Koch Inc., the nation’s number two privately owned firm, imported more than a billion barrels of crude oil into the United States over the past decade, according to DeSmog’s review of company-reported federal energy data. Those lucrative oil imports helped build the Koch empire now fighting before the Supreme Court over President Donald Trump’s tariffs.
Over 90 percent of that foreign oil flowed into Koch’s Pine Bend refinery from Canada, making the Minnesota refinery one of the nation’s largest importers of Canadian crude ― and the destination for over three percent of all company-reported crude imported to the U.S. since 2015. Since the 1950s, Pine Bend has transformed that deluge of foreign crude into a fountain of cash, which the Koch family used to build its dizzying collection of investments worldwide.
That means Pine Bend, and in turn the Koch family fortunes, appears significantly exposed to the threat of tariffs from President Trump, who has wielded tariffs in erratic ways that have unsettled global trade. Late last month, for example, Trump announced he would ratchet up tariffs on Canadian imports 10 percent. The president claimed the hike was over an Ontario ad quoting Ronald Reagan saying tariffs “hurt every American.”
Trump’s legal power to impose tariffs now hangs in the balance as the Supreme Court considers two lawsuits challenging the president’s authority.
Those tariff disputes confront today’s hard-right Supreme Court with an issue that pits Trump against his billionaire base.
“I think this is one of the only areas where we’re seeing a split between some business interests and Trump,” Lisa Graves, executive director of True North Research, and author of the new book Without Precedent: How Chief Justice Roberts and His Accomplices Rewrote the Constitution and Dismantled Our Rights, told DeSmog.
Billionaire Charles Koch, one of the world’s wealthiest people, occasionally has had public spats with Trump, openly taking an ambivalent approach to the President and the Make America Great Again (MAGA) wing of the Right. But Koch-funded groups, including Americans for Prosperity, a political advocacy network, nonetheless put their muscle into electing Republican candidates in 2024, Graves noted, helping Trump return to the presidency.
But the tariff split represents a genuine divide, Graves told DeSmog.
“This instance is a literal, visible ― not just PR manufactured ― split, in terms of the tariff power,” Graves said. “It’s real.”
Some of the first lawsuits against Trump’s tariffs were filed this spring by the New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA), a legal group heavily funded by Koch money. The Liberty Justice Center, another legal nonprofit linked to the Koch network via the State Policy Network, an association of free-market think tanks, filed one of the two tariff challenges that rose to the Supreme Court, a Washington Post report found. Other big-money donors tied to the Liberty Justice Center include the Walton Family Foundation (the founders of Walmart), the Bradley Foundation, and the dark money fund DonorsTrust.
Perhaps given Trump’s reputation for retaliating against those who oppose him, including major law firms, Koch Inc (formerly Koch Industries) and other large corporations have shied away from being named as plaintiffs in lawsuits challenging tariffs. Those challenges have instead been brought by small businesses and shepherded to the high court by donor-funded law firms such as the NCLA.
“In this instance, NCLA is working with small businesses, presenting small businesses as the victims of the tariffs,” said Graves. “I’m not suggesting those aren’t their clients, those are their clients. But it’s also the case, when you look at the vast majority of money that has funded NCLA, it’s traceable to Koch money.”
Friend of the Kochs
On November 4, one day before the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments over Trump’s tariffs, the NCLA announced it had filed its latest lawsuit challenging Trump’s authority. The class action, the NCLA indicated, was designed to make sure that companies that aren’t named in pending cases can still benefit rapidly if the Supreme Court strikes down any tariffs.
“NCLA believes the Supreme Court is on the verge of setting aside the so-called Liberation Day tariffs,” NCLA president Mark Chenoweth, who previously worked as in-house counsel for Koch Industries, said in a statement. “When it does so, it may find a way to provide nationwide relief. But in case it does not, NCLA will stand ready with this class-action lawsuit to make sure everyone in the class who pays tariffs can obtain relief as soon as possible.”
That’s in addition to filing a “friend of the court” brief arguing against Trump’s tariff power in the pending Supreme Court challenges. And, earlier this year, the NCLA also filed what it said was “the first Complaint challenging President Donald Trump’s unlawful attempt to require Americans to pay a heavy tariff on all products they import from China.”
Founded in 2017, the New Civil Liberties Alliance rapidly emerged as a power player in the current judicial environment. It played a major role in convincing the Supreme Court to overturn the Chevron deference doctrine, resulting in a 2024 precedent that critics said “knocked out a core pillar of American administrative law and created a real risk of regulatory chaos” in areas including environmental protection, labor laws, and corporate disclosures. The law firm also has worked to block student loan debt cancellation, backed undercutting union protections in a dispute involving Starbucks labor organizing, and moved to protect Elon Musk’s right to free speech in a battle over a 2018 tweet.
