Democrat politicians spent two years telling Americans that COVID emergency powers were about public health.
Turns out some of them may have been also about something else entirely.
And now one Democrat is facing a grand jury indictment that pulls back the curtain on what was allegedly happening on the inside.
The Indictment and Who Else Got Swept Up
Luke was indicted by a grand jury on charges of criminal conspiracy to commit bribery, bribery, and falsifying candidate committee reports stemming from a bribe she allegedly took as a state lawmaker in 2022.
The others indicted were Ryan Yamane, a former state representative; Tobi Solidum, a businessman and lobbyist; Ford Fuchigami, an official with Hawaii’s Transportation Department; and Leo Asuncion, a former official with Hawaii’s public utilities commission.
That’s five people. A sitting lieutenant governor, a current state transportation official, a former state rep, a former utilities commissioner, and the lobbyist who allegedly bankrolled the whole operation.
The alleged co-conspirators include the state airports administrator, the ex-director of the Hawaii Department of Human Services, the former Public Utilities Commission chair, and a lobbyist who has fled the country.
Solidum fleeing the country is a detail worth sitting with for a moment. That’s not the behavior of someone who thinks the charges are flimsy.
Attorney General Anne Lopez said the indictments followed an investigation launched in January that stemmed from a federal public corruption probe. The state investigation ran for six months before prosecutors brought the case to the grand jury.
A Steakhouse, an Envelope, and a Wire
The charges stem from allegations that Luke accepted at least $35,000 in campaign contributions from businessman and lobbyist Tobi Solidum in exchange for support for testing sites operated by the National Kidney Foundation, where Solidum served as a lobbyist and consultant. Prosecutors allege Solidum handed Luke two $5,000 campaign checks during a meeting at a Morton’s Steakhouse in January 2022, where the two allegedly discussed state funding for COVID-19 testing sites, according to court filings.
What makes the dinner scene so damaging isn’t just the money. It’s who was sitting at the table recording every word.
Cullen served a two-year sentence in federal prison for bribery-related crimes. He became a witness for the FBI and in 2022 was wearing a wire to record a dinner he had with then-candidate for lieutenant governor Luke.
Luke at the time was chair of the state House Committee on Finance while raising campaign funds for her race for lieutenant governor. So she wasn’t just any lawmaker. She held the gavel on the committee with direct influence over state money.
The 30-page indictment centers on a January 20, 2022, meeting in a private dining area at Morton’s The Steakhouse at the Ala Moana Center in Honolulu, where Solidum and an associate put an envelope on a table for Luke. The envelope contained two $5,000 checks written out to the Friends of Sylvia Luke. Luke is alleged to have said, “Oh, thank you.” Then, she picked up the envelope and put it in her handbag.
And Solidum wasn’t shy about his intentions before the dinner even started.
“Solidum told Cullen that Luke was ‘Running for LG now. All I gotta do is give her more money,'” the indictment states.
At the dinner itself, the alleged promise got more specific. “By next week we’ll have 35 — so it will be halfway to our 70,” Solidum told Luke, according to the indictment.
Luke responded with “Oh wow,” and “That’s terrific,” the documents say.
The two $5,000 checks were subsequently deposited into the Friends of Sylvia Luke bank account, the same day Luke arranged for a meeting to discuss emergency appropriations for additional COVID community testing.
That timing is prosecutorial gold. The money goes in, and the meeting gets scheduled on the same day.
Luke accepted the money but failed to report the $10,000 in contributions as required until years later when Civil Beat asked about them. She has maintained she never accepted $35,000 from any one person. Luke said earlier this year that she tried to return that money after Cullen was arrested because she was “uncomfortable” keeping it.
According to the indictment, Luke served as chair of the House Committee on Finance when she accepted campaign contributions from Solidum with the “intent that her vote, exercise of discretion, or other action in her official capacity as an elected Representative and the Chair of the House Committee on Finance would be influenced.”
What the COVID Emergency Machinery Actually Produced
The political class demanded compliance from the public throughout the pandemic. Mask mandates, lockdowns, vaccine requirements, testing site protocols — all of it justified by appeals to the common good. But while regular people lost their businesses, missed their kids’ school years, and got fired for refusing injections, certain well-connected people were apparently working a different angle.
Solidum, according to the indictment, had developed what prosecutors described as “lucrative financial interests” working on the Department of Health’s contract with the National Kidney Foundation to provide COVID-19 testing. He allegedly made millions off those contracts. And the allegation is that he kept the money flowing by paying off the lawmakers who controlled the appropriations.
This is what happens when government seizes emergency control over large sectors of the economy and then hands out contracts with minimal oversight. The incentive to corrupt the process goes up in direct proportion to the amount of money being shoveled through it. COVID spending was a firehose of public money, and people like Solidum allegedly positioned themselves right in front of it.
But it wasn’t just Luke. In separate meetings, Yamane, then a state representative and House health chair, allegedly accepted cash numerous times — more than $1,000 in envelopes — from Solidum. Solidum also allegedly paid Fuchigami $7,000.
A Hawaii grand jury returned a 12-count indictment charging Luke with criminal conspiracy to commit bribery and falsifying candidate committee reports among other charges, according to the state’s Department of the Attorney General.
Her own governor isn’t standing by her. Gov Josh Green said in a written statement that Luke, who is on unpaid leave and quit her reelection campaign in April, should step down. “The Lieutenant Governor needs to consider formally resigning to address this matter and so that the state of Hawaii can move forward,” he said.
Her bail was set at $80,000.
Luke turned herself in after the indictment was issued. All five defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.
But the facts alleged in the indictment — the recorded dinner, the envelope of checks, the same-day meeting on emergency COVID funding — paint a picture of how the pandemic emergency apparatus got used by some of the people running it.
The Make America Healthy Again movement has been raising exactly this kind of concern: that the COVID response was not just a policy failure but a corruption opportunity, and that the people demanding the public’s compliance were sometimes the same people cashing in on the machinery they built. This indictment doesn’t prove a conspiracy, but it does prove that the concern wasn’t paranoid.
And it’s worth asking how many other states ran similar COVID contracting operations with similar oversight gaps — and whether Hawaii is the exception or just the one that got caught.
Sources: Fox News, The Hill, Hawaii News Now, Honolulu Star-Advertiser, Honolulu Civil Beat, Kauai Now, Aloha State Daily, UPI