Secrecy gone awry: Just when you thought the bribery and corruption case involving former Honolulu prosecutor Keith Kaneshiro and contractor Dennis Mitsunaga couldn’t get any weirder — it’s hard to top an alleged hitman, after all — the federal prosecutors keep filing the most tantalizing documents.

Too bad they’re heavily redacted.

And that has prompted the Public First Law Center to ask the court to unseal a number of the documents that the federal judge overseeing the case has allowed to be filed in secret, or seriously blacked out.

The Blog always thought that criminal trials were supposed to be conducted in open court. You know, so the government can’t lock you up and throw away the key without your fellow citizens knowing what was going on.

But there has been a lot of secret stuff going on in the Kaneshiro case — sealed filings, hearings behind closed doors — much of it apparently related to whether defendant Sheri Tanaka hired a hitman to knock off the previous federal judge in the case, J. Michael Seabright, who mysteriously recused himself, as well as Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Wheat, the lead prosecutor in the case.

Tanaka says the money she apparently paid to an alleged bad guy was actually part of an extortion scheme in which she was the victim and had to pay him off to keep him from hurting her family.

FBI agents are apparently still investigating all that and Tanaka remains free on bail.

Meanwhile, last week the feds filed another motion suggesting Tanaka not only lied to a federal judge but also has been intimidating at least one witness. Much of it is, wait for it, blacked out.

But the unredacted intro is most intriguing. (By the way, The Blog loves the line about striking down two birds with “one mendacious stone.”)

Prosecutors say they only learned about this alleged intimidation on March 27. According to the motion:

“A witness is expected to testify that soon upon learning about her grand jury appearance, Tanaka picked her up, drove her out of the city to an unfamiliar location in the hills, and instructed her to exit the car without her cell phone. There, on the side of the road, Tanaka began speaking to the witness about the grand jury investigation. After the witness objected and told Tanaka she did not wish to continue the conversation, Tanaka’s demeanor changed. Tanaka became very serious and began instructing the witness what to say to the grand jury about political contributions.”

The unredacted version of the feds’ latest Tanaka motion is just one of a half-dozen documents the law center is seeking to bring into the proverbial light of day. Basically, the law center says, neither the government, defendants nor the judge have given a good reason why these records need to be sealed.

Read the law center’s motion, filed Friday, here:

This agency doesn’t mess around: The Honolulu Medical Examiner gets a lot of public records requests, and not just from the media. Anyone can go online and request an autopsy report simply by filling out a basic form and paying $5. The ME’s office is one of the more enlightened when it comes to understanding Hawaii’s public records law and it generally wastes no time in releasing public records when asked.

And that’s just what happened a couple weeks ago when attorneys for the family of Angus Mitchell, the heir to the Paul Mitchell hair product empire, went to court to try to keep the ME from releasing an autopsy report on Mitchell.

The 53-year-old co-owner of John Paul Mitchell Systems was found dead in the swimming pool at his Diamond Head home early on the morning of Jan. 3. Police were called, the ME got the body, did an autopsy and notified the family in March that it had gotten media requests for the report and was about to release it, according to a lawsuit that the family filed March 28.

The lawsuit sought to prevent the ME from releasing the autopsy report on the grounds that it violated his and his family’s privacy and it contained information that was unrelated to Mitchell’s death. The motion seeking the temporary restraining order likens the case to media requests following the death of President John F. Kennedy and the Challenger space shuttle astronauts, among others.

The Public First Law Center wasted no time filing an amicus motion with the court, stating the obvious:

“Vague references to medical privacy do not justify withholding autopsy reports. That issue has been well-settled for decades, and decedent’s wealth, social status, and philanthropy as described in the motion do not justify special treatment,” executive director Brian Black wrote.

The 27-page filing goes on to detail why autopsy reports as well as toxicology information are public in Hawaii. You can read the original complaint, the Mitchell family’s motion and Black’s arguments about the public’s right to know on the law center’s website.

As it turns out, all of this became a moot point and the judge ultimately denied everybody’s motions. By the time Mitchell’s attorneys filed their case the ME had released the report. The Blog has no idea to whom because while the ME turned over the autopsy report upon receiving The Blog’s $5, the office still hasn’t revealed what public records requests it had received as The Blog asked for in a public records request March 28.

The Blog didn’t find any news story mentioning the autopsy report or its findings in a Google search. There were plenty of news reports soon after he died, though, and a number of TikTok video tributes. And reports of an Instagram video Mitchell apparently posted the night before his death where he was singing and having fun with friends and family at the house.

That particular video is no longer available on his Instagram page. But it might speak to what the autopsy report found: the cause of death was drowning and contributing factors included excessive levels of cocaine and alcohol.