Candidates and public officials should take note.
Yesterday’s arrest and indictment of former Honolulu prosecutor Keith Kaneshiro, along with four executives of the architectural/engineering firm of Mitsunaga & Associates, opens a new chapter in the feds’ ongoing corruption investigation here in Hawaii.
The charges against Kaneshiro include conspiracy and “honest services wire fraud,” the same charge that took down former legislators Kalani English and Ty Cullen at the beginning of this year.
There’s an interesting difference between the cases, though. English and Cullen took straight-out payoffs, while Kaneshiro is not accused of taking any direct bribes of that kind. Instead, taken in context, the otherwise legal campaign contributions made by a group of Mitsunaga-related people are alleged to have been quid pro quo bribes. To make their case, federal prosecutors have laid out a timeline tracing the Kaneshiro-Mitsunaga relationship over time as the company pressed Kaneshiro to file charges against a former Mitsunaga employee.
Prior prosecutions of elected officials for campaign violations have focused on the conversion of campaign funds to personal use by the candidates, but the application of honest services wire fraud to otherwise legal contributions isn’t new.
For example:
One of the recent trends is toward the crime of deprivation of honest services, a crime defined as “a scheme or artifice to deprive another of the intangible right of honest services. For example, Representative Bob Ney of Ohio pled guilty to accepting campaign contributions
for political favors, but instead of the original bribery charge, he pled guilty to deprivation of honest services. The Warner case out of the Northern District of Illinois involved a defendant who was charged with deprivation of honest services after his receipt of campaign contributions from parties for whom he subsequently secured contracts. The defendant argued that quid pro quo evidence is nonetheless required where mail fraud charges are predicted on the receipt of campaign contributions. He based this argument on policy reasons; namely, that not requiring a quid pro quo would open up any campaign contribution as a violation of federal law. The court concluded that the government does not have to identify any specific act so long as the defendant accepted campaign contributions with the understanding that in return he would perform or not perform acts in this official capacity.
For more information on the current policy questions in this area, see “Bribery, Kickbacks, and Self-Dealing: An Overview of Honest Services Fraud and Issues for Congress,” Congressional Research Service, May 2020.
The feds allege there had been no Mitsunaga-related contributions to Kaneshiro before they began discussing Mitsunaga’s request, and that later contributions were repeatedly made as the agreement between the prosecutor and the company developed. In the Kaneshiro-Mitsunaga case, prosecutors allege several false name contributions were made, in which one of the company execs contributed to Kaneshiro’s campaign without the consent or knowledge of those whose names were used, which are considered to be Class C felonies if charged under Hawaii campaign law.
It’s also interesting to see how intertwined this was with former deputy prosecutor Katherine Kealoha, now serving time after her conviction on a number of federal charges. The indictment alleges that after being advised by an experienced deputy that they should not pursue the charges requested by Mitsunaga, the case was then assigned to a newbie in the office.
“In or about the summer of 2014, after a senior Deputy Prosecuting Attorney recommended declining the L.J.M. case, KANESHIRO reassigned the case to recently hired Deputy Prosecuting Attorney, J.D, who was then assigned to the Career Criminal Unit of the DPA,” the indictment alleges.
“J.D.” appears to refer to former Hawaii County and Honolulu deputy prosecutor Jake Delaplane, as confirmed in a Civil Beat story on Friday by Christina Jedra (“Keith Kaneshiro Charges Detail Abuse Of Power, Bribery And Conspiracy“).
At the time, Delaplane was assigned to the career criminal division of the prosecutor’s office, which was headed by Katherine Kealoha.
Deleplane was also appears to be the “J.D.” described as part of a group close to Kealoha’s brother, Rudy Puana, who was convicted on a total of 38 federal drug charges earlier this year. Information about their relationship was disclosed in documents filed in Puana’s case.
There was just so much going on within Kaneshiro’s office that it feels like these prosecutions are only peeling away the first few layers of the onion.
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Let’s be real: ANY amount of money to a politician from a corporation/PAC/private citizen can and should be considered a bribe as those entities all EXPECT something in return, be it specific legislation, policy that favors them, bringing pork to a district or just the fulfilling of a campaign “promise”.
The American system encourages it all and condones it.
That’s why no one is truly wrong or disparaging when they say “Politicians are all crooks”.
Nothing substantive to add…just congratulations again, Ian, for a detailed and clearly explained case of serious political corruption in our paradise of the pacific. I hope this also appears in Civil Beat, but I still long for the much larger reach your writing and that of Jim Dooley once had in the Star-Bulletin and the Advertiser. There is still some good work being done in the Star-Advertiser (often with funding support by ProPublica), but nothing close to what was produced by the two competing dailies. Alas, those days are gone forever, here and throughout the country.
And once again the ineptness of our local law enforcement community and the depth of public corruption in Honolulu is on public display. The only 2 significant public officials who have so far escaped indictment and or imprisonment are the former mayor and governor – and I am not persuaded that final chapter has been written. The Paradise of the Pacific is beginning to look more and more like Al Capone’s Chicago. Great reporting Ian.
It is tempting to think of corruption in Hawaii as a hidden iceberg, but it might not run so deep. Peter Carlyle asserted as much when he wondered aloud how a prosecutor’s office that had no corruption became thoroughly corrupt so quickly. Think instead of a new disease sweeping through a population with “naive” immune systems. There is the issue of ineptitude, which is more damning. Carlyle pointed out that Keith Kaneshiro ran the prosecutors office but never personally took cases to court, but in order to run a good office, prosecutors must take on a share of the cases and be present in court. It could be that Kaneshiro lacks the skills to succeed in court, or feels uncertain of himself. Also, defense attorney Myles Breiner joked to his client Tracy Yoshimura that Katherine Kealoha seemed to lack basic legal knowledge (Breiner is now Kaneshiro’s attorney).