House Speaker Seeks Answers About The $35,000 Mystery Money The FBI Revealed
Pressure has been building on legislative leaders to launch their own investigation into the possible bribe of one of their members.
Hawaiʻi House Speaker Nadine Nakamura is wading into the murky political and legal waters swirling at the State Capitol around whether another lawmaker took tens of thousands of dollars as a bribe.
As a federal investigation into corruption in the Legislature appears to be stalling out, signatures are being collected on a petition asking the House and Senate to undertake their own inquiry into information made public as part of the FBI’s case against convicted former Rep. Ty Cullen.
On Friday, Nakamura sent two letters requesting more information about what’s going on with the revelations that came out in the Cullen case and asking what the state can do about it. The letters went out two days after Hawaiʻi News Now reported that Nakamura said the Legislature won’t take any action on a petition being circulated by former federal public defender Alexander Silvert.
One letter went to Attorney General Anne Lopez asking her to review a much-publicized document that is part of the Cullen case. In it, the U.S. Attorney’s Office describes a January 2022 meeting between Cullen, an unnamed subject of the bribery case involving Cullen and “an influential state legislator” who was given an envelope with $35,000 to be used for campaign purposes.
“Given the seriousness of the allegations and the potential involvement of a current member of the Legislature, I respectfully request that your office review the attached filing, and any other available data, to determine whether any Hawai’i state laws may have been violated,” Nakamura writes. “I recognize that a federal investigation may still be ongoing, and my request is not intended to interfere with or duplicate federal efforts. However, if warranted, I ask that you consider initiating an appropriate investigation or referral to the relevant division within your department, in coordination with federal authorities as necessary.”
The second letter went to Acting U.S. Attorney Ken Sorenson, who has been the lead on the yearslong federal sting that saw Cullen and former Sen. J. Kalani English convicted and sent to prison for accepting bribes from Honolulu businessman Milton Choy to sway legislation that benefitted his wastewater disposal business. Sorenson and the feds have insisted that the investigation into legislative corruption is not over but it’s been dragging on so long that Cullen and English have both been released from prison and Choy has died.
Now, Nakamura wants to know from Sorenson if the investigation is indeed still active and if a parallel state inquiry would help or hinder the federal case.
It would be surprising if Sorenson said anything other than yes, the case is still active. It’s likely Lopez will say the feds are already doing this investigation and choose to steer clear. So it remains to be seen if Nakamura is serious about ferreting out another dirty lawmaker if one exists or if the letters are just political cover.
Civil Beat has been reporting on the investigation since the arrests of Cullen and English were made public in February 2022. We’ve filed a lawsuit, currently pending before the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, to get the FBI’s investigative files on the misdeeds of Cullen and English.
Because they quickly pleaded guilty and went off to relatively short prison stints, there was no public trial that would have let the public see exactly what they did, what legislation or issues were affected and who else may have been involved. We do know that the FBI put up some of the money for the bribes passed on from Choy and that the feds kept quiet about Cullen even as he was being reelected in 2020. The FBI’s investigation deserves scrutiny too but the government is refusing to release any files and a federal judge ruled in its favor.
It was Civil Beat that discovered the document now at the center of the debate over whether at least one more lawmaker was involved in taking bribes. The information was contained in a memo filed by the U.S. Attorney’s Office as support for why Cullen should get a lighter sentence. But it was improperly redacted and easy to see through the blacked out passages.
Since we published the memo and a story about the $35,000 potential bribe — it’s not clear whether the money was cash or simply bundled checks which wouldn’t be illegal — more than eight months ago there’s been no further word from the FBI about what is or isn’t happening with the case.
That prompted Silvert to take up the issue himself. His petition, which has received hundreds of signatures, asks the Legislature to convene an investigative committee to look into who the unnamed legislator might be, especially with the 2026 elections looming. Silvert points out that the committee would have subpoena powers and could use other tools to figure out who got the $35,000 and whether it was indeed a bribe or that the money was never reported as campaign expenses.
Silvert has recently been upping the publicity about the petition, including writing an op-ed for the Honolulu Star-Advertiser and making public appearances. He told Hawaiʻi Public Radio last week that the legislative committee should subpoena Cullen and have him testify under oath.
He plans to file the petition with the Legislature in the next few weeks.
“It is certainly a positive sign that the House leadership has finally decided to ask law
enforcement their position regarding the feasibility of a state investigation,” he said Saturday when told about Nakamura’s letters. But he called it “curious” that Nakamura would reject a request to form a special committee to investigate and then two days later write the letters asking if a state investigation would be interfering.
“This belated effort smacks of a CYA letter and should be seen so by the public,” Silvert said.
“Meanwhile, it should not be forgotten that the Senate leadership has played deaf, dumb and blind and said and done absolutely nothing regarding the possible wrongdoing of one of the Legislature’s own members,” he said.
Nakamura’s letters to Lopez and Sorenson were also distributed to all House members. But given that the fallout from the blatant corruption committed by Cullen and English has been rippling through the State Capitol for years the question the individual lawmakers should be asking is how come it’s taken this long for leadership to take action.
Read the letters from Nakamura:
