Dela Cruz Silent On Bribery Charges Leveled At Former Staff Member

Sen. Donovan Dela Cruz was crucial to fast-tracking legislation now at the center of the state's bribery case, and his then-new staff member is among those indicted.

But the senator has declined to answer questions about the role Ford Fuchigami – now the state’s airport administrator – may have played in the alleged scheme to direct millions of dollars in taxpayer funds to pricey Covid-19 testing centers.

That silence, some critics say, speaks volumes.

“I think silence here makes you look complicit – whether you are or not,” Judith Wong, secretary of the League of Women Voters of Honolulu, said. 

Fuchigami worked for Dela Cruz in 2022. During that legislative session, Fuchigami is accused of taking a $7,000 bribe from lobbyist Tobi Solidum and meeting with Solidum and then-Rep. Ryan Yamane, another co-defendant in the bribery case, to discuss emergency funding for the state health department.

Fuchigami has pleaded not guilty, as has Yamane, Lt. Gov. Sylvia Luke and her former campaign treasurer.

As chairman of the Senate Ways and Means Committee, Dela Cruz helped fast-track the bill that provided emergency funding to the testing centers, the one that is now central to the state’s bribery case. Fuchigami’s job at the committee as a budget analyst put him in close proximity to major decisions that affected the two-year, $15 billion general fund budget.

Funds in the emergency appropriations bill for the health department totaled more than $160 million between 2022 and 2023. To what extent Dela Cruz was part of the bill discussions, and why his budget analyst was directly involved, remains unclear for now.

The measure's treatment raises other questions, too; it was among the few that Dela Cruz recommended advance that year without first going through an end-of-session slog known as conference committee, a secretive negotiation process between the House and Senate where many bills end up dying.

Gary Hooser, a former state senator, said the Legislature should conduct an independent audit of budget decisions made during the 2022 session, including changes or additions made by the House and Senate, especially during the period Fuchigami worked for the committee.

Such a review could “remove any unwarranted suspicion and expose any secret dealings perhaps the chair (Dela Cruz) wasn't aware of.”

While wide-reaching, that kind of review would not be unprecedented. In 2022, the Senate audited the work product of former Sen. J. Kalani English, who was convicted that year on bribery charges in a federal case that led to the current state case against Luke and others.

Whether a review will happen this time is yet to be seen.

In a written statement on behalf of members of the Ways and Means Committee, Senate spokesperson Sheryl Turbeville declined to comment on the indictment because it is an active criminal matter. The statement also said that Fuchigami’s duties during the 2022 session “did not include work on any Covid-19 emergency appropriation legislation referenced in the indictment.”

Dela Cruz himself hasn’t responded to multiple inquiries from Civil Beat regarding Fuchigami and the funding measure since the indictments came down on July 24.

While the criminal justice system will ultimately decide what happens with this bribery case, Wong said the Legislature has a duty to create an environment that discourages corruption. She’s among those who have called on lawmakers to immediately ban campaign donations from government contractors. 

Community groups have called for a special session to take up that measure, but House and Senate leaders have been mum on the prospects of a special session.

“Nationwide, people are more skeptical of politics,” Wong said. “The silence only adds to that. If people are not willing to, at a bare minimum, say, ‘This is wrong,’ then they just feed that fire that says, ‘They’re all corrupt.’” 

Bill Skipped Late Session Negotiations

The path the emergency funding measure for the health department took through the Legislature was out of the ordinary.

Typically, requests for emergency funding come from the governor, but House Bill 2392, the funding bill came from Yamane, then chair of the House Health, Human Services and Homelessness Committee.

The bill eventually passed, and included $79 million destined for Covid testing labs run by the National Kidney Foundation of Hawaiʻi. The foundation’s consultant, Solidum, is the person accused of bribing state lawmakers and Fuchigami to move the bill along.

But it also got some help from Dela Cruz in the last half of the session.

Dela Cruz recommended that the bill pass with a “clean date” – a flag for both the House and Senate that the bill can advance quickly to the governor’s office and skip a contentious, late-session negotiation process known as conference committee, where bills are often stalled and die.

It was one of just a handful of measures that year to receive such treatment, Civil Beat found after reviewing 79 House bills containing appropriations referred to Dela Cruz’s committee in 2022. The others dealt with budgets for the three branches of government, regulating cryptocurrency and issuing bonds for the University of Hawaiʻi.

The other 72 House bills seeking appropriations advanced out of Ways and Means with what’s called a “bad date” or a “defective effective date,” where a measure will take effect in a year far into the future like 2060 or 3100. Many of them came to the committee in that state, while others were changed by Ways and Means.

Lawmakers rarely have the intention of delaying laws for a hundred years. Instead, those “bad dates” are inserted as a way of ensuring that the bill goes to conference committee.

Political observers and former lawmakers said it is rare for bills to make it past the money committees with clean dates, effectively fast-tracking them, as HB 2392 did. However, lawmakers likely hastened its passage because it was an emergency appropriations bill holding funds that had to be spent by the end of the fiscal year on June 30.

It was among measures that Gov. David Ige asked lawmakers to pass immediately. It was transmitted to his office on April 12, well before the end of session.

“You’re trying to get the money out as soon as possible,” former Ways and Means Chairman Brian Taniguchi said. “It’s usually something most people agree with, where there won’t be any controversy, and they need to spend the money now.”

The health department funding bill came to the Ways and Means Committee with a “clean date” already inserted from the Senate Health Committee, chaired by Sen. Jarrett Keohokalole. The amendments added by Keohokalole were at the behest of the health department, according to a committee report.

But Dela Cruz took other bills with clean dates and changed them to take effect in the future, like the year 2050, essentially putting up a barrier to their passage. Some of those bills would have funded legal counsel for low-income immigrants and a program to remove invasive species from the Waiāhole Stream. Both measures later died.

Two other bills that died were also on the list of emergency funding bills requested by Ige. They included funds for the state education department to build a new maintenance baseyard and develop an agriculture innovation center “to give students an opportunity to learn more about local food production,” a committee report said.

Earlier in the 2022 session, Dela Cruz, a well-known advocate for agricultural interests, inserted defective dates into both of those measures.

Defendants in the bribery case are set to appear in court again on Thursday for a status conference. Their trial is scheduled for Sept. 28.