The prosecution of Laurel Mau was unusual from the start. 

There was no police investigation of her alleged theft from her former employer, the prominent local engineering firm Mitsunaga & Associates Inc. At least two line prosecutors determined no crime had occurred. And the allegations never cleared the hurdle of a grand jury. 

Nevertheless, accusations by Mitsunaga’s firm were turned into criminal charges submitted to the court by “information,” and Mau faced felony charges that could have put her in prison for years. 

What motivated Honolulu prosecuting attorney Keith Kaneshiro to pursue the case, according to federal prosecutors, was money. Over several years, Mitsunaga and those connected to him sent Kaneshiro nearly $50,000 in campaign contributions. 

A trial set to begin this week will put that narrative to the test. Kaneshiro, engineering firm CEO Dennis Mitsunaga and his associates – former firm attorney Sheri Tanaka, secretary Terri Ann Otani, chief operating officer Aaron Fujii and vice president Chad Michael McDonald – are all charged with multiple counts of conspiracy to commit fraud and violate a person’s rights. 

Federal prosecutors are painting a picture of a prosecution purchased for revenge.

The allegations depict a prosecutor determined to force through a meritless case against an innocent woman at the behest of the woman’s former boss – a businessman who flooded the prosecutor’s campaign coffers with cash as a means to achieve his malicious aims. 

The alleged scheme was ultimately unsuccessful, with a state judge throwing out the charges against Mau and excoriating Kaneshiro’s office for bringing the case forward in the first place. 

All the defendants have pleaded not guilty, and their attorneys have sought to poke holes in the case against them. While prosecutors are alleging a quid pro quo, the evidence of any such arrangement is circumstantial, the defense argues. There is no smoking gun document or recording capturing a prosecution-for-cash promise, they say.

Furthermore, there is nothing illegal about political contributions, which the defense says are a perfectly legitimate way of “gaining access” to a public official. 

“Campaign contributions are not only a constitutionally-protected form of free speech, but due to reporting requirements are an extremely public and transparent way to spend money,” the defense’s trial brief states. “By contrast a bribe is clandestine by nature.” 

The case puts a spotlight on an often-discussed but rarely prosecuted practice: pay-to-play, directing money to public officials to gain influence or achieve a goal. 

The line at which that kind of political activity becomes a crime will be up to the jury. 

“According to the government, the difference is that in general, when you donate money to a politician, you donate it, and maybe you hope they’ll give you some favorable benefits for it, but you’re not making any specific request,” said former federal public defender Ali Silvert. 

“Here the government alleges there was a specific ask.” 

Jury selection is set to begin on Tuesday, with opening statements slated for Friday. The trial is expected to last several weeks. 

At its core, the case is about whether Honolulu’s prosecutor saw the duties of his office as something for sale.

“It’s a step beyond getting a government contract,” said Hawaii political scientist Colin Moore. “It’s using the power of the state, a unique power that a city and county prosecutor has, to target an individual.”

‘A Pretty Good Return’ 

The case was brought forth by Special Prosecutor Michael Wheat of San Diego who has been investigating public corruption in Honolulu since at least 2015. Wheat was originally called in to investigate what became the largest corruption scandal in Hawaii history – the downfall of former police chief Louis Kealoha and deputy prosecutor Katherine Kealoha – but his scope has expanded since. 

In this instance, Wheat is taking on a three-time elected prosecutor and a businessman whose political giving and influence peddling has long attracted scrutiny but who has not been hit with criminal charges, until now. 

Allegations of pay-to-play corruption have surrounded Mitsunaga for years due to his heavy political giving and frequent receipt of government contracts. Still today, the firm holds numerous state contracts. Just in the time since he was indicted, the firm won more than $1.5 million in work, mostly from the Hawaii Department of Education, records show. 

In the early 2000s, Mitsunaga’s name was raised by a Honolulu prosecutor pursuing an illegal donations case against someone else. In response, Mitsunaga announced that he had taken a lie detector test that exonerated him of the claims, the Honolulu Advertiser reported in 2004. 

In 2012, Mitsunaga’s political giving to his longtime friend, former Hawaii Gov. Ben Cayetano, captured public attention. A significant amount of Cayetano’s fundraising in a race for Honolulu mayor came from more than a dozen people connected to Mitsunaga, including Otani, McDonald and others mentioned in the current case record. 

The pro-rail group Pacific Resource Partnership, or PRP, seized on the donations to suggest Cayetano was unduly influenced. Mitsunaga fired back at the time, referring to the claims as “smears” and “lies.” 

Donations through the years caught the eye of the Hawaii Campaign Spending Commission, but the oversight board came up empty-handed. 

“He was pretty clever. If he did make excess contributions, we couldn’t find it,” former commission executive director Bob Watada told Civil Beat in 2012. “But the reason I remember him is his companies were getting a lot of contracts. We were looking for contributions that he may have made in another name or something else. But that’s one that we couldn’t find.”

A few years later, Mitsunaga was found to be bankrolling a political action committee opposing then-mayoral candidate Kirk Caldwell. Mitsunaga and his family donated more than a quarter-million dollars to the effort, aimed at helping Caldwell’s opponent, Charles Djou. 

“I guess I would ask why someone wants to contribute $250,000 to a mayoral campaign unless he thinks he’s going to get a pretty good return on it,” Caldwell’s campaign chair Lex Smith said in 2016.

That PAC was criticized for hiding its donors past deadlines requiring disclosure. 

A few years later, in 2018, Mitsunaga was identified as the driving force behind another PAC, this time supporting former U.S. Rep. Colleen Hanabusa for governor. That PAC was fined for failing to file proper paperwork as it aired pro-Hanabusa TV ads right before the election. 

Federal prosecutors have pointed to Mitsunaga’s prior political giving as evidence of an established campaign financing apparatus that the businessman tapped into when going after Mau. 

Mitsunaga’s defense witness list hints at his political connections. Among those listed are  Honolulu Mayor Rick Blangardi, Hanabusa, and former Honolulu City Council members Ann Kobayashi and Ernie Martin. Martin and Hanabusa did not respond to requests for comment. 

In a statement, Blangiardi communications director Scott Humber said Mitsunaga’s attorney contacted the mayor earlier this year to “confirm that Mr. Mitsunaga had never asked him for and has never received anything in exchange for a political contribution.”

 “Mayor Blangiardi will testify to that fact in court if he is called upon to do so,” Humber said. 

Theft Accusations 

The tensions that laid the foundation for the current indictment have been boiling up for years. 

Mau worked for Mitsunaga’s firm for 15 years as an architect. But around 2011, the employee-employer relationship soured, according to prosecutors. 

After Mau asked for a raise, Mitsunaga granted it but delivered her a letter full of criticism. Mau pushed back, citing instances of sexual harassment she’d experienced at the firm in years prior. Soon after, Mau was abruptly fired without an explanation, according to prosecutors’ description of events. 

The end of Mau’s employment was just the beginning of a series of retaliatory actions the firm took against her, prosecutors say. 

The firm tried to block Mau’s access to unemployment benefits, claiming she had done “side jobs” on company time. 

An employment examiner sided with Mau. Mitsunaga’s firm appealed. A hearing officer again sided with Mau. According to one member of the unemployment office, the matter was notorious as the case that would “never die,” prosecutors said in their trial brief. 

Undeterred, Mitsunaga’s firm appealed to state court, which granted Mau her unemployment benefits. 

In 2012, as Mau prepared to file a lawsuit against the firm for gender and age discrimination, defendant Aaron Fujii reported a “theft” to Honolulu police. He named both Mau and a Honolulu attorney named Stanford Masui. 

Fujii supplied police with a 17-page memo outlining allegations that Mau had assisted Masui with a home renovation project on company time and with company resources, including her cellphone and email account. Fujii alleged Mau and Masui stood to financially benefit from the arrangement, but federal prosecutors say Mau received no compensation. 

In the prosecutors’ telling, Fujii walked away from the case, failing to respond to inquiries from HPD detective Phillip Snoops. The firm would later claim – falsely, the feds say – that Snoops told the complainants to bypass him and go directly to prosecutor Keith Kaneshiro’s office. 

After Mau’s lawsuit was filed, Mitsunaga and his associates started “angling” for a prosecution, the feds’ trial brief says. Mitsunaga’s cousin Terri Ann Otani had then-City Councilwoman Ann Kobayashi broker a meeting between Mitsunaga and Kaneshiro, according to the prosecution. 

In an interview, Kobayashi told Civil Beat that Otani is a friend and she does often make introductions among her contacts, but she doesn’t specifically recall setting up this meeting. 

On Oct. 4, 2012, Kaneshiro met with Mitsunaga and the firm’s attorney, Sheri Tanaka. Prosecutors say that’s when Mitsunaga “personally requested that Kaneshiro prosecute Mau for theft.” 

“Thus began a courtship in which the two men— Mitsunaga and Kaneshiro — or their assistants, routinely met, lunched, spoke, or corresponded with one another about the Laurel Mau case,” prosecutors’ trial brief states. 

“On multiple occasions, Kaneshiro requested information about Mau from (the firm’s) attorney, Tanaka, directly. This was an unprecedented relationship.” 

The case file was one of only a half-dozen to sit in the filing cabinet of Kaneshiro’s secretary, according to the feds. 

Campaign Money Flows In

In the ensuing months, Mitsunaga tapped into his network of employees, relatives, and business associates to funnel money to Kaneshiro’s reelection campaign. 

“These contributions were bundled, delivered together, and recorded on the same dates — proof of a coordinated effort within MAI to transfer as much money to Kaneshiro as possible while making the transfers appear legitimate and to make sure he knew where the money was coming from, Mitsunaga,” the feds say. 