The NCLA received $1 million from the Charles Koch Foundation in 2017, the lion’s share of the $1.6 million in funding the organization reported to the IRS in its first year. Koch-funded organizations have donated over $5 million more to the NCLA in the ensuing years, a 2024 review of tax filings by Graves found, though the exact number is not public. The NCLA has also received at least $1 million from the donor-advised fund DonorsTrust. The law firm is also listed as a “partner” by the Koch-linked State Policy Network.
When asked if Charles Koch had funded the NCLA’s tariff work, a law firm spokesperson told DeSmog, “NCLA is proud to partner with everyone that supports our mission to protect people’s Constitutional freedoms.” Koch Inc. did not respond to a request for comment.
Koch Industries received its first documented warning about the role that burning fossil fuel products plays in causing climate change over 50 years ago, a 2024 report by Brown University’s Climate Social Science Network found.
Over the ensuing decades, Charles and his brother David Koch (who passed away in 2019) fought to prevent climate action that might restrict the growth of fossil fuels, the report finds, often by funding right-wing or Libertarian organizations that framed the fight as warding off oppressive government power, rather than as protecting specific companies’ profitability.
“Koch played a very nimble game with Trump,” Christopher Leonard, author of the 2019 book Kochland, told the Washington Post last year. “I called it block and tackle. They tried to block the stuff they didn’t like or not participate. … But for the stuff the Kochs liked about MAGA, they did everything they could to support the agenda.”
Oil Driller: Trump Noise and Chaos “Deafening”
Trump’s tariff threats have been rapid-fire, often sprawling and ill-defined, leaving importers accustomed to decades of expanding free trade and globalization scrambling to figure out how their business might be impacted and struggling to plan for the future.
Fossil fuel companies are hardly alone in feeling the fallout.
“Far from restoring domestic manufacturing, this tariff regime has instead chilled capital investment and stunted manufacturing growth,” the nonprofit Clean Air Task Force wrote in a June 4 policy brief. “Since the tariffs were put into place, the U.S. has seen higher manufacturing input price inflation than any country in the world, and North America is the only region where manufacturing production has fallen.”
The oil and gas sector never delivered the $1 billion Trump famously demanded during the 2024 election, the New York Times reported this summer. Nonetheless, the industry has already reaped tens of billions in new and expanded tax incentives, tax breaks, and slashed fees, the Times noted.
Often Trump has ultimately exempted fossil fuel imports from tariffs, but the uncertainty caused by the President’s threats still has proven disruptive, oil and gas producers have complained. In addition, Trump has imposed tariffs on steel and other goods that oil companies need, sparking outrage.
“We are suffering from a combination of increased cost due to tariffs and downward pricing pressure from end users,” one anonymized oilfield services company told the Dallas Fed Energy Survey in September. “Global geopolitical issues and U.S. foreign policy uncertainty are creating increased financial challenges for both our U.S. and international business.”
“The noise and chaos is deafening! Who wants to make a business decision in this unstable environment?” an anonymous oil driller told the Fed.
In April, around the time the NCLA filed its first tariff challenge, Koch’s Minerals and Trading subsidiary dropped out of oil trading, a field where the company had been a significant player, according to Bloomberg. “While US President Donald Trump’s tariffs have revived volatility, it has proven to be the kind that is difficult to trade,” Bloomberg noted at the time. (Koch Inc. kept its Pine Bend refinery, which is held by a different arm of its business.)
Despite any anonymous discontent, in public, donations from the sector have continued to flow towards Trump, with oil tycoon and sometime Trump advisor Harold Hamm among those funding the construction of a $300 million White House ballroom.
Koch Has “Benefited Enormously” from Trump
Koch and Trump have publicly sparred in the past. Koch made headlines for decrying “change, chaos and conflict” following Trump’s return to the presidency this spring, while Trump once called Koch “Very stupid, awkward, and highly overrated” in a Truth Social post.
But their interests remained largely aligned, Graves noted.
“The fact is that Charles Koch has benefited enormously from Donald Trump’s policies,” said Graves, citing Trump’s renewed tax cuts this summer as a major example. “The fact that they are not friends doesn’t mean that Charles Koch is not benefiting in substantial ways from the actions of the Trump administration.”
The pending legal challenges over tariffs attack just a sliver of executive branch power. They could leave Trump able to impose other tariffs targeting disfavored industries, for example.
This summer, Trump’s Commerce Department began laying the groundwork to use a different kind of legal authority to impose tariffs on wind turbines. While this course moves slower than the President’s claim to “emergency” tariff powers under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, it would allow Trump to focus tariffs specifically on renewable energy even if the Supreme Court limits the tariffs currently under challenge.
Court observers are predicting Trump’s claim to tariff power may be in trouble after recent oral arguments, where conservative justices asked Trump’s lawyers challenging questions.
“I think he may lose this case,” Graves told DeSmog, “but it will likely be one of the only ones he loses, given what this Roberts court has been doing to empower him.”
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