I believe he did not.
    Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. He did not recuse himself from this 
case. And in fact, he used his seat on the Supreme Court, after 
all of this, to rule in Singer's favor and following the 
decision, Mr. Singer's hedge fund was ultimately paid $2.4 
billion because of this ruling, not a bad return on investment 
for a fishing trip there. Now, Professor Clark, would a Federal 
judge in a lower court be required to recuse himself?
    Mr. Fry. [Presiding.] The gentlelady's time has expired. 
The gentlelady's time has expired.
    Ms. Clark. May I answer the question sir?
    Mr. Fry. I think at the discretion of the Chair, yes, you 
can answer the question.
    Ms. Clark. Thank you, sir. Yes, there is a Federal statute. 
I believe it is 28 USC 455 that does require recusal by both 
justices and judges under certain circumstances.
    Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. Thank you, and I yield back.
    Mr. Fry. Thank you. The Chair now recognizes the gentleman 
from Tennessee Mr. Burchett for 5 minutes.
    Mr. Burchett. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Professor Steinitz, 
did I get that right, ma'am? Is your mic turned on?
    Ms. Steinitz. Yes, sir.
    Mr. Burchett. OK, thank you. Do not call me sir, ma'am. You 
are fine. Got to call these other knuckleheads sir and ma'am. 
Just, I am good with Tim. Thank you. Are there Federal laws 
that are requiring the disclosure of third-party litigation 
financing?
    Ms. Steinitz. Currently, there are no laws that directly 
require that, no.
    Mr. Burchett. Do you know the total number of litigation 
investors operate in the U.S.?
    Ms. Steinitz. No, the total number is not known.
    Mr. Burchett. OK. Do you generally know the rate of return 
for these investors?
    Ms. Steinitz. No. That is also private information.
    Mr. Burchett. OK. Do you know the total amount of funding 
in the third-party litigation financing industry?
    Ms. Steinitz. There are only estimates.
    Mr. Burchett. Just estimates?
    Ms. Steinitz. Correct.
    Mr. Burchett. Would you share some of those estimates with 
us? I am not a lawyer. I know there is a word for it. I have 
seen it on television, but I am guessing or something. I am not 
guessing, but all right. Well, Professor, let me ask you this. 
Have you heard of a company called Burford Capital?
    Ms. Steinitz. I have, yes.
    Mr. Burchett. Yes, ma'am. Are you aware that in 2018 
Burford Capital reached an agreement with a sovereign wealth 
fund to provide over $1 billion in capital for Burford's 
litigation investments?
    Ms. Steinitz. I have seen a press release. Yes.
    Mr. Burchett. So, what these folks do, is they just invest 
in these things and hoping for a return obviously?
    Ms. Steinitz. Correct.
    Mr. Burchett. Yes, ma'am. So foreign countries can fund 
U.S. litigation.
    Ms. Steinitz. They can invest in third-party funders that 
invest in litigation in the U.S., yes.
    Mr. Burchett. Yes, ma'am. So, would this mean that foreign 
adversaries and other bad actors could potentially exploit our 
litigation system to advance their home industries?
    Ms. Steinitz. Potentially, yes.
    Mr. Burchett. Could litigation funded by foreign 
adversaries potentially delay technology critical to national 
security?
    Ms. Steinitz. Potentially, yes.
    Mr. Burchett. Could third-party litigation funding 
potentially allow foreign adversaries to access privileged 
information?
    Ms. Steinitz. Potentially, yes.
    Mr. Burchett. Without Federal litigation or regulations, 
excuse me, is it possible to determine the extent to which non-
U.S. persons or entities are engaged in third-party litigation 
funding?
    Ms. Steinitz. No, without regulation, there is no way to do 
so.
    Mr. Burchett. OK. OK, Professor, let me ask you this. Are 
you aware in 2018, that the Biden Administration settled a 
lawsuit with Sierra Club and other environmental groups that 
sued the National Marine Fishery Service?
    Ms. Steinitz. I am not familiar with that, no.
    Mr. Burchett. OK. Do you know who pays when the government 
settles a lawsuit with a plaintiff?
    Ms. Steinitz. The taxpayer.
    Mr. Burchett. The taxpayers. Yes, ma'am. Thank you. See, 
that is what is called a leading question, if you did not know 
that. I do know that. In cases where a plaintiff successfully 
sues the government, who pays the judgment?
    Ms. Steinitz. Successfully sues the government, the 
taxpayer ultimately.
    Mr. Burchett. Yes, ma'am. So, foreign adversaries and other 
bad actors could fund litigation threatening national security, 
and then have it paid off by the American taxpayer?
    Ms. Steinitz. If they are litigating, or funding litigation 
against the U.S. Government, yes.
    Mr. Burchett. OK. Ms. Lucas, you are an environmental 
scientist, is that correct?
    Ms. Lucas. Water resources, sir.
    Mr. Burchett. OK. But you would consider yourself a 
scientist?
    Ms. Lucas. Yes.
    Mr. Burchett. All right, good. Do you have concerns that 
some of the financiers of these lawsuits, especially those that 
claim to litigate in the name of climate justice could actually 
be negatively impacting the environment in the long run?
    Ms. Lucas. That is one of my concerns that we will not get 
up to speed in time to meet our goals of the Paris Agreement. 
We will not meet our goals for the U.S., and we will not meet 
our goals internally for our state that is set 100 percent 
clean energy goal by 2040.
    Mr. Burchett. OK.
    Ms. Lucas. We need minerals to build those materials.
    Mr. Burchett. All right. Ms. Wein, yes, I get that name 
right? Wein or Wine?
    Ms. Wein. It is Wein.
    Mr. Burchett. Wein. Ms. Wein, what would be the long-term 
impacts of our economy if this broad network of activists went 
unchecked? And its billions of dollars spent annually were not 
disclosed?
    Ms. Wein. Congressman, I think we are seeing it now, right, 
we are seeing the amassing of litigation of unmeritorious 
claims resulting in multibillion dollar settlements, money that 
could be used to further innovation, funds that could be used 
to further science, funds in our case that could be used to 
change health for humanity, which is what the thousands of 
people employed by Johnson & Johnson try to do every day.
    Mr. Burchett. OK. Thank you, ma'am. Thank you, panelists, 
Mr. Chairman.
    Mr. Fry. Thank you, sir. The Chair now recognizes Ms. 
Porter from California for 5 minutes.
    Ms. Porter. Thank you very much. Ms. Wein, in your 
testimony, you describe some of the hardships of this kind of 
litigation onto a company like Johnson & Johnson. Would you say 
that these kinds of mass tort claims are expensive to defend?
    Ms. Wein. Yes, Congresswoman.
    Ms. Porter. And to the tune of maybe even tens of millions 
of dollars, $10 million to $20 million a month in expenses?
    Ms. Wein. It is hard to say, each one is different.
    Ms. Porter. But millions.
    Ms. Wein. Yes, Congresswoman.
    Ms. Porter. Has it had an effect on Johnson & Johnson's 
overarching financial position, its stock price, its bottom 
line, its ability to invest in lifesaving R&D, for example?
    Ms. Wein. Congresswoman, every expense has an impact, and 
so while I cannot quantify it for you right now, it does have 
an impact.
    Ms. Porter. Johnson & Johnson, in its public security 
filings in 2019, disclosed $1.2 billion in loans and notes 
payable, normal debt. In 2020, it disclosed $2.6 billion, 
almost double, more than double. In 2023, that amount had 
jumped to $11.7 billion. So, Johnson & Johnson is taking on 
more loans over time, or notes or debt over time. Has any of 
that been all driven or related to the expenses, the incredible 
hardship that you describe of defending against these claims?
    Ms. Wein. Congresswoman, while I could not specifically 
answer that question for you, I think it is interesting to note 
that we disclose our expenses, we disclose our source of 
revenue. The difference between third-party litigation funding 
and the defense of these cases is that there are no disclosure 
requirements there. There is no transparency there.
    Ms. Porter. So, Ms. Wein, Johnson & Johnson discloses the 
names and terms and details of its loans?
    Ms. Wein. Congresswoman, that is not what I said. I said 
that we make our public disclosures as required by the SEC 
rules. You----
    Ms. Porter. All you disclose is the amount of a debt. You 
do not give any details about the names and terms. I mean, 
Johnson & Johnson backed LTL in the subsidiary that it created 
to the tune of a $61 million funding agreement that J&J, when 
it did the Texas two-step and split it into two companies, one 
with the assets and one with the liabilities. You entered into 
a $61 million funding agreement. Did you disclose the terms of 
that?
    Ms. Wein. Congresswoman----
    Ms. Porter. LTL was in bankruptcy.
    Ms. Wein. Correct.
    Ms. Porter. LTL's funding was coming from J&J. Did you 
disclose the terms of the $61 million funding agreement?
    Ms. Wein. Congresswoman, unfortunately, I do not have an 
answer to that question for you right now. I am happy to take 
it back.
    Ms. Porter. Haven't J&J lawyers insisted that the sworn 
deposition testimony about that financing agreement be deemed 
confidential? Haven't they argued that to Judge Kaplan in New 
Jersey and the bankruptcy court that LTL management your 
subsidiary's funding and financing for the purpose of defeating 
this litigation must be kept confidential, even as you sit here 
today, and try to tell us that the plaintiff should have to 
disclose all of the details of their financing?
    Ms. Wein. Congresswoman, respectfully, I think that we are 
talking past each other. I think those are two different 
things.
    Ms. Porter. Why?
    Ms. Wein. Funding agreement related to the structure of 
bankruptcy, as I understand it, we are talking about----
    Ms. Porter. Excuse me, Ms. Wein. The bankruptcy only exists 
and LTL management as a company only exists as a response to 
the talc litigation. It did not exist until you tried to defend 
against the talc lawsuits. J&J was the third-party funder of 
the LTL company that went into bankruptcy to deal with the talc 
claims. Your company argued in court that those should be 
confidential, and yet you want the other side, the plaintiff 
side, to have to disclose all of their funding. I think that is 
hypocritical. I think it is the same.
    Ms. Wein. Congresswoman, respectfully, I disagree. I do not 
think it is the same.
    Ms. Porter. Why?
    Ms. Wein. Because as I explained previously, one has to do 
with the filing of bankruptcy and the funding agreement related 
there too. The other has to do with the pursuit of a third-
party litigation funding that is intended----
    Ms. Porter. Pursuant to the bankruptcy, J&J was a different 
entity than LTL. That was your choice. That was your 
structuring choice to split those companies and create two 
separate entities, which made J&J a third-party funder of the 
LTL litigation.
    Ms. Wein. Congresswoman, respectfully, I disagree. It 
related to the filing of the bankruptcy plan.
    Ms. Porter. OK. I yield back.
    Mr. Fry. The gentlelady yields. The Chair now recognizes 
the gentlelady from Colorado, Mrs. Boebert, for 5 minutes.
    Mrs. Boebert. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you to our 
witnesses who have joined us today. Ms. Clark, in your 
testimony, you agree that third-party litigation funding does 
pose ethical risks, such as conflicts of interest, correct?
    Ms. Clark. Correct.
    Mrs. Boebert. Fantastic. Then why did you spend most of the 
time off-topic discussing the ``ethics crisis'' currently 
facing the Supreme Court?
    Ms. Clark. Congresswoman Boebert, I believe that relative 
to the ethics challenges in the third-party litigation funding 
context, the crisis, the ethics crisis at the Supreme Court----
    Mrs. Boebert. Yes, yes.
    Ms. Clark [continuing]. Is much more grave and----
    Mrs. Boebert. OK. So----
    Ms. Clark [continuing]. Significant.
    Mrs. Boebert. Thank you, Ms. Clark. What really it sounds 
like is an ethical concern to me is the constant wave of 
frivolous litigation from environmental extremists that deprive 
communities of employment opportunities, improvements to 
outdated infrastructure, cheaper products, corporate tax 
revenue, and economic certainty. So now, Ms. Clark, are you 
familiar with Earth Rights International?
    Ms. Clark. I am not.
    Mrs. Boebert. ERI is representing Boulder County in a 
lawsuit against ExxonMobil and Suncor Energy to ``recover the 
costs associated with climate change impacts.'' Now, would you 
happen to know who might fund Earth Rights International? Not 
knowing of the group maybe you do not' know exactly who funds 
this group.
    Ms. Clark. Correct.
    Mrs. Boebert. Correct. So, ERI is funded by several wealthy 
anti-oil and gas funds, including George Soros' Open Society 
Foundations, the Rockefeller Family Fund, the Rockefeller 
Brothers Fund, and the Tides Foundation. In this lawsuit, 
specifically in Boulder County, the Rockefellers have provided 
direct funding to the lawyers in this case, another outside 
organization, supporting the plaintiffs received a $200,000 
grant from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund less than 2 months 
before the lawsuit was filed. Ms. Clark, do you find it at all 
concerning that these extreme environmental groups are 
attempting to circumvent this body by legislating via lawsuit?
    Ms. Clark. Any time a third-party has a financial 
arrangement to finance legal fees, there is a potential for 
conflict of interest and there are rules to address it, but 
beyond that, I am not familiar with this particular group.
    Mrs. Boebert. So, I would see this as them attempting to 
circumvent this very body just via lawsuit and our legislative 
process. In this Soros funded lawsuit, ERI is making a baseless 
claim that oil companies are responsible for the destructive 
wildfires ravaging across my home state without a single 
mention of the several wilderness area designations.
