The U.S. Department of Justice just opened a federal trial against the Israeli private investigator Amit Forlit, and climate activists are watching for a reason that has nothing to do with Israeli cybersecurity firms. The indictment alleges Forlit was hired to hack the inboxes of ExxonMobil’s critics — environmentalists, policy consultants, the Rockefeller family’s foundation — and that the $125,000-a-month operation was commissioned by a lobbying firm representing the oil giant itself. DCI Group’s disclosed lobbying on Exxon’s behalf that year ran $320,000, according to Open Secrets records. DCI and Exxon both deny involvement, and no charges have been filed against either. But the paper trail in the court filings draws a line from an oil company’s legal-defense strategy straight through a Washington lobbying shop, through an Israeli private intelligence firm, and into the inboxes of people who had the nerve to ask what Exxon knew about climate change and when it knew it.
We up here in Adams County know what that line looks like, even if we call it by different names. When the manure lagoon off County G overflows into the ditch that runs past the neighbor’s well, the chain runs: the CAFO operator says it wasn’t his fault, the DNR inspector writes a report that goes in a drawer, the county board notes the violation but approves the permit expansion anyway, and the neighbor drinks water from a five-gallon jug because the nitrate in her well measured above the EPA standard and the state’s response was to form a groundwater collaboration workgroup. Nobody puts a $125,000 monthly budget on the neighbor’s health, nobody gets indicted for it, but the structure is the same. There is an operator with a problem. There is a hired intermediary. There is a set of people downstream who pay the cost. The only difference between Adams County and Irving, Texas is the zeros on the wire transfer.
The indictment’s language is precise and damning by accumulation. An October 2015 memo from a lobbying-firm principal to Forlit — the email cover note says “this is what I gave the client yesterday” — lays out how to “operationalize the research on the bad guys.” The objective: the “opportunity to go ‘on offense’” against groups that had been attacking the Irving, Texas oil giant over climate change. Forlit allegedly responded with a proposal for a “climate change project” at $125,000 per month. Over 2014–2017, Forlit’s firms allegedly earned $7 million, including for work on this operation. The phishing campaigns hit in 2016–2017; roughly 80 emails hit Kert Davies of the Climate Investigations Center alone, one disguised as a colleague sharing a Dropbox document titled “ExxonMobil (confidential).docx.” The Justice Department confirmed 100-plus victims were successfully hacked.
Lee Wasserman of the Rockefeller Family Foundation, who believed he had narrowly dodged the phishing attempts, later learned from the indictment that someone had been reading his email all along. He started whispering in his own office, wondering if his home was bugged. That is the human register of what corporate intelligence operations produce: not just stolen documents leaked to the press and then incorporated into Exxon’s own court filings as the company fought state attorneys general investigations — which the government’s sentencing memo against a prior defendant, Aviram Azari, confirmed happened — but a chilled, fearful citizen who stops talking to his own colleagues over email because he thinks someone is reading it.
The structural story here is the one that matters. Exxon’s own scientists had determined by 1982 that fossil-fuel combustion caused climate change. When that internal knowledge surfaced in 2015 via InsideClimate News reporting, the company faced a wave of investigations from state attorneys general. The logical response, if you believe the corporation is a good-faith actor, would be to produce the documents, cooperate with the inquiries, and let the evidence speak. The response the indictment traces — a lobbying firm, a private investigator, a team of hackers, stolen communications weaponized in court — is something else entirely.
That is not corporate strategy. That is the behavior of an institution that knows it cannot win the argument on the facts, so it attacks the people making the argument instead. It is the same playbook the tobacco industry ran for forty years, the same structure the opioid distributors used, the same logic that runs through the fossil-fuel-funded manufactured-doubt campaigns Oreskes and Conway documented in Merchants of Doubt. If you cannot discredit the science, discredit the scientists. If you cannot discredit the scientists, hack their email. If you cannot keep the hacking secret, deny it and have the lobbying firm repeat what they say the government told them.
The symmetry test here matters. When a small shop in Adams County has a dispute with a neighbor, the resolution is the county courthouse or the nuisance ordinance or the sheriff’s deputy. The scale of the resources is the scale of the community. When the world’s largest oil company faces a dispute with environmentalists, the resolution involves an Israeli private investigator, a federal cybercrime indictment, and a trial that will determine whether the men connected to the operation are held accountable. The asymmetry is not incidental to the system. It is the system.
DCI Group’s partner Craig Stevens told the Guardian that his firm has “no knowledge or understanding” of the hacking activity and called any insinuation otherwise “completely false and unsubstantiated.” Exxon has said it is not aware of any hacking, condemned it in the strongest possible terms, and pointed to its business dedicated to reducing emissions. Forlit has pleaded not guilty. The charges against him remain allegations. None of these denials changes the structure of the indictment: a $320,000-a-year disclosed lobbying arrangement between Exxon and DCI, a memo titled “go on offense,” a $125,000 monthly cybersecurity contract, and 100 hacked email accounts of people who had committed no crime except asking the wrong questions.
The trial is in New York, not Adams County. But the people watching from their bench at 9 p.m. are the same people who have been watching this pattern for thirty years — since the first CAFO permit got approved and the nitrate in the wells started climbing and the neighbor’s livestock operation sold out because nobody under fifty could farm his way anymore, and the land wound up in a corporation’s name. The pattern has a name. It is the cost of asking questions the powerful would rather you did not ask.