The Paper Bag and the Architecture of Self-Investigation

In January 2024, Senate Bill 2107 arrived at the Senate Judiciary Committee. It was a small piece of legislation — a few paragraphs amending HRS §28-8 to let the Attorney General appoint independent special counsel when an investigation “may present a conflict of interest for the Department.” It formalized a power the AG arguably already possessed. A doorstop, really. The kind of bill you pass on a voice vote and forget about.

Attorney General Anne Lopez did not forget about it. She submitted written testimony calling SB2107 “ultimately unnecessary.” She already had authority under HRS § 28-8 to appoint special deputy attorneys general with specified duties and powers. She could tap any of the four county prosecutors. She could enlist the Department of Law Enforcement. The tools existed. The bill was redundant.

The bill died in committee.

Thirteen months later, on February 13, 2026, a reporter asked Lopez why she would not appoint an independent prosecutor to investigate whether Lieutenant Governor Sylvia Luke accepted $35,000 in a paper bag from the dinner companion of an FBI informant.

“First,” Lopez said, “there is no legal process in Hawaiʻi law for the appointment of a special prosecutor.”

The door she bricked shut in 2024, she now gestured toward in 2026, palms up, as if she had never held the trowel.

I. The Architecture

This is Part II of a series called The Closed Loop. Part I examined the judicial branch: the Commission on Judicial Conduct, all seven members appointed by the Supreme Court they are meant to police, zero sustained complaints across six consecutive fiscal years, proceedings entombed behind confidentiality rules so total that complainants cannot obtain copies of their own filings. A fortress built by its own prisoners.

That was one wing of the building. This is another.

In Hawaii, the Attorney General is not elected. She is appointed by the Governor and serves at his pleasure. Attorney General Anne Lopez was appointed by Governor Josh Green. Lieutenant Governor Sylvia Luke is Governor Green’s running mate and, under the state’s Plan of Organization, Lopez’s hierarchical superior. When Lopez announced on January 21, 2026 that her office would investigate the $35,000 scandal, she was describing a building in which the investigator’s office sits one floor below the suspect’s — connected by stairwell, ventilation shaft, and the plumbing of political appointment. The state’s chief law enforcement officer would investigate the second-highest official in the administration that created her.

Retired federal public defender Alexander Silvert stated the geometry: “Because they’re being asked to investigate their immediate supervisor boss, the lieutenant governor, it creates a clear conflict of interest.”

Lopez’s rebuttal was a kind of architectural denial — the assertion that the rooms are not connected, that the stairwell does not exist. “There is no conflict because of my prosecutorial independence,” she told reporters. “I really want people to understand that I can’t be influenced.”

In Part I, the closed loop was a design problem: the Supreme Court appointing its own overseers. In Part II, the same blueprint has been transposed to the executive branch: the Governor appointing the person who decides whether his administration faces criminal charges. The nameplate on the door changes. The floorplan does not.

II. The Contradiction

What follows is documented. It requires no interpretation. The record contradicts itself and the contradiction has a name attached to it.

2024. Senate Bill 2107. Senate Judiciary Committee, January 25, 2024. The AG’s office submits written testimony in opposition. The argument: the bill is unnecessary. The AG already has authority under HRS § 28-8 to appoint special deputy attorneys general with specified duties and powers. The AG can “tap any of the four county prosecutor’s offices or enlist the Hawaiʻi Department of Law Enforcement.” Conclusion: “This bill, while well-intended, is ultimately unnecessary.”

The bill died. The AG’s testimony killed it.

2026. Press conference, Department of the Attorney General, February 13. Forty organizations comprising the Clean Elections Hawaii Coalition — Common Cause Hawaii, the League of Women Voters, the ACLU of Hawaii among them — have demanded an independent prosecutor. Lopez’s response:

“First, there is no legal process in Hawaiʻi law for the appointment of a special prosecutor. But even more importantly, the calls for a special prosecutor ignore the fact that the Special Investigations and Prosecutions Division was created for this exact purpose.”

She continued: “We can hire special deputy AG, an SDAG. The SDAG is still accountable to me and my department. It doesn’t provide the special prosecutor that people are looking for — somebody that can act completely independent of this department.”

Read it again. In 2024, the power existed and the bill was unnecessary. In 2026, with her own boss under scrutiny, the power does not exist and independence is structurally impossible. The bill that would have formalized the mechanism lies dead in committee, killed by her own hand.

This is not a change of mind. A change of mind requires acknowledging the first position. This is the quiet removal of a tool from a toolbox when the tool becomes inconvenient — and the subsequent insistence that the toolbox was always empty.

Silvert, in his February 15 Civil Beat essay, named it: “Presenting one position to a Senate committee to have a bill killed in 2024 and then taking the exact opposite position in 2026 to now justify why the office cannot appoint a special prosecutor raises troubling questions regarding the office’s candor and ability to act in the public’s best interest.”

Retired Judge Randal Lee did not bother with diplomacy: “When she says these things, which is factually incorrect, I think it questions her truth and veracity.”

This is how closed loops maintain themselves. The legal justification migrates to wherever it needs to be to ensure the investigation never leaves the building. The rationale is not a principle. It is a thermostat.

III. The Precedent She’s Ignoring

Lopez’s position — that a verbal declaration of independence neutralizes a structural conflict — is not merely unusual. It runs headlong into forty-five years of Hawaii Supreme Court jurisprudence, jurisprudence the Court itself has recently reaffirmed.

Amemiya v. Sapienza, 63 Haw. 424, 629 P.2d 1126 (1981). The Kukui Plaza bribery scandal. Developer Hal Hansen allegedly funneled approximately $500,000 to Honolulu Mayor Frank Fasi through campaign contributions in exchange for a redevelopment contract. City Prosecutor Maurice Sapienza — appointed by the Mayor — was asked to present the matter to the grand jury. Attorney General Ronald Amemiya looked at that arrangement and saw what it was: a man investigating his patron. Amemiya moved to disqualify Sapienza and his entire office. Sapienza refused to step aside. Amemiya obtained a circuit court injunction. A special prosecutor was appointed — Grant B. Cooper, a prominent California trial lawyer recommended by former Watergate special prosecutor Leon Jaworski.

The Hawaii Supreme Court affirmed. The holding:

“Because public trust in the scrupulous administration of justice and in the integrity of the judicial process is paramount, any serious doubt will be resolved in favor of disqualification.”

The Court did not stop there: “Where the public prosecutor has refused to act and such refusal amounts to a serious dereliction of duty on his part, or where, in the unusual case, it would be highly improper for the public prosecutor and his deputies to act, the attorney general may [supersede].”

This is not a case buried in the basement of Westlaw. The Hawaii Supreme Court cited Amemiya extensively in McGuire v. County of Hawaiʻi (2025), confirming it remains active, authoritative, governing law.

The structural parallel requires no embellishment. It is precise:

In 1981, the Attorney General was the one demanding that a conflicted prosecutor step aside. In 2026, the Attorney General is the one refusing to step aside — from an identical conflict, in the same jurisdiction, under the same constitutional framework.

The building hasn’t changed. Only the person standing in the doorway, blocking it.

IV. The Anti-Corruption Unit That Doesn’t Prosecute Corruption

When Lopez deflected calls for an independent prosecutor, she pointed inward — to her own division, SIPD, as proof the system already worked. “The Special Investigations and Prosecutions Division was created for this exact purpose, and it has been investigating and prosecuting public corruption in the state of Hawaiʻi over the last several years since its creation.”

A claim like that has a testable predicate. So test it.

SIPD was created by SB2930 (2022) with an initial appropriation of approximately $834,000 for nine positions — two deputy AGs, three forensic analysts, one legal assistant, two investigators, one legal clerk — plus $754,000 for a companion human trafficking unit. Combined: roughly $1.59 million and 18 positions. The division was legislated into existence for a single, explicit reason: the federal convictions of former State Representative Ty Cullen and former Senate Majority Leader J. Kalani English for accepting bribes from wastewater executive Milton Choy. The FBI built that case. The FBI ran the informant. The FBI recorded the conversations. State law enforcement contributed nothing. SIPD was the state’s answer — a promise that next time, Hawaii would catch its own.

SIPD has brought cases. They should be enumerated plainly, because the pattern is in the enumeration:

• February 2023: Dhaene family investment fraud ($309K scheme, joint with FBI). Not public corruption.
• February 2025: Moanaoio Bjur nonprofit fraud (~$81K from Conservation Council for Hawaiʻi). Not public corruption.
• August 2025: Ludin Yorleny Pena Miranda labor trafficking (9 counts, joint with DOL/DHS). Not public corruption.
• November 2025: HPD officers insurance fraud. Not political corruption.
• December 2025: Alohi Kaupu-Grace bank teller embezzlement (~$44K from Bank of Hawaii). Not public corruption.
• January 2026: HPD Officers Serrao & Kenolio — perjury, evidence tampering. Closest to public integrity. Not political corruption.

Bank tellers. Nonprofit bookkeepers. A mileage-form cheat in Hilo. The unit created to catch the next Milton Choy has spent four years prosecuting people who could not afford lawyers good enough to make the case complicated. In a state rocked by multimillion-dollar COVID testing fraud, unreported campaign contributions from federally investigated lobbyists, and the $35,000 paper bag exchange — SIPD has produced zero prosecutions of elected state officials, cabinet-level appointees, or influential political donors. The highest-profile public corruption target it has reached is a Department of Education complex area business manager charged with [falsifying mileage and parking forms to steal approximately $7,000](https://ag.hawaii.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/News-Release-2023-07.pdf).

Seven thousand dollars. That is the ceiling.

Retired Judge Randal Lee heard Lopez claim that SIPD “has been investigating and prosecuting public corruption” and responded: “When she says these things, which is factually incorrect, I think it questions her truth and veracity. And then, in essence, it heightens the lack of transparency.”

There is one more thing. SB2930 SD2, Section 3 required SIPD to submit annual reports to the Legislature for 2023, 2024, and 2025 — case data, personnel numbers, budget information, policy recommendations. No published SIPD annual reports could be located through the AG’s website, the Legislature’s website, or news archives. Whether these reports were filed confidentially, filed and never published, or never filed at all is unknown. The statute required them. The public cannot find them. The unit created to end Hawaii’s reliance on federal prosecutors for public corruption cases has no publicly verifiable performance record.

The loop is closed from the inside.

V. The Money Trail

Understanding why the structural failure matters requires understanding what the structure is insulating.

On January 20, 2022, former State Representative Ty Cullen — by then a cooperating FBI informant, wired and recording — attended a dinner with lobbyist Tobi Solidum, Solidum’s stepdaughter Kristen Pae, and an unnamed “influential state legislator.” According to federal court documents filed in Cullen’s sentencing, Solidum handed the legislator approximately $35,000 in a paper bag.

A paper bag. Not a wire transfer, not a bundled contribution through a PAC, not even a check with a memo line left tactfully blank. A paper bag at a dinner table. The FBI was recording.

Lieutenant Governor Sylvia Luke — at the time the House Finance Committee Chair, the most powerful budget position in the Legislature — acknowledged on February 10, 2026 that “the circumstances are that it could be me.” She simultaneously denied receiving $35,000 in cash or a paper bag, stating she received two $5,000 checks from Solidum and Pae at the dinner — totaling $10,000, not $35,000. She returned the checks in March 2022 after Cullen was federally charged — but did not report either the donations or the refunds on her campaign spending filings until Civil Beat asked about them in February 2026. Four years of silence, broken only by a reporter’s phone call. Her campaign simultaneously discovered a $6,000 donation from Brant Tanaka in 2021 that had been deposited but never recorded. Total unreported: $16,000.

During the week of January 20–27, 2022, Luke’s campaign reported $36,350 in deposits from 16 individuals and organizations. According to [Civil Beat's analysis of state campaign finance data](https://www.civilbeat.org/2026/01/we-asked-hawaii-lawmakers-did-you-take-35000-in-a-paper-bag/), she was the only lawmaker to report receiving at least $35,000 within the seven-day reporting window of the federal transaction. The $10,000 from Solidum and Pae was not included in that $36,350 — those were the unreported donations — meaning the actual total was higher.