    Now, a wilderness area designation that prevents us from 
actually managing our forests, and it makes it impossible, in 
fact, to actively manage that land. These policy decisions are 
debated and discussed by experts and congressional committees, 
which Democrats and Republicans agree we need to actively 
manage our forests. And that is why the founders gave this 
authority to Congress, not the Rockefeller families, to sue job 
creators, to shut down operations that will only hold up 
critical energy development projects for years, especially in 
my state. Increased project costs contribute to skyrocketing 
gas prices and discourages future development, where my 
communities that I represent in Colorado's 3d District are 
literally being regulated into poverty because of these 
extremist environmentalist groups and their lawsuits that are 
circumventing our job here in Congress. Now, Ms. Clark, do you 
know how many jobs depend on the survival of the oil and gas 
industry?
    Ms. Clark. I do not.
    Mrs. Boebert. The oil and gas sector supports 69,000 direct 
jobs and 271,000 indirect jobs in my home state of Colorado. 
These are very good jobs. They are good-paying jobs, and out 
West, George Soros and the Rockefeller families are trying to 
destroy, in an attempt to legislate through the courts. This is 
a huge problem, and if they fail, at least they can go home as 
winners with a taxpayer-funded settlement. Do you know how much 
money Federal Government agencies spend settling these 
ridiculous lawsuits?
    Ms. Clark. May I answer?
    Mr. Fry. Yes, you can.
    Ms. Clark. I do not know.
    Mrs. Boebert. So, former Director Ash testified that the 
Agency spent approximately 75 percent of its listing program 
budget on ``substantive actions required by court orders or 
settlement agreements from litigation.'' Seventy-five percent. 
Now, that sounds like a very real ethics crisis to me, Ms. 
Clark. Mr. Chairman, I yield. Thank you.
    Mr. Fry. Thank you. Pursuant to the previous order, the 
Chair declares the Committee in recess, subject to the call of 
the Chair. We plan to reconvene 10 minutes after votes.
    The Committee stands in recess.
    [Recess.]
    Mr. Grothman. [Presiding.] The Committee will come to 
order. Mr. Goldman.
    Mr. Goldman. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I thank our 
witnesses for being here.
    Before I dive into some of the issues that we have been 
called here to discuss today, I want to respond to my friend 
and colleague from South Carolina and some of her allegations 
and statements that she made about the so-called impeachment 
inquiry. I believe that she stated that Joe Biden got bribes, 
committed money laundering, and engaged in a prostitution ring. 
She says there are texts, emails, and phone calls, but then she 
says that we should trust the evidence itself. And with that, I 
agree because the evidence itself shows absolutely no 
connection between Joe Biden and any of those allegations.
    So, we are now entering into what is so-called an 
impeachment inquiry, ostensibly because the Republicans say 
they need more information, and that somehow, by the Speaker of 
the House unilaterally declaring an investigation, an 
impeachment inquiry, that changes this Committee's authority. 
It does not. This Committee has been investigating these 
allegations for more than 8 months. This Committee of House 
Republicans have obtained more than 12,000 documents, pages of 
bank records, more than 2,000 suspicious activity reports, 
numerous hours of witness testimony, texts, emails, and the 
problem they have is not that they cannot get the evidence. The 
problem they have is that the evidence does not support their 
allegations.
    And so, why are we going to spend the next few months on a 
bogus and sham impeachment inquiry? Because Donald Trump wants 
them to, and Donald Trump has been calling them and urging them 
to do it because he was impeached twice. One of those 
impeachments of Donald Trump was because he tried to extort the 
President of Ukraine to investigate Hunter Biden. The President 
of Ukraine refused. Unfortunately, House Republicans do not 
have the spine that President Zelenskyy has, and they are now 
doing Donald Trump's bidding.
    Let me move on to the topic today, and I know that my 
colleagues would like to narrowly focus this hearing on their 
sudden grave concerns about third-party litigation funding. 
That is right. My Republican colleagues are having a hearing to 
criticize and restrict the free market from investing in 
litigation. Well, how could that possibly be that the party of 
free markets would want to restrict the free market? Well, I 
know why. Because big corporations and special interests do not 
like the fact that independent investors can support litigation 
that otherwise would not be able to be brought because of the 
expense.
    And I also find it ironic that Republicans are criticizing 
third-party funding in legal proceedings, when they themselves 
have engaged in the same kind of third-party funding.
    And I would like to ask unanimous consent to introduce for 
the record an article entitled, ``FBI Whistleblowers Admit 
Taking Money from Ex-Trump Official.''
    Mr. Grothman. We will take that.
    Mr. Goldman. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Now, it is no 
surprise that the Republicans are doing the bidding of the same 
special interests who have been spending massive amounts of 
dark money to control the Supreme Court. But the odd thing is 
that we are here talking about the ethical issues of third-
party litigation funding, and not the ethical issues in the 
Supreme Court.
    In June, I led a letter of 18 former prosecutors and law 
enforcement officials, urging the Chief Justice to abide by his 
own declaration that he would take care of these ethics 
concerns and saying that if he were to do that, appropriately, 
and seriously, he would first have to establish an independent 
investigative body within the court that can provide 
transparency and accountability, and, two, that he would have 
to establish a dedicated ethics council to provide advice to 
the justices on their ethical issues.
    Unfortunately, his response to that letter just simply 
thanked me for writing it, and that is not good enough. And so 
my time is up, but I would urge my colleagues on the other side 
of the aisle who ostensibly are concerned with ethics that they 
hold a hearing on the dramatic and absurd ethical lapses of 
Supreme Court Justices and make sure that we implement an 
ethics code on the Supreme Court, which are the only nine 
justices in our entire Federal judiciary who do not have to 
abide by our ethics code, and I yield back.
    Mr. Grothman. Mr. LaTurner.
    Mr. LaTurner. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you all for 
being here. You have got to pan the whole area to find me who 
is speaking, I know.
    We are gathered today to address a disturbing issue at the 
intersection of politics, activism and corporate influence, the 
growing trend of liberal activists and private equity firms 
using dark money to fund frivolous lawsuits aimed at stifling 
industrial activity, political discourse, and civic engagement. 
A fundamental tenet of our legal system is that those who have 
been harmed can seek a remedy by bringing a claim to be 
adjudicated before the courts.
    When a remedy is obtained, it is supposed to go to those 
who are harmed. Increasingly, that is not the case in today's 
legal system, as some courts are being used to pursue social 
activism for special interests. Even more concerning is the 
fact that wealthy foreign actors with no skin in the game have 
begun backing scores of private law firms to sue American 
businesses for billions of dollars in damages. These payments 
mean the law firms have all their costs subsidized, and yet the 
same law firms are hired by state and local governments on a 
contingency fee basis.
    Ms. Steinitz, how are you today? Did I get it right, 
Steinitz?
    Ms. Steinitz. You did, yes. Thank you.
    Mr. LaTurner. OK. Isn't it true that law firms receiving 
funding to cover their expenses and fees from wealth special 
interest groups, who also get contingency fee agreements from 
local and state governments, have no risk while they stand to 
recover tens of millions of dollars, if not more, from 
contingency fee arrangements?
    Ms. Steinitz. I am not familiar with those arrangements, so 
I cannot comment.
    Mr. LaTurner. In recent years, a number of investors 
including Arabella advisors, George Soros and Leonardo 
DiCaprio, as well as foreign funders like Christopher Hone and 
Hansjorg Wyss, have funneled tens of millions of dollars into 
organizations that fund climate litigation, targeting American 
energy producers. Ms. Steinitz again, are you aware that 
several nonprofit organizations backed by Soros, DiCaprio, and 
Wyss, for which these wealthy individuals likely seek tax 
breaks, have also made donations directly to law firms that 
bring climate-related lawsuits?
    Ms. Steinitz. I am not familiar with that, sorry.
    Mr. LaTurner. Not familiar with anything that I am saying 
right now?
    Ms. Steinitz. No, afraid I am not.
    Mr. LaTurner. OK. The Soros-backed new venture fund and the 
DiCaprio-backed resources legacy fund have given millions of 
dollars to the California law firm Sher Edling, which is 
responsible for bringing over a dozen climate litigation cases. 
In addition to this special interest funding, Sher Edling is 
entering into fee agreements where it stands to make tens of 
millions of dollars. And it does not end there, Michael 
Bloomberg is funding a program through NYU Law, where they 
place attorneys in state attorneys general offices where those 
embedded attorneys are working on some of the same climate 
litigation, where Sher Edling is also receiving a contingency 
fee. Ms. Steinitz, does that arrangement create concerns for 
you about the influence of wealthy special interests on 
litigation purportedly brought on behalf of taxpayers, and who 
really plans to benefit?
    Ms. Steinitz. Again, I am not familiar with these 
particular arrangements, but the general point that we should 
be interested as a public in who influences the various 
branches of government, including the judiciary, is a point I 
agree with.
    Mr. LaTurner. Thank you very much. Mr. Chairman, I yield 
back.
    Mr. Grothman. Thank you. Mr. Raskin?
