The Hawaiʻi bribery investigation is a fiasco.

It’s like two cops accidentally setting a squirrel on fire, Captain Hook’s fake arm careening into the audience, or a reporter spewing coffee through her nose during her first big celebrity interview. All true stories. More in a minute.

A fiasco is a completely chaotic, embarrassing failure where things don’t just go south. They go Antarctica south, so much so that people turn against the fiasco creators.

With the bribery cases we’re heading on down that wide disaster highway.

A Special Commentary Project

Civil Beat is focusing on transparency, accountability and ethics in government and other institutions. Help us by sending ideas and anecdotes to sunshine@civilbeat.org.

Read More

Surprise! That’s not how Hawaiʻi Attorney General Anne Lopez sees it. For her and her staff it’s all about a predictable legal process full of integrity and efficiency getting the job done through procedures and rules.

“The public rightly expects this investigation to be completed thoroughly and fairly,” Lopez stated. “This process takes time, but it is essential to maintaining public confidence in the outcome.”

That’s the height of confidence in the legal process and carefully laid plans. That’s what the public wants, she claims.

It’s not the public’s confidence you should worry about. It’s the attorney general’s because that kind of confidence is a recipe for fiasco.  

“One ingredient of many fiascos is that great, massive, heart-wrenching chaos and failure are more likely to occur when great ambition has come into play, when plans are big, expectations great, hopes at their highest.” 

Bingo!

This was the conclusion of an expert on “Fiasco,” one of the most popular segments ever on Ira Glass’s public radio show, “This American Life.” That’s the source of those examples I mentioned.

The root of the fiasco is this: the law has one notion of fairness. The public has quite another.

The trial’s goal is to discover whether there was bribery or not. That’s about the law.

The public’s concern is about too much money in politics. That’s much broader with very different aims and criteria.

Any way the Sylvia Luke bribery case turns out, it’s not going to give the public what it wants. Law is one thing. The real issue is something else.

In law talk, the Luke bribery trial is all about legal definitions and legal concepts like quid pro quo, official acts and freedom of speech.

Courts require a “quid pro quo” to convict a government official of bribery. That means there has to be an unambiguous link between the money involved and an act that a public official performs: “I’ll give you this, if you do that for me. Deal!”

Quid pro quo is a high bar that’s hard to prove because most transactions are much subtler than that.  

Quid is a common defense, and the one that could very well get Sylvia Luke acquitted.

I doubt that the public thinks about the crucial Morton’s The Steakhouse meeting with Luke and others that way at all.

They think about it as a bunch of pols sneakily meeting together at a fancy restaurant, eating ribeye and doing under-the-table deals where money changes hands with wink-wink promises to a help a big money player get what he wants.

For ordinary folks, quid pro quo is a cop out — another way that the legal process makes things more complicated and avoids the real issue. 

If Luke is acquitted the reaction will be: “What a fiasco! They promised us to make things better but made things worse by using legal technicalities. Undue process.”

And that’s one fiasco, generated by the chasm between the legal heart of the matter and the ordinary view of the heart of the matter.

Another fiasco will happen even if the court finds the defendants guilty. This fiasco won’t be immediate. It will emerge once there is the understanding of how little difference that guilty verdict makes.

If the public’s concern is about the role of money in politics, a guilty verdict is a drop in the bucket because when it comes to that problem, bribery is small potatoes, just one French fry in a greasy bag of money, influence and sleaze.

A guilty verdict will be a bright reminder of how little the trial accomplished. This will take time as at first people bask in the glow of hanging the baddies high then realize how useless that guilty verdict is for fighting corruption, or as it’s often called, “a culture of corruption.”

Despite the handwringing and brouhaha after Ty Cullen’s and Kalani English’s bribery convictions — a corruption commission and the like — the same big problems remain.

The Legislature has refused to pass a law prohibiting people with state contracts and grants from donating to a campaign. It has also stayed away from a major commitment to public funding of political campaigns.

Another issue untouched by a guilty verdict is the huge and unmatched amount of money the Carpenters Union gives to candidates. And those donations are legal.

Ian Lind just completed an exhaustive study of Hawaiʻi campaign contributions over the years. Why do people donate big money? To get access. How? Through connections.

“Relationship-building and institutional access,” Lind says, “rather than strong ideological alignment.”

All of that is outside of the court’s wheelhouse.

Either way, the court’s decisions could, as fiascos do, alter the public’s faith and create a backlash against the courts. 

That backlash could be a good thing. There can be fiascos with benefits.

At the end of the “This American Life” story about the fiasco celebrity interview, Ira Glass says to the reporter Margy Rochlin, “To me, the thing about it that’s useful is that it shows the useful purpose of a fiasco.”

“When social order breaks down,” Glass says, “that can be a force not just for chaos. In fact, that can be a force for good. It can bring people together.”

Similarly, the trial’s fiasco might bring people together with a shared understanding that courts are not saviors and can’t be relied upon. 

That would mean a political rather than a legal response, more direct focus on confronting the Legislature, which is both the main source of the problem along with the greatest potential for solving it.

Yeah, I know. All kinds of reasons for being cynical about the Legislature. But any port in a storm, and a court is definitely not that port.