Whether the $35,000 in the paper bag and the $36,350 in deposits are the same money is a question for forensic accountants and, eventually, a grand jury. But for the purposes of this structural analysis, the answer is irrelevant. Whether Luke is innocent or guilty, the investigation is being conducted by a person who cannot investigate her independently. That is the architectural failure. It is load-bearing. It holds either way.

VI. Where the Money Came From

The $35,000 did not materialize at a dinner table. It had an origin. Trace it backward and you arrive at a pandemic, a nonprofit, and an Ohio startup that nobody had heard of.

In early 2020, lobbyist Tobi Solidum — working as a consultant for the National Kidney Foundation of Hawaiʻi (NKFH) — approached then-Mayor Kirk Caldwell’s administration with a proposal: give the foundation a no-bid emergency contract and it would stand up a COVID testing lab at Daniel K. Inouye International Airport. Caldwell agreed. No competitive bid. No vetting of downstream subcontractors. Emergency procurement.

Before the pandemic, NKFH’s annual revenue never exceeded $3 million. Between FY 2021 and FY 2023, it pulled in [more than $135 million](https://nocope.substack.com/p/who-is-tobi-solidum) from COVID testing. Most of that money flowed downstream to Capture Diagnostics — an Ohio-based startup with no prior experience in mass medical testing, processing samples in a state two ocean crossings away. Johns Hopkins accounting professor Ge Bai examined the arrangement and provided context: Capture charged approximately [$120 per test](https://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/2022/08/20/experts-non-profits-lucrative-sweetheart-deal-non-bid-covid-testing-contract-gouged-taxpayers/) when the actual cost was approximately $20. “That is an outrageous amount,” Bai said.

The ecology of this arrangement deserves mapping. Solidum’s company, Geopolicy Development Group — registered in Las Vegas under stepdaughter Pae’s name — held equity in Capture Diagnostics. The Green Coral Trust, controlled by Solidum, Pae, and a Beverly Hills attorney, owned 5.46% of Capture and 80% of Geopolicy. In September 2022, the trust received a dividend of approximately $995,000. An email from Capture's CEO to the trust's attorney had the subject line "Tobi Dividend." Capture's bankruptcy filings later alleged Solidum overbilled the company by [$7 million](https://www.civilbeat.org/2026/02/luke-donor-and-friends-cashed-in-on-city-funded-covid-testing-program/) in consulting fees.

A nonprofit kidney foundation. A no-bid pandemic contract. An Ohio lab charging six times the market rate. A Las Vegas shell company. A Beverly Hills trust. A million-dollar dividend. A $7 million overbilling claim. And from somewhere inside this apparatus, $35,000 found its way into a paper bag and across a dinner table while the FBI listened.

Milton Choy — the same man whose bribes to Cullen and English created the federal scandal that led to SIPD’s creation — was also embedded in this network. His company, H2O Process Systems, received approximately [$968,000](https://www.staradvertiser.com/2026/02/13/hawaii-news/lobbyist-at-center-paper-bag-case-under-federal-investigation/) from NKFH for sanitization and hazardous waste services at the airport lab. Civil Beat documented [19 occasions between 2015 and 2021](https://www.civilbeat.org/2026/02/sylvia-luke-quietly-took-thousands-from-this-lobbyist-linked-to-cullen/) where Solidum and Choy donated to the same political candidates on the same dates, often in the same amounts — combined total: $31,450 to matching candidates. Overall, Choy gave $160,150 and Solidum gave $108,626 to state and county lawmakers between 2014 and 2022.

Choy was convicted federally of bribing Cullen and English, and separately of paying over $2 million in bribes to a Maui County official for $19.3 million in no-bid contracts. He was sentenced to 41 months. He died in federal prison at Federal Medical Center Butner on June 22, 2024, at age 61.

Solidum is believed to be in the Philippines. His phone is disconnected. He is no longer at his last known Honolulu address. Capture Diagnostics’ bankruptcy filings noted the $7 million claim against him was “probably uncollectable because his whereabouts were unknown.” He has not been criminally charged. He is described as “a target of an ongoing federal public corruption and COVID-19 fraud probe.”