    Mr. Raskin. Thank you kindly, Mr. Chairman, and I was glad 
that my colleague, Mr. Goldman, from New York was able to 
answer some of the surprising things that we heard from our 
esteemed colleague, Ms. Mace, right before we had our break. 
And, you know, it is very clear that there is no evidence that 
has turned up over the last 7 months that Joe Biden is guilty 
of any criminal wrongdoing, any high crime and misdemeanor, 
much less prostitution, bribery, money laundering, or any of 
the crimes that were set forth in that laundry list that Ms. 
Mace offered at the end, so I do hope she will clarify that.
    Let us see. Ms. Wein, you are here as the assistant general 
counsel of Johnson & Johnson. Do I have that right?
    Ms. Wein. Yes, sir.
    Mr. Raskin. And Johnson & Johnson paid $5 billion out in 
the opioid litigation, and $4 billion in the talcum powder 
litigation. Is that right? Those are numbers roughly, correct?
    Ms. Wein. Congressman, as far as I am aware.
    Mr. Raskin. OK. So, are you here to complain about 
meritorious lawsuits being brought by consumers in cases like 
these or frivolous and meritless cases being brought by 
consumers?
    Ms. Wein. Congressman, an excellent point. We are not here 
to talk about limiting a grieved consumer's access to justice. 
We are here to talk about transparency, regulation, disclosure 
around third-party litigation funding, which has an effect of 
actually diluting the claims that have merit with the influx of 
meritless lawsuits.
    Mr. Raskin. OK. So, you have no problem with the litigants 
who went to court in the opioid cases or in other mass toxic 
tort cases, the BP oil spill or the talcum powder case or so 
on?
    Ms. Wein. Congressman, as a lawyer----
    Mr. Raskin. Yes.
    Ms. Wein [continuing]. I believe in access to justice.
    Mr. Raskin. Got you. And there were no Rule 11 sanctions 
that your company sought against any of the litigants in those 
cases, right?
    Ms. Wein. The ones that you mentioned, Congressman?
    Mr. Raskin. Yes.
    Ms. Wein. Not as far as I am aware.
    Mr. Raskin. OK.
    Ms. Wein. In the mass tort context, it is actually 
extremely different because we have no access to information 
regarding the thousands of claims brought against us because 
plaintiffs are not required to actually produce evidence of 
product usage, or injury alleged from the product, we are 
essentially hamstrung from using Rule 11 to bring sanctions on 
those individual cases. We are also hamstrung in many cases 
from filing 12(b)(6) motions because that motion practice is 
usually suspended in the MDL process.
    Mr. Raskin. So, you are saying you cannot move to dismiss 
in a class action lawsuit?
    Ms. Wein. Not a class action, Congressman, right. We are 
talking about multidistrict litigation, which is a different 
animal.
    Mr. Raskin. Yes.
    Ms. Wein. Multidistrict litigation, the aggregation of 
thousands of claims, typically what we see are judges 
suspending motion practice 12(b), 12(e), the usual discovery 
practices.
    Mr. Raskin. Yes. OK. Well, that might be something 
interesting to look at, but to my understanding, anybody who 
brings vexatious, frivolous or meritless litigation can be 
sanctioned by the courts. But I appreciate your candor in 
saying that that was not the case in the opioid litigation, or 
in the talcum powder case.
    Ms. Wein. What I said, Congressman, is that we believe in 
access to justice, so----
    Mr. Raskin. Yes.
    Ms. Wein [continuing]. Those who brought those cases had 
their day in court. We do not stand in the way of that, of 
course.
    Mr. Raskin. Right.
    Ms. Wein. As I mentioned earlier, we do not believe that 
the talcum powder cases have merit. We believe that that is 
actually all driven by third-party litigation funding.
    Mr. Raskin. All right. Fair enough. Well, maybe we should 
stop there because we are just going to disagree about that, 
and obviously, the settlement speaks for itself. One of our 
colleagues, actually, several of our colleagues raised this 
issue, but one of them asked whether the Chinese government 
might have used intellectual property law or lawyers to achieve 
power over the U.S. Government and to undermine American 
society, and I think I found at least one good answer to this 
question.
    And I would like to submit for the record this November 6, 
2018, Associated Press article, ``Headline: China Grants 18 
Trademarks in 2 months to Donald Trump and Daughter.'' And in 
the early days of the Trump Administration, Donald Trump and 
his daughter Ivanka, got 18 trademarks from the Chinese 
government that she had been unable to get before, and there 
were lots of allegations about conflict of interest in the 
influence peddling and the scheme.
    So, I would like to submit that for the record, Mr. 
Chairman.
    Mr. Grothman. Very good.
    Mr. Raskin. Yes, I yield back. Thank you.
    Mr. Grothman. Thank you. Mr. Gosar.
    Mr. Gosar. Thank you. I first want to thank the Chairman 
Comer for this important hearing. You know, the thing I heard 
earlier was the gentlelady from New York claiming that this 
fishing trip cost $100,000 one way. That has got to be some 
kind of fishing trip because that is not going to be $100,000 
one way. It is vital that law firms and those who fund them put 
the interests of the victims first, and not their bottom line.
    As a representative with a large mining constituency, I 
work hard to defend the mining industry from radical 
environmentalists and the third-party litigants who have funded 
them, whose goal is to end the mining in the United States. I 
also worked very hard to make sure that the mining companies 
uphold their part of the bargain, that what they say they do, 
they follow through with that.
    One of the most egregious examples of third-party 
litigation funding that has yielded devastating consequences 
was the attempt by the Democratic Party prior to 2020 to change 
the voting laws. This practice was nothing less than the 
weaponization of the judicial system to overturn the will of 
the people as expressed in the voting laws created by their 
duly elected representatives. Marc Elias, the same man who 
hired Christopher Steele to lie about President Trump in the 
infamous dossier, who was sanctioned by a Federal court in 2021 
for misleading motion, was hired by the Democratic Party in 
2020 to harass states by filing at least 50 lawsuits against 
them for laws seeking to preserve electoral integrity.
    Elias' law firm Perkins Coie received at least $41 million 
since 2019 from left wing organizations. It is unclear how many 
millions the Democratic Party and their allies spent trying to 
destroy election integrity in the run up to the 2020 elections. 
They should come clean and be transparent with American people, 
and the same American people who I am sure they claim they are 
fighting for in their bogus lawsuits.
    Sound legal representation in any setting requires a moral 
compass that puts at first the interests of the injured party. 
Third-party funded litigants that have made half of our country 
doubt the integrity of our elections is unacceptable and is a 
very big stain on our country. Ms. Lucas, you are from a mining 
area, aren't you, from Minnesota?
    Ms. Lucas. Yes, I am, sir.
    Mr. Gosar. I have been up there. It has been very 
interesting. What are the average incomes of the smaller 
communities that have mining?
    Ms. Lucas. The average of--that currently have mining?
    Mr. Gosar. Yes.
    Ms. Lucas. I would have to get back to you on that one.
    Mr. Gosar. Would you say it is above $60,000?
    Ms. Lucas. The mining incomes are for sure above $60,000.
    Mr. Gosar. That is my whole point. I am trying to get to 
those miners.
    Ms. Lucas. Yes.
    Mr. Gosar. This is, you know, if you cannot mine it, you 
cannot grow it, you cannot fish it. You are not going to make a 
bunch of money off of it.
    Ms. Lucas. Correct.
    Mr. Gosar. How about the comparison of others in the state? 
They are much lower, aren't they, on average?
    Ms. Lucas. Yes, especially in rural areas.
    Mr. Gosar. Now, can you estimate the amount of state and 
Federal permits and regulations a mining company may have to 
comply with to be able to operate in Minnesota?
    Ms. Lucas. It takes a lot of permits, and it should.
    Mr. Gosar. Yes.
    Ms. Lucas. We have to have air permits, we have to have 
water permits, wetlands, land use, permit to mine, tailing 
space and all of those things that can be over 20 permits.
    Mr. Gosar. You know, we are losing copper out in Arizona, 
and it is going on this 20th year. They have invested over $2 
billion, with a b, billion dollars in reclamation and they 
still have not got a permit. The water is cleaner coming out 
than going in. It is amazing what you have to do. Can you 
briefly describe how existing regulations encourage and require 
extensive community and stakeholder engagement to solicit 
feedback and address these concerns?
    Ms. Lucas. Yes, our system is set up to make sure that 
people know what is going to happen in their backyard. We need 
to have that system. It is important that we have that system. 
We have a legacy that demands we have that system. And every 
step along the way from the beginning of the scoping EAW 
through the EIS through the permitting process, we ensure that 
we have multiple opportunities for the public to ask questions.
    If you live in a mining area, you understand mining, but 
``normal people'' may not. So, we need to provide all the 
opportunities people can get to ask those questions about what 
are you doing with our water, how will you protect our air, 
what will you do about wetlands, and we ensure we have all of 
those opportunities for people because it is a critical step in 
the process.
    Mr. Gosar. I get it. You think we can have our mining and 
have our cake and eat it too, right?