While Mitsunaga was known to be a prolific political campaign donor, he had not given to Kaneshiro before. But the businessman and his associates quickly gave in such substantial amounts that they accounted for roughly 40% of all donations to Kaneshiro’s campaign in 2012, 2013, 2015 and 2016, the feds say. 

This was accomplished, in part, via a pressure campaign by Fujii and Otani directed at Mitsunaga’s contacts, including contractors and subcontractors, according to the feds. 

“We were doing work with Mitsunaga, and it was pretty much sort of understood that, you know, if you want to continue doing or have the opportunity to bid on their project, that it was expected of you,” one subcontractor told investigators. 

Kaneshiro responded to the cash flow by taking action on Mitsunaga’s request, the feds say. In front of Tanaka, he assigned the case to two people: a “respected fraud prosecutor” and an investigator with 27 years of experience with the FBI. 

“Unfortunately for the conspirators, these officials took their jobs seriously,” the feds said. 

After investigating the claims, both individuals determined that no crime had occurred. But Kaneshiro wouldn’t drop the matter. Instead, he reassigned it to Jacob Delaplane, a newly hired “junior attorney” who obeyed his new boss’s orders to charge the case by felony information – a process that would bypass a grand jury. 

The case rested almost exclusively on nearly 2,000 pages of “evidence” submitted by Mitsunaga employees Tanaka, Otani, Fujii and Chad Michael McDonald, according to the feds. Much of that evidence came from the civil litigation between Mau and the firm — a case that the feds called a “wash.” It ended in a rejection of Mau’s workplace discrimination claims and a $1 reward for Mitsunaga for a counterclaim of “breach of loyalty.” 

“Drawing from the same pool of evidence that failed to convince a civil jury of Mau’s improprieties, and relying on similar legal theories of fraud, the defendants alleged in the criminal case that Mau ‘stole’ from the company by using (the firm’s) email account and phone to do her side jobs and by submitting inaccurate time sheets.” 

In 2017, Judge Karen Nakasone threw the case out for lacking probable cause and ripped city prosecutors, accusing them of being a “conduit” for Mitsunaga. She called the case a “threat to the judicial process.” 

In spite of that condemnation, Kaneshiro asked his staff to appeal Nakasone’s dismissal. Both his division chief and appellate chief refused, the feds said. 

Proving A Quid Pro Quo

The most basic facts of the case are not in dispute: that Mitsunaga and his associates pursued a criminal case against Mau around the same time they directed campaign contributions to Kaneshiro, and Kaneshiro accepted those funds and took steps to move the prosecution forward. 

The defense says proving the case requires prosecutors to demonstrate a quid pro quo was “clear and unambiguous.”

“The purpose of this demanding standard is to ensure that the jury, when presented with evidence of a sequential relationship between a contribution and an official action, does not erroneously assume a causal relationship between the two,” the defense trial brief states. 

Prosecutors may not have a promise from Kaneshiro on tape, but having that kind of evidence is rarely the case in conspiracy trials, according to Silvert. 

“Most crimes (rely on) circumstantial evidence or witnesses who were present and can relay the nature of the conversation,” he said. 

“In any circumstantial evidence case, it’s just going to be a question of credibility … The government has to convince the jury that the giving of the money and what happened are directly related.”

As for the defense, several Mitsunaga firm employees may try to argue that they were just following the advice of counsel, in this case Tanaka. Silvert said they might say something to the effect of: “People told us this was OK, so we did it.” 

“For higher-ups, they’re going to make somewhat of the same argument, although it’s more difficult for them because the higher you are in the organization, saying ‘Oh I just did this because the lawyer told me to do it’ is a harder sell,” Silvert said. 

When it comes to Kaneshiro, the elected prosecutor may point to Delaplane, the junior attorney to whom he assigned the Mau case after it was rejected by more senior prosecutors. 

“One of the big defenses that Kaneshiro will use, is: ‘Hey, I asked a licensed deputy prosecutor to investigate a case. He, independently of me, believed there was probable cause. He presented it to the court,’” Silvert said. “And so that breaks any tie to him specifically doing anything improper.” 

That line of argument may put Delaplane in a difficult position. As attorneys, prosecutors are only allowed to bring forth cases they believe are valid, Silvert said. Delaplane is unlikely to admit during this trial that he only pursued the case because Kaneshiro told him to. 

“He’s going to be cross-examined very vigorously and it’ll be up to the jury to decide if he’s credible,” Silvert said. 

Mitsunaga also intends to fight back against the charges with evidence of his positive reputation in his profession and the community, court records show. 

Prosecutors have asked the court not to allow such evidence, calling it inadmissible hearsay. 

No matter what happens in the trial, Moore said the case could be considered a warning to both public officials and those who donate to them.

“The federal government is prosecuting someone who’s very prominent, who’s been involved in politics for a long time as a donor and volunteer,” Moore said.

“Major donors to politicians in Hawaii are going to be very, very careful, even more than they perhaps already were, about trying to ensure that nothing they get or say to elected officials could plausibly be linked to their campaign donations.”