Soon after Hawaiʻi. Rep. Ty Cullen left office, resigning in disgrace due to a bribery scandal, the Hawaiʻi House of Representatives wiped his email account clean, deleting years of messages. 

What kinds of emails he exchanged with the man convicted of bribing him, Milton Choy, the public may never know. Also unknown is what kinds of conversations, if any, Cullen shared with a lobbyist named Tobi Solidum. Solidum is believed to be connected to an investigation into $35,000 in a paper bag given to another “influential” lawmaker in 2022 — an exchange Cullen recorded for the FBI. 

House information technology staff, as it turns out, deletes the computer accounts, including emails, of representatives almost as soon as they leave office, according to Brian Takeshita, chief clerk for the House. Civil Beat learned this after filing public records requests. 

“The House Chief Clerk’s Office does not have the records requested and therefore cannot disclose them to you,” Takeshita wrote. 

In contrast, the Hawaiʻi Senate’s practice is to store emails for up to two years after a lawmaker’s departure, according to Senate clerk Carol Taniguchi. Emails aren’t directly addressed in the Senate’s records retention schedule, which lays out which records need to be saved and for how long.

Alexander Silvert, an attorney who filed a citizens’ petition calling on lawmakers to investigate the $35,000 transaction, said legislator emails need to be preserved so the public can have a record of how bills are created and negotiated.

“We have a right to know the history of their actions,” he said. “And these are emails sent on government computers dealing with government business.” 

The House email account of former Rep. Sylvia Luke, who dined with Cullen and Solidum in January 2022, was also deleted, Takeshita told Civil Beat. At the time of that dinner, Cullen had already been arrested by the FBI and was working with federal investigators.

Luke, now lieutenant governor, has been under fire since she shared in February that she accepted two $5,000 checks from Solidum and his stepdaughter on that day and didn’t immediately list them in campaign finance disclosures. She only reported her efforts to return the money after Cullen was charged.  

Luke acknowledged in February that federal investigators may have suspected she was the lawmaker who accepted $35,000, but she denied ever taking that amount. Her belated disclosures though made her politically vulnerable, and she is now facing a primary challenger in her reelection campaign. 

“It does not help anything in this situation not to have those emails,” said Camron Hurt, state director of Common Cause Hawaiʻi, a government accountability organization. “It’s another roadblock to the transparency that people are craving.” 

‘We’re Left To Guess’

The deletion of the two lawmakers’ emails leaves questions unanswered as Hawaiʻi Attorney General Anne Lopez investigates the $35,000 interaction.

Now, the public won’t know if the emails included exchanges between the lawmakers arranging to meet with Solidum or information about his planned campaign donations to Luke.  

“We’re left to guess,” Silvert said. “Given modern technology, most things are done by texts and emails.” 

It’s possible that no emails were exchanged among the parties at all. Luke told Civil Beat in a text message she doesn’t remember communicating directly with Solidum during her time in the House.

“As you noted, House email accounts are not retained after a member leaves office, so I no longer have access to records,” she wrote.

Birney Bervar, Cullen’s attorney, did not respond to requests for comment. Civil Beat has made repeated attempts to reach Solidum in recent months and has not received any response. Multiple sources said they believe he moved to the Philippines.

Text messages and call logs, which Civil Beat also requested, could not be supplied, either, because Luke did not have a government-issued cell phone during her tenure in the House, Takeshita said. And the House does not maintain call logs for landlines, he said. 

The House does not issue government cell phones as a matter of policy, Takeshita said, because it would be considered a taxable fringe benefit. It would also be too difficult for lawmakers to separate the official business conducted on their personal phones from private use, including for campaign purposes.

In response to Civil Beat’s records request, Takeshita said information technology staff delete the computer accounts of representatives “shortly after the member’s last day,” whether they leave office because of a resignation, finishing their term or failing to win reelection.

If there is a vacancy, the House may keep the account open until the opening is filled in case constituents continue to contact the office, Takeshita said. The House also deletes the accounts of former staff members. Luke served in the House from 1998 to 2022, when she was elected lieutenant governor. 

The House’s records retention schedule does not specifically address emails. It says legislative committee testimony and other records of the clerk — such as messages from the governor, bills, resolutions, communications, petitions, journals and roll call lists — must be maintained permanently. 

The policy says that audio tapes of House sessions, on the other hand, can be erased after two years so the tapes can be reused, but that language dates back to a time when physical tapes were used. The House now uses digital MP3 recordings, Takeshita said, and even though the retention schedule mandates they can be deleted after two years, he said they are kept much longer in practice.

Personnel records must be maintained for five years and payroll ledgers must be kept for 50 years, according to the schedule. 

States have different ways of handling legislative emails. In Massachusetts, for example, the Legislature is exempt from that state’s public records law, so lawmakers’ emails would not be considered public record. 

In Montana, though, legislators and their emails are subject to public records law, and that state is required to retain emails in an archive for five years after a lawmaker’s departure. In North Carolina, lawmakers’ emails are automatically deleted after three years. 

In Washington, legislators don’t even have to keep emails until the end of their terms. Last year, that state’s House of Representatives instituted a policy allowing lawmakers to automatically delete emails that have been in their accounts for 30 days.

Takeshita, the House clerk, said part of the reason the House deletes the accounts of departed representatives and staffers is so that it can recycle the paid licenses tied to each person’s Outlook account and use it for the next incoming person. 

Emails could conceivably be separated and archived in a way that they would be preserved and the licenses could still be reused, he said, but the House would have to change its policy and update its retention schedule to include emails.

Hurt said Hawaiʻi should make a policy to preserve lawmaker emails for at least three years. Emails can contain troves of information that can educate people about how bills are crafted and give the public important insight into who their elected officials are communicating with.

The lawmakers themselves should also want this to protect themselves if they ever come under suspicion, he said.

“I think it’s important to safeguard as much records and transparency, especially of public interest, as possible,” he said. “That way the dignity of that office, if ever questioned, can be answered truthfully.”