News & Analysis
June 5, 2026
The Trump administration’s “vague,” “unripe,” and “flimsy” legal arguments to stop Minnesota from putting three major architects of Big Oil’s climate deception on trial “strain credulity” and should be dismissed, the state’s attorney general said in a filing last week.
Last month, after the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled that Attorney General Keith Ellison’s consumer fraud lawsuit against ExxonMobil, Koch Industries, and the American Petroleum Institute could advance toward discovery and trial, the Department of Justice urged a federal court to take emergency action to block it.
Federal courts have already rejected preemptive Trump administration lawsuits that aimed to stop Michigan and Hawai‘i from taking Big Oil companies to court. But the DOJ’s action against Minnesota is “even more egregious,” the state argued, because it comes six years after Minnesota filed its case. In that time, multiple state and federal courts have rejected Big Oil’s arguments to escape accountability and ruled that Minnesota’s case can advance toward trial in state court.
The Trump administration’s lawsuit against Minnesota “violates the established norm that federal courts do not interfere with or restrain state court proceedings, which is rooted in fundamental concerns of federalism,” Minnesota said in its brief, adding that “the United States does not identify how it will suffer any real and articulable harm” if Minnesota’s case goes forward.
Minnesota’s case charges Exxon, Koch and API of running a “campaign of deception” to mislead Minnesotans about the harm of fossil fuels in violation of state laws against consumer fraud, deceptive trade practices, and false advertising. The lawsuit seeks to make the companies end those illegal practices, pay financial penalties, and fund a “corrective public education campaign” about climate change.
But the Trump administration’s lawsuit intentionally mischaracterizes Minnesota’s consumer protection case “as one seeking to regulate global fossil fuel production or greenhouse gas emissions,” the state wrote in its response, which is a “fallacy” that state and federal courts rejected when the Big Oil defendants made the same argument as the Trump administration in earlier stages of the litigation.
“Allowing this suit to proceed would license the United States to drag into federal court any state-court suit that a sitting presidential administration dislikes, by merely alleging that the suit is precluded by federal law and asserting some remote federal interest,” Minnesota wrote. “Like its sister courts, this Court should reject this attempt to aggrandize the Executive Branch and expand federal jurisdiction.”
The Trump administration’s attack on Minnesota’s lawsuit comes a year after oil executives met with President Trump in the White House and reportedly asked for his administration’s help in escaping the growing number of lawsuits over their climate deception. Soon after, Trump ordered the Justice Department to take “all appropriate action to stop” the cases, and DOJ filed its failed suits against Michigan and Hawai‘i. The administration is now urging the U.S. Supreme Court to side with Big Oil companies in their efforts to escape a climate deception lawsuit from Boulder, Colorado, while Republican members of Congress push legislation to grant Big Oil immunity from any laws or lawsuits that could hold them accountable for their role in the climate crisis.
“The American people deserve a Department of Justice that fights for us, and it’s a tremendous shame that Trump’s DOJ would rather sell us out to Big Oil," Ellison said.