    Ms. Lucas. I think without mining, sir, we do not have this 
room that we are in, we do not have this building we are in, we 
do not have lights on, we are not kept cool from the humidity 
that D.C. has. I thought we had bad humidity. I was wrong, but 
we do not have the world without mining, sir.
    Mr. Gosar. I absolutely agree with you. Thank you for your 
quest to keep mining a pivotal part of this economy. Thank you 
very much. I yield back.
    Mr. Grothman. Thank you. Ms. Greene.
    Mrs. Greene. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I agree that third-
party litigation that is funded by groups that have interest in 
these issues is causing many frivolous lawsuits. I want to 
explain a situation that is happening in politics. Dark money 
funded lawfare is waged against candidates, against groups to 
sway politics, and also interfere in elections.
    On March 24, 2022, a group called Free Speech For People, 
which is an ironic name, filed a lawsuit against me using the 
14th amendment to try to remove my name off the ballot in my 
district in Georgia. This group, Free Speech For People has 
received funding from leftist groups like San Francisco 
Foundation, Kohlberg Foundation, Leonard & Sophie Davis Fund, 
Overbrook Foundation, Park Foundation, Schumann Media Center, 
and Cloud Mountain Foundation and many more. These groups are 
groups that claim they care about defending democracy, but they 
funded a group called Free Speech For People that was 
interested in taking away the free speech of the voters in my 
district.
    These groups from San Francisco and New York, all they did 
was fund a group to interfere in an election in my district in 
Georgia. On April 22d, I had to go to court where I took the 
witness stand, defending myself under oath against a lie, 
launched and funded by this dark money group and run by far-
left political operatives like David Brock and Norm Eisen, but 
I won, and it cost me almost a million dollars defending 
myself.
    And then 1 month later, I had my election day on May 24, 
2022. Well, I want to tell you, I won again because the voters 
in my district voted for me with over 70 percent, but this is 
still happening, and it is happening again to interfere in the 
2024 election. Last Wednesday, a lawsuit was filed by Citizens 
for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, CREW, to have 
President Trump removed from Colorado's ballot over claims he 
violated Section 3 of the 14th amendment on January 6. This is 
the same thing Free Speech For People tried to do with me and I 
beat them and President Trump will beat them as well.
    CREW was founded in 2003 by Norm Eisen, the same activist 
that was probably involved funding mine, and Melanie Sloan to 
be a progressive watchdog group. Democrat operative, David 
Brock, of Media Matters, also well-known for the Brock memo, 
was chairman of the board of directors from 2014 to 2017. Norm 
Eisen worked for the ADL in the 1980's investigating anti-
Semitism and civil rights violation. He worked in his law 
school classmate Barack Obama's Presidential campaign and then 
was named Special Counsel for Ethics and Government Reform in 
the White House. In 2019, Eisen was appointed consultant to the 
House Judiciary Committee, where he worked on the first 
impeachment of President Trump.
    You can see where this goes, ladies and gentlemen. It is 
all about politics. Eisen implemented the David Brock blueprint 
for suing the President into paralysis and his allies into 
bankruptcy. He helped mainstream and amplify the Russia hoax. 
He drafted 10 articles of impeachment for the Democrats a full 
month before President Trump ever called the Ukrainian 
president in 2018. He personally served as special counsel 
litigating the Ukraine impeachment. He created a template for 
internet censorship of world leaders and a handbook for mass 
mobilizing racial justice protesters to overturn democratic 
election results.
    There is perhaps no man alive with a more decorated resume 
for plots against President Trump than Norm Eisen. All of these 
actions were part of the David Brock memo, which outlined how 
to defeat President Trump through lawfare, funded lawfare. The 
next step in Eisen and Brock's plan is to take President Trump 
and his allies out before the Presidential election of 2024. 
They are trying to use January 6 as the reason for filing 
lawsuits against President Trump in various states, arguing he 
violated the 14th amendment and is supposedly guilty of some 
so-called insurrection that never was, and therefore would be 
ineligible to run for office.
    CREW, the organization Eisen founded and Brock chaired, is 
one of the main groups devoting funds to this goal. We have to 
stop funded lawfare by political organizations that want to 
take away people's freedom of speech to vote for the candidate 
that they want to vote for. And we also have to stop these dark 
money funded groups from interfering in elections. I yield 
back, Mr. Chairman.
    Mr. Grothman. Thank you. If there is no further business, 
without objection, the Committee--we have another show coming 
up afterwards, so we are going to not deal with the closing 
statements.
    If there is no further business, without objection, the 
Committee stands adjourned.
    [Whereupon, at 2:46 p.m., the Committee was adjourned.]