Same people. Same dinner. Same money. And the state’s anti-corruption unit — tasked with following the thread — reports to the AG, who reports to the Governor, who ran on a ticket with the person the thread leads to. The architecture was not designed to fail. It was designed to succeed at something other than accountability.

VII. The Pattern

The state of Hawaii did not catch Ty Cullen. The FBI did. The state did not catch J. Kalani English. The FBI did. The state did not catch HPD Chief Louis Kealoha and Deputy Prosecutor Katherine Kealoha — the greatest corruption case in Hawaii history, involving a fabricated mailbox theft, framed family members, corrupt officers, and a $250,000 illegal payout orchestrated by three former city officials. The FBI did. The state did not detect the $35,000 in the paper bag. An improperly redacted federal sentencing memo and a Civil Beat reporter did.

This is the pattern. Federal investigators build the case, collect the evidence, wire the informants, record the dinners. Then they hand the wreckage to the state. The state stands over it with a broom and a dustpan and a mandate to clean house and somehow the house is never clean.

AG Lopez herself acknowledged this history when announcing SIPD’s takeover of the investigation. “Prior to 2022,” she said, “the state relied on the federal government to investigate and prosecute public corruption.”

She offered this as an argument for SIPD — her internal unit, created in 2022 — being the solution. But SIPD’s four-year record says something else. It says the state built a new room in the same building and called it a separate structure. The federal government built the English/Cullen case. The federal government built the Kealoha case. The federal government recorded the paper bag exchange. Then the federal government handed the evidence to the state, and the state is investigating it with an office that answers to the administration implicated by the evidence.

The initial federal refusal to share evidence with SIPD was not a bureaucratic oversight. It was an assessment. Federal law enforcement understood that injecting sensitive evidence into a system where the AG reports to the Governor — who relies on the targets of the investigation for political survival — creates a security risk. They eventually reversed course, reportedly after determining the alleged conduct did not constitute a federal crime but might violate state campaign finance law. The evidence was shared. The structural conflict was not addressed.

The evidence crossed the threshold. The architecture that makes the threshold a trap did not change.

VIII. Three Loops

In Part I, I mapped the judicial closed loop. Here is the executive loop alongside it. And beside that, a third — law enforcement — because the topology of accountability in this state has a fractal quality. The pattern repeats at every scale.

The third column. Civil Beat’s analysis of 58 arbitration awards over 25 years found HPD ranks fourth nationally in reinstating fired officers. The SHOPO contract — which expired June 30, 2025 and is presumably under renegotiation — includes 30-minute interrogation limits, on-duty questioning requirements, a one-year statute of limitations on misconduct allegations, and mandatory purging of derogatory material from personnel files after four years. Sergeant Darren Cachola, terminated for assaulting a woman on video in 2014, was reinstated in 2018 after an arbitrator called it a “playful sparring match.” Daniel Sellers, convicted in the Kealoha corruption case, was reinstated through arbitration. A 2024 city audit found the Honolulu Police Commission’s oversight “inconsistent and ineffective” — a “black box” where complaint outcomes disappear.

Three branches. Three loops. The same blueprint stamped onto different institutional facades. Every overseer appointed by the overseen. Every record sealed by the institution that produced it. Every reform attempt dead on arrival, killed by the entity it was designed to constrain. The city is built on these loops. They are the foundation. The rest is decoration.

IX. The Walls

Every accountability mechanism in Hawaii operates behind a confidentiality wall. This is not an incidental feature. It is structural. The walls are load-bearing.

The Commission on Judicial Conduct seals everything under Rule 8.4. The Office of Information Practices ruled it exempt from public records law. The public cannot see in. The subjects cannot see out.

The AG/SIPD operates under blanket policy: the Department “will not make statements to confirm or deny the existence of investigations.” Lopez herself, February 13: “I cannot name names; I cannot tell you what evidence we’ve received; and I can’t tell you whether or not a crime has been committed.” SIPD’s enabling legislation required annual reports to the Legislature. None are publicly available.

