Hey Liberals — You Can't Throw Stones in Your Glass Houses

Dear Democrats,

A lot of you shared my letter about the Reflecting Pool this morning. I am glad you did, and I meant every line of it. Now I owe you the other half, because I went looking for whether the thing I was describing only happens on one side, and it does not.

On July 24 an Oahu grand jury indicted Sylvia Luke, the Lieutenant Governor of Hawaii, on charges of conspiracy to commit bribery, bribery by a public servant, and falsifying candidate committee reports. Four other people were indicted with her, including her own campaign treasurer. Her governor, Josh Green, a Democrat, said out loud that she "needs to consider formally resigning to address this matter and so that the state of Hawaiʻi can move forward." That is not Fix News talking. That is the top Democrat in the state.

Here is what prosecutors say happened, and I want you to sit with the picture rather than the charge.

On January 20, 2022, at a table at Morton's Steakhouse, a businessman named Tobi Solidum told Luke, "By next week we'll have 35 — so it will be halfway to our 70." At that same dinner his stepdaughter handed her two checks of $5,000 each. Five days later Luke directed a House committee to take up an emergency appropriation. The money went to a Covid testing program, and Solidum's consulting company cleared more than $7 million out of the work. She did not report those two checks for years — until a reporter at Honolulu Civil Beat asked her about them.

And the detail I cannot stop thinking about: there was a fourth person at that dinner. Ty Cullen, a former House Finance vice chair who had served under Luke, was wearing an FBI recording device.

Now the part where I am careful, because it is the part that separates a publication from a mob. Everyone named here has pleaded not guilty. An indictment is an accusation, not a verdict, and legal observers in Hawaii have said this may be a hard case to prove. I am not asking you to convict Sylvia Luke on my page. I would not want it done to me and I will not do it to her.

I am asking you to look at the shape of it.

Because there is one thing on this page that requires no jury at all, and it is the thing I actually want to talk to you about.

There is a bill in Hawaii called SB 2530. It would bar government contractors — and their immediate family members — from donating to political candidates. It had support in the House last session. It died in the Senate. It died over a disagreement about how far the ban should reach into a contractor's relatives.

Read that again with the dinner in your head. The bill died over whether it should cover a contractor's relatives. The checks at that table were handed over by the contractor's stepdaughter.

That is not an allegation. Nobody has to prove anything in a courtroom for that to be true. It is a bill that did not pass, in a chamber your party runs, over the exact loophole the indictment describes. And it is four years after two other Hawaii Democrats went to federal prison in a bribery case that this investigation grew directly out of. You had the warning, you had the draft, and the door stayed open.

So this is the letter, and it is short because it only has one point in it. You cannot spend this week telling the country that the other guys are the party of no-bid contracts and donor money and officials who blame somebody else, while your own Lieutenant Governor is under indictment and her campaign treasurer is charged with falsifying the reports that would have shown the money. You can say one of those things. You cannot say both. The stones do not travel well from inside the house.

And here is the good news, which is real, and which is why I am writing to you instead of about you. Two state representatives in Hawaii — Kanani Souza, a Republican, and Della Au Belatti, a Democrat — are petitioning the governor right now for a special session to pass the contractor ban. Souza put the whole thing in one sentence: closing the loophole would make sure "legislators are not being influenced in ways that they should not be." Au Belatti says it would take some negotiation but that the contractor loophole can be closed.

Do that. Pass the bill you already wrote, in a special session, before the trial starts and it looks like a reaction instead of a principle. Then you will have earned the sentence you have been trying to say all week, and I will be the first one to print it for you.

I am leaving the bigger argument out of this letter on purpose — what happens to any government, of any party, when nobody is watching it at all. That one is not about Democrats and it deserves its own page. It is coming.

— Michael

The Official Internet Press Secretary

Spotlight Dispatch · August 4, 2026

michael@spotlightdispatch.com