FBI Still Delays Releasing Findings of Hawaii Lawmaker Bribery Investigation

Former state lawmakers Ty Cullen and J. Kalani English pleaded guilty more than two years ago to accepting bribes to influence legislation to benefit Honolulu businessman Milton Choy, who owned a wastewater disposal company.

Cullen and English served their sentences and were released from prison. Choy died in prison in June.

You would think there is no longer any reason to keep the public from seeing exactly what happened and how the investigation was conducted in what is probably the most serious case of public corruption in this state in decades. There is a great deal of public interest in seeing how this situation unfolded and what can be done to protect against it in the future.

However, the FBI and U.S. Attorney’s Office, in court documents, continue to argue that the investigation into Cullen and English must remain secret because making the matter public could jeopardize ongoing investigations.

Sorry, but that’s what federal prosecutors have been saying about their investigations into the spinoff for ages, and yet no new cases have surfaced, especially involving corruption by lawmakers, county officials, or even lobbyists. And the records in the federal lawsuit Civil Beat filed in May 2023 in an attempt to force the government to hand over the investigation suggest they’ve done nothing more than drag out our investigation.

And maybe others?

Here’s what our process looked like and where we are now.

But first, a summary.

Cullen, a former member of the state House of Representatives from Oahu, and English, a former longtime state senator from Maui, were embroiled in an FBI sting operation involving Choy, a Honolulu businessman who gave lawmakers tens of thousands of dollars in cash, casino chips and other valuables in exchange for helping pass legislation that would benefit his company.

The close relationship appears to date back to 2015 for Cullen, and almost as far back for English.

Meanwhile, Choy was also giving cash—at least $2 million, it turned out—to a Maui County environmental official named Steven Stant for favorable county contracts for his company. Stant eventually pleaded guilty and remains in federal prison.

It was Maui’s bribes that appear to have led the FBI to first sniff out Choy and turn him into a federal informant. He cooperated with the FBI for years before Cullen and English were arrested in 2022, and their arrests were made public in February of this year.

Months later, Civil Beat reporter Blaze Lovell filed federal Freedom of Information Act requests for investigative records on Cullen and English. At that point, they pleaded guilty but were not convicted.

The FBI rejected the initial requests, saying we didn’t show enough public interest in the case. We appealed, they rejected the appeal, the legislators were convicted and sent to prison. We wrote new FOIA requests, they were rejected, we appealed, and the appeals were rejected again.

We asked Public First Law Center to take on this case. Our lawsuit was filed in May 2023.

Little has happened beyond the usual early activity in the civil lawsuit and a few meetings between Public First Executive Director Brian Black and Dana Barbata, the assistant U.S. attorney who is handling the case for the FBI. The FBI has insisted that it is reviewing all records and preparing an index of the material, ostensibly so that we can all see what can be legally covered up.

The government has until May 2024 to justify which documents should be withheld; a hearing is scheduled for October.

In early May — a year after the lawsuit was filed — we filed additional public records requests in our investigation into Choy, Stant, and Wilfredo Savelli, a wastewater mechanic for Maui County who was a relatively minor player but admitted to accepting more than $40,000 in bribes from Choy.

Denied, dismissed, dismissed. Unfortunately, they are not part of this lawsuit and we will likely have to do it all again at some point.

Meanwhile, on May 20, just before the federal deadline to complete its review, the FBI filed for an extension, saying it needed more time to review the records. Either two years or four years, depending on what kind of review it actually decides to conduct—one in which they review the records for privacy purposes, or one in which they review them for privacy purposes along with all the other exemptions that might apply.

The FBI said it can only process 500 pages per month. And given the number of pages in the files, that would mean two to four years more for review.

He granted the court a stay of trial, moving it to 2025. He did so without even allowing Civil Beat to respond to the motion to postpone.

We took it to the next level and U.S. District Court Judge Susan Oki Mollway got the case. She has proven to be less tolerant of the government’s constant excuses, as evidenced by the series of short orders she has issued. She’s not kidding.

While she agreed to give the U.S. attorney until March or April 2025 to produce the records, she said the government had failed to justify a two- or four-year delay.

On June 21, she ordered the FBI to provide Civil Beat with a status report by June 28, which would have to include the number of documents and pages covered by Cullen and English’s requests. The FBI had to provide a date when the review would be conducted, she said, and it had to be well in advance of the trial date.

“The status report should explain why review and indexing is limited to 500 pages per month when there are two separate requests for two separate investigations,” Mollway wrote.

On June 27, the government told Mollway: No way. He wanted three more weeks, Barbata said, because the information “requires review and approval by many people.”

Mollway denied the request, noting that not only has the FOIA case been pending for more than a year but also that the government has plenty of time to obtain “all consents necessary to provide information consistent with this court’s order.”

So the FBI sent its response only to the judge, not to Civil Beat, which included a statement from the head of the FBI section overseeing the records. Mollway was visibly stunned and ordered the FBI to provide a detailed explanation of why the information was withheld from Civil Beat.

She further questioned the secrecy of the government’s actions and noted that the new declaration contradicts what was previously stated.

“Now, more than a year later, the FBI should have made progress, and if it didn’t, the delay is too long to be justified in the face of hundreds of other cases,” U.S. District Court Judge Susan Oki Mollway

“The FBI has already indicated that it will take 23 months to review and index the documents at a rate of 500 pages per month. That means there are at least 11,500 pages in dispute. By requesting 23 months, the FBI has already indicated that thousands of documents are involved. Why must the exact number remain secret?”

She gave them another week, until July 8, to deliver what she asked for. Instead, on July 8, she got another request for an extension.

“This is highly problematic,” Mollway wrote in another order, chastising federal prosecutors for trying to blame the delays on time zone differences, scheduled vacations and trying to manage hundreds of other cases.

“Now, more than a year later, the FBI should have made progress, and if it didn’t, the delay is too long to be justified by reference to hundreds of other cases.”

Mollway ultimately ordered the FBI to provide Civil Beat with a statement and reasons why it took so long to review the documents.

And as it turns out, the FBI hadn’t even begun its review. After all that, and after all the assurances that Barbata, the assistant U.S. attorney, had given Black, the lawyer at the law center.

“Processing has not yet begun,” the FBI finally admitted in its July 2 document, “because it does not know which processing schedule to follow.”

As Black noted in a recent motion opposing the FBI’s latest “split control” motion, “despite affirmative statements made over a period of more than a year that the FBI conducted what were variously described as controls on Vaughn or Maydak, the FBI stated that it did so Thread.”

Last week, Porter, a magistrate judge, denied a request for a much more tedious and complicated record review. And he ordered the U.S. attorney to provide weekly status reports to Civil Beat starting this month.

The next deadline for the government to respond is November.

We currently believe we have approximately 30,000 pages of transcripts, audio and video materials that we would be happy to view.

There was no way for the public to see what these two elected officials actually did when they violated the public trust. Because they pleaded guilty, there was no trial and no evidence was publicly released.

The investigative files are the only records that exist not only of what these two did, but also of how the government handled the case. There is a lot to investigate.

We believe this is extremely important, especially for assessing whether any changes need to be made to the way our legislative process works. It’s hard to imagine how you’d stop dishonest officials from taking envelopes of cash from the men’s room of a local restaurant, but we won’t know until we see the record.

Read the FBI’s explanation of why it takes officials so long to review documents: