A MAGA PAC’s Biggest Donors Sued Environmentalists Over Peaceful Protests

"There is no doubt it will have a chilling effect on those campaigning to expose wrongdoing by powerful companies"

In the first half of 2025, MAGA Inc., a pro-Trump super PAC, raised $177 million, according to a recent New York Times report. The largest donors were the Dallas-based pipeline company Energy Transfer Partners and its co-founder and CEO Kelcey Warren, who gave a combined $25 million.

Even if you’ve never heard of Energy Transfer, you’re probably familiar with one of its major projects: The Dakota Access Pipeline. In 2016, thousands of people, led by leaders of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, gathered to protest that pipeline, which now carries an estimated 500,000 to 750,000 barrels of crude oil per day from North Dakota to an oil terminal in Illinois.

Energy Transfer Partners says that it owns pipelines and energy infrastructure across 44 states and has “assets in all of the major U.S. production basins.” Trump’s interior secretary recently told oil, mining, and gas executives, “You’re the customer,” and the Administration aims to “unleash American energy,” so it’s worth knowing more about Energy Transfer Partners and Kelcy Warren.

There’s also another layer to this story, which I’ll get to below. First, the basics: Warren is a longtime major Republican donor who has given to tons of candidates and campaigns, including Trump’s 2016, 2020, and 2024 campaigns. Energy Transfer and Warren stand to profit from currying favor with the Trump administration in numerous ways. Here’s one: The Biden administration denied the extension of a permit for Energy Transfer’s multi-billion-dollar natural gas project in Lake Charles, Louisiana. In May, the Trump administration ended Biden’s pause on liquefied natural gas exports and greenlit that Energy Transfer project. Sarah Cohen of the nonprofit Climate Accountability Research Project told the Guardian that in the week following that decision, Warren’s wealth rose by 10 percent.

Here’s another: The recently enacted Congressional megabill unwinds many years of climate action by rolling back clean energy tax credits and giving an estimated $15 billion in tax breaks to the fossil fuel industry, not to mention other tax cuts for the ultrawealthy. Then there’s the other layer to the story. In 2017, Energy Transfer sued the environmental nonprofit Greenpeace over the Dakota Access Pipeline protests in U.S. federal court, alleging that by supporting the protests Greenpeace had violated the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), which is used to prosecute organized criminals (it was originally designed to take down mob bosses). That case was thrown out in 2019.

Energy Transfer then filed a similar lawsuit in North Dakota. Greenpeace tried to get a change of venue, arguing that many people in that area have personal ties to the fossil fuel industry so they wouldn’t receive a fair trial, but their request was denied. In the lawsuit, Energy Transfer argued that Greenpeace had defamed the company and orchestrated criminal behavior by ginning up a “misinformation campaign” to “incite” protest. According to CNN, Energy Transfer’s lawyers argued in court that Greenpeace’s “deceptive narrative scared off lenders” and as a result the company lost $68 million in financing and spent $7.6 million on public relations. According to reporting by The Guardian, many of the selected jurors expressed negative views about pipeline protests and positive views of fossil fuel mining.

Around the same time, ALEC — the rightwing group that’s funded by corporations, billionaires, and industry groups and is a prominent incubator for pro-corporate legislation – helped to draft and promote bills that criminalized protest against oil and gas expansion projects. According to the International Center for Nonprofit Law (ICNL), starting in January 2017, a wave of anti-protest legislation moved across the United States. In 2021, the Oklahoma House, for example, passed a bill that would criminalize “unlawful assembly” under the RICO Act. According to ICNL, the bill meant that someone could be found guilty of a felony if they were found to have encouraged people to go to a nonviolent demonstration that the police considered “unlawful assembly.” ICNL’s Protest Tracker counts 55 anti-protest bills enacted across the country since January 2017.

This March, the North Dakota jury decided that Greenpeace was liable to pay Energy Transfer over $660 million in damages over the Standing Rock protests. Leaders of several major environmental and civil liberties organizations condemned the decision as a blow to free speech rights. Amnesty International’s secretary general, Agnes Callamard, said, “There is no doubt it will have a chilling effect on those campaigning to expose wrongdoing by powerful companies in the United States and all over the world.”

When I first heard about this case during the first Trump administration, the facts took my breath away. It shocked me that in the United States a company could sue over protests and be taken seriously. We now live in a country where one of the biggest donors to MAGA Inc., which supports the president, can shut down free speech. That isn’t what democracy is supposed to look like.