The State Ethics Commission is confidential by statute. HRS §84-31(b): “The commission shall investigate all charges on a confidential basis… proceedings at this stage shall not be public.” Every complaint sealed until a formal contested case hearing — if one ever occurs. The Ethics Commission currently has two of its five seats vacant, with the application deadline extended to March 13, 2026. New commissioners will be nominated by the Judicial Council and appointed by the Governor — the same Governor whose administration is under investigation. Another loop, nested inside the others.

The Campaign Spending Commission operates under similar opacity. Its executive director stated in July 2025 that the agency did not want to “jeopardize criminal investigations” and would wait until “feasible” to pursue civil violations. Deference as paralysis.

SHOPO aggressively fights disclosure of arbitration proceedings. In the Cachola case, the union sued to block release of the arbitration decision. The Hawaii Supreme Court eventually ruled in SHOPO v. SPJ that police misconduct records have minimal privacy protection — but the union continues to resist disclosure as its default posture. The ruling changed the law. It did not change the behavior.

Grand jury proceedings are sealed under HRPP Rule 6(e). In a system where the AG controls what evidence reaches the grand jury, and the AG has a structural interest in the outcome, grand jury secrecy ceases to function as a protection for witnesses and becomes an insulation layer for the prosecutor. A conflicted AG with sole control of the presentation can under-present evidence, decline to call witnesses, frame questions to steer away from an indictment — all of it invisible, all of it unreviewable, all of it behind the wall.

At every checkpoint — judicial, executive, law enforcement, ethics, campaign finance, grand jury — confidentiality provisions prevent the public from verifying whether accountability mechanisms are functioning. The system asserts that it works. No one can check. The walls were built to protect the process from outside interference. In practice, they protect the process from outside observation. The distinction is the entire ballgame.

X. The Question That Answers Itself

This article is not about whether Sylvia Luke took $35,000 in a paper bag. The structural argument does not depend on the answer.

If she is innocent, an investigation conducted by her political subordinate will carry the taint of a whitewash permanently. No exoneration will be complete. The public will measure the verdict against the architecture that produced it and find both insufficient.

If she is guilty, an investigation conducted by her political subordinate faces overwhelming institutional incentives to narrow the scope, undercharge, or close the file quietly — all behind a confidentiality wall that makes each of these outcomes indistinguishable from the others.

Either way, the building fails. That is what it means to talk about architecture. It is not about the people in the rooms. It is about the rooms.

The Clean Elections Hawaii Coalition — 40 organizations — stated it: “The Executive Branch cannot investigate itself. Public trust in government has been severely impacted by recent revelations. Restoring public trust requires an appropriate arm’s length distance from the interested parties in the Executive Branch.”

The Hawaii Supreme Court stated the same principle in 1981: “Any serious doubt will be resolved in favor of disqualification.”

The AG killed the bill that would have given her the tool. She now says the tool does not exist. The forty-five-year-old precedent says otherwise. The record says otherwise. The data says otherwise. And the investigation of the second-highest official in the state — bankrolled by $135 million in pandemic testing profits routed through a kidney foundation, laundered through an Ohio lab charging six times cost, channeled through a lobbyist who has fled to the Philippines, connected to a convicted felon who died in a federal prison in North Carolina — advances inside the closed loop, behind the wall, where the public is told the machinery is working but cannot hear it run.

I told you in Part I: the machine runs on silence.

The silence has not broken. But the architecture is visible now. And architecture, unlike silence, can be taken apart.

This is the second article in The Closed Loop series. Part I: The Zero Commission documented the judicial branch. If you have information about SIPD’s operations, the SB2107 testimony, or the disposition of SIPD’s required legislative reports, contact the author at [email protected].

Exhibit: SIPD Prosecution Record (2022–2026)

Data compiled from AG news releases, federal court filings, and news reporting. This table includes all publicly documented SIPD-tagged prosecutions identified through systematic review. Additional cases may exist in the human trafficking portfolio or in matters not publicly attributed to SIPD.

Of the cases above, one involves campaign finance violations (Timothy Lee) and two involve police officer misconduct. None involve elected state lawmakers, cabinet officials, or high-level political donors. SIPD’s enabling legislation — SB2930, passed in direct response to the English/Cullen federal bribery convictions — was specifically mandated to address public corruption at the highest levels. Four years in, the unit has not reached that level.