 Welcome to Think Tech Hawaii's Movers, Shakers, and Reformers Politics in Hawaii series. I'm your host, Carl Campania. It is June 14th, and there's a lot going on. Today, we're going to talk specifically about a couple of things, a few things that happened yesterday and over the course of the last week or so, things have come up. Specifically lawsuits and investigations with the Trump campaign, how some of that may or may not impact or could impact Hawaii, and several other issues that are going on from an investigation and lawsuit perspective. In addition, in the second half, we're going to discuss the sessions testimony, the Attorney General Jeff Sessions testimony from yesterday. We're going to go into a couple of things there. So to help me in this conversation, because we know I need help in this conversation, I have asked and graciously been allowed the opportunity to have Senator Carl Rhodes join us for this conversation, so thank you for joining us today. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. No, I'm looking forward to a good conversation. You always have a lot of information for me, so. Okay, so first of all, I want to get, I want to back up a little bit, and once again, you were on the show a little while ago, a few months ago, and once again, congratulations being Senator. Thanks. We're excited about your role there. Thank you. You have then, when you were in the House, you were Chair of Judiciary. Yes. And moving to the Senate, you are Vice-Chair as of this last session. You were Vice-Chair of the Judiciary and Labor. Yes. So, tell us about what goes on in those, in Judiciary, what sorts of things you cover, and I guess teach us a little bit about the committee. Well, just the Judiciary part of it, Judiciary and Labor in the Senate is basically the Labor Committee and the Judiciary Committee in the House, so, and I was Chair of Labor for a while in the House, but it's very broad jurisdiction for Judiciary in particular. It's all about the courts. It's about, in the Senate, it's about confirmations for judges, but basically, gun control, civil rights, same-sex marriage came through Judiciary and JDL. Very broad jurisdiction, if you look at the actual rules, it says basically anything with a legal question, which of course is everything, so if you really wanted to push the envelope, you could pretty much drag anything you wanted to into Jud or JDL. Okay. Okay. So, tell us a bit about your background and how you got yourself fit into the Judiciary committees. Well, I am an attorney. I did practice for a couple years a long time ago, and I'm proud to say that last week I paid off my student loans after 20 years. Yay. Congratulations. And so, I did practice while I was actually Vice-Chair of Jud when I was still Chair of Labor, and that was probably why, well, that and some people, I've been told that I'm cool and calm under pressure, and that's something that you want at Judiciary or JDL because it's definitely the hot seat. It's, I mean, finance and ways and means are bigger committees that have broader jurisdiction, and of course they have control of the money, so that's always really important. But the good thing about ways and means and finances that you can split the baby in half, you can say, well, I don't know, we'll give you this, we'll give you some, we'll give you some, and everybody's at least not wildly unhappy. Judiciary, it's usually often just a yes-no question. Do you support same-sex marriage or don't you? You know, there's really no, there's no middle, I mean, we tried a middle ground which was civil unions, but then when the Supreme Court said, you know, it's not the same, the marriage is not the same as the civil union, then it was just a yes-no question, and you end up having very controversial issues in front of you. So that's where it's hard to find consensus when it's a yes or no? There's not much consensus to be found many times. So in that particular peculiar perhaps to judiciary? I think it's unusually stark in judiciary. Labor was actually a good practice for being judiciary. When I was labor chair, there was a lot of questions where, you know, labor was all in favor of paid sick leave, for example, and generally business was almost universally opposed to it. So even if you did a really water, there you could sort of modulate a little better, but even a really watered down version would usually oppose because, you know, the business guys are worried that the camel gets the nose under the tent and pretty soon you have three months of paid sick leave or something, and that would be the end of it. Everybody likes to argue the extreme because then that helps you win your case, but at the same time, we still have issues like not just paid leave, but also equal pay and a number of things that just never seem to happen. Yes, well, that's all true, but judiciary is probably even worse than labor in that regard. It's just there's really stark choices and it requires a certain thickness of hide to absorb all the slings and arrows that get thrown at you. Yeah, well, yeah, okay. So tell us a bit about, I definitely see that by the way, I've watched some of those committee hearings and there's some stuff that goes on, it's interesting, fascinating, and I'll agree, you handle it with a column that I think not others would. Other people handle it just fine, but that is sort of a prerequisite for getting the job in the first place, yeah. Preference. Yes, exactly. So tell us a bit before we go into some of these other questions here or thoughts here, tell us a bit about the difference between chair and a vice chair of a committee. Well, it's really the chair's game. The vice chair, depending on the chair, the vice chair can play a fairly active role if the chair wants him to, if the chair wants to. But traditionally, the chair runs the show and then in the house, the vice chair has the privilege and honor of collating the testimony, which is a lot easier than it used to be because it's all electronic now. But when I was a vice chair, when I first started 11 years ago, I was vice chair on human services and housing. What you think about the, that's actually a pretty good committee. I mean, it's a pretty wide jurisdiction and we had to do it all by hand and we had a Monday hearing. So pretty much every Sunday, my staff and I would go to one of those committee rooms and collate 40 copies of testimony. You have to just walk down the table, pick one up and go down the other side of the table into those staff tables in the back and go down all those and that was one. The coalition train. Right. And then you do that 40 times and then you're ready to go. Wow. So that's, that's usually the vice chair's role. They just, in the Senate, they don't have to do it. The chair takes care of it all, but the chair's really in the driver's seat. So it's okay. So it's the chair's prerogative to have the vice chair in both house or Senate. Do anything or are there some requirements that are in the house there? They will say that pretty much the vice chair at the discretion of the chair can be assigned other task or be asked to substitute for the chair if the chair's sick or something like that. Yeah. Or at any time decides you can, yeah. In the Senate, in particular, the most vice chairs are also chair of something else. So it's, even there, then there's a little more restriction on what the chair can do, because if you ask them to do, ask your vice chair to do something when they're chairing another hearing, then obviously they're not going to do it. Right, right, right. So it's a little, a little, the rules don't really spell out the landscape entirely. A lot of it's just interpersonal relationships and the politics of it. Sure, sure, sure. So then you have to, as chair in the Senate, you have to collate your own files electronically? Yes, yes, that's one of my, I fortunately don't have to do it very much anymore, but my staff does, yeah. Okay, okay. You had a larger staff. I don't know if it's the same. You had a very large staff in the house. Were you able to maintain that? No, I didn't. Unfortunately, the Senate gets two permanent staffers, but I had two permanent staffers as judge chair in the house. And then during session I got, you know, we had 10 or 11 people most sessions now. I think this last session we had five, maybe six, if you count the interns. So yeah, it's a, Judd is a plumb spot. There's no question about it. And I was, it was an honor and a privilege to serve there, especially during the same-sex marriage debate and some of the other big issues we dealt with. Definitely some big issues came through. So the chair of Judiciary of late has been Senator Bill Keith Agaron. Yes. And I have also found him to be, in my conversations with him, to be very even-tempered as well. Yes, he is. He's very even-tempered and a very bright guy. And, but and he's leaving. He's going to, he's going to go to, it's going to be Vice Chair of WAM on Ways and Means. So, yeah, my understanding is, oh, I'm not talking out of school. I think this is all public information already, but Brian Taniguchi, who was JDL Chair years ago, is going to get it back. Oh, okay. He's going to get Jud. He's not going to get JDL. They're splitting, like I said, they're splitting. Oh, they're splitting it up. Okay. Splitting labor and JDL. Got it, got it, got it. Okay. All right. Okay. Okay. Well, I said, I know there's a lot of changes coming up. I know with the, with the leadership changes in the house, there's a whole lot of stuff that's about to change. I don't have any idea what's, who's getting what over there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, I had the fortune of meeting with Speaker Psyche a couple of weeks ago, and he had not yet decided either and figured some, in this, throughout this summer, it'll be determined. Yeah. So now I wouldn't ask you about that, but there are changes that are going to be happening. And that's one of the interesting things that happens as well from, from session to session, not always from session to session, but it certainly has been happening lately where there has been a change from the committees. So a sort of a restructuring of the committees. Yes, that does, it does happen from time to time. I mean, sometimes you'll get situations where someone will be chair of the same committee for a number of years, but you also get where Judd and the House is a perfect example, I think there were. So when I first started, it was Tommy Waters and then John Ricky Karamatsu, and then I feel like I'm forgetting somebody, but Gil Keith-Agron was chair of Judd and the House for a while, and then me, and then Scott Nishimoto now. So there's been, in fact, I was the longest of that group. I was in there for four years. Everyone else was just there for two. So Judd had turned over a bunch of times. Turned over from a chairmanship, but then also as, you know, they're restructuring, not just of personnel, but of the committees themselves. Yes, so that- They're saying they're breaking it apart or they're combining. Yes, my recollection is that Judd and the House used to include Hawaiian affairs. I don't know when they got split back apart, but obviously it's a separate committee now. I actually like that it's a separate committee. I think that Hawaiian affairs should be dealt with, and there could be a lot more done. So that's my personal view. Yeah, no, I think you're right, I think you're right. So, okay, I was having a lot of fun going through that little educational piece there, so thank you. So we'll get back to what we're supposed to be talking about here today, which is lawsuits and investigations. So, okay, the travel ban, the Ninth Court just came out, well, yesterday, the day before, reconfirming that they will not allow the travel ban. It has been shut down again, another, I guess, in a string of losses, if you want to call it that, for the Trump administration in this travel ban, some call it a Muslim ban. There's a few different cases going on. There's the Hawaii versus Trump in this situation. There's also the ACLU and how it has picked up. I'm not sure if those are the same or separate. I'm not sure if you're aware if those are separate or if those are the same. I think they're separate, but I don't know. I mean, I think when they get to the Supreme Court, which they almost inevitably will, then they'll probably all be combined into one decision. But I know there's one that came up through the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals that started with, I don't remember where that started now that I think about it, but there's a fourth. That one's already been decided, too, and then the one from us through the Ninth Circuit. Right, the Ninth, yeah. The other one, I think, was Oregon. Was it Oregon? No, that would have been Ninth Circuit, too. So, there's one from the Fourth Circuit. I'm not sure who filed that one. Well, so my question for you is, and we only have a couple minutes for our take a break, all right, so my question for you is, with all of that, some people have the concern that there will be a fallout, a negative impact for the state of Hawaii as a result of Hawaii taking a lead against the Trump administration. From your perspective, being involved in, I guess, the legal world and the politics world, what is your comment to that? What would your concerns be? Well, I think there are quite a number of people who are concerned about that here in Hawaii. Chris Lee and I both introduced separate bills requiring that the next presidential candidate from Hawaii provide at least one year of tax returns. The Constitution, actually, the U.S. Constitution gives the states, gives the legislature complete control over who they send up as an elector. So, we thought that was probably, I would say that it's probably, we're just going to talk about them monuments later. I think that that case is actually a stronger case than the monuments case. But in any case, there were a lot of no votes in the House on that bill because people were afraid that Trump would retaliate somehow. And we do, it's true that Hawaii does, we get more federal money back than we pay out. And, of course, the military's presence here, you know, we get a lot of money that comes to Hawaii because of the military. My personal feeling is I just don't care. If he's going to be that small person and retaliate against us, so be it, it's the price you pay for trying to do the right thing. Yeah, and I think that that's a big, the most important point is we need more people to stand up to do the right thing against what more and more people are recognizing as just, we could say moving in the wrong direction, but someone who is just standing in opposition to what our Constitution seems to be about, to what our country seems to be about, and all of the things that he's been doing. So we do have to take a quick break already. We're going to jump into a couple of these and then go to the session's testimony after this break. So, again, thank you so much for joining me. Thank you. We had a little bit of a history lesson there, a little bit of education there as far as the committees are concerned. Thank you for joining us. This is Think Tech Hawaii's Movers, Shakers and Reformers. I'm your host, Carl Campania. See you in one minute. I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist and I'm the host of Shrink Wrap Hawaii where I talk to other shrinks. Did you ever want to get your head shrunk? Well, this is the best place to come to pick one. I've been doing this. We must have 60 shows with a whole bunch of shrinks that you can look at. I'm here on Tuesdays at 3 o'clock every other Tuesday. I hope you are too. Aloha. Good afternoon again. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for sticking with us. This is Think Tech Hawaii's Movers, Shakers and Reformers. I'm your host, Carl Campania. Again, thank you to Senator Karl Rhodes for joining us today. My pleasure. Thanks for being. Thanks for having me. So we are going to go into the emoluments now. There are two lawsuits at the moment that are being brought to and against President Trump. One, I guess it's a joint effort between DC, the District of Columbia and Maryland, and then a separate one with nearly 200 and there might be more. And it's possible that some of our federal legislators are involved in this. Nearly 200 Democratic members of Congress have agreed to file a lawsuit against the president for violating the emoluments clause. Now, help us understand the emoluments clause a little bit. I'm not going to say you're a constitutional lawyer, perhaps, but. No, I'm not. But I have, I mean, obviously I'm interested in the topic because it's come up for the first time really ever. And basically what it says is what the, you know, when we first started, everybody forgets that we haven't always been a superpower, right? So when we were just 13 colonies and we had, I don't know, 3 million people or 2.5 million people in the whole country, we were small potatoes and the framers of the Constitution were very concerned that big countries, France, England would influence our decision makers by either offering them titles, you know, grand duchess, grand duke or whatever, and by, with money. Titles, land and money. Titles, land and money. You know, that's what it's all about, and they were concerned about that. So they put this clause in the Constitution that said they can't take it without congressional permission. Right, they can't take it. But the president can't take it without permission. The president in particular cannot take it because the president is the, one of the primary roles of the president is foreign relations. Yes. And that's one of the things that gets missed as well. So with that, so what it is, this is, I can read here, it's like, let's see. The lawsuit is against President Trump, alleging that by retaining interests in a global business empire, he has violated the constitutional restrictions on taking gifts and benefits from foreign leaders. Now, the gifts thing is something that's hard to really parse out, I think. How do you determine what is a gift or not if you're talking about a business transaction? So, yeah, I think that, I think that's true. I think that's true. I mean, I think that if, even if Trump had done everything he was supposed to do under the ethics law, I mean, I realize he keeps, he keeps saying that my ethics laws don't apply to me and to a certain extent that's true. They don't, technically. But if he were, had actually tried to abide by the, the spirit of the ethics laws and he had taken all of his business interests to put him in a truly blind trust, not just giving it to his son. Like he said he was going to do, actually. As he said he was going to do what he didn't. Instead of just giving it to his sons and daughter, I think this is his son's not his, I don't think his daughter's involved in that one. But even then, you still would have had a question. I mean, I think that's pretty much all you can do if you're a business person and you get elected. But there would still, because it's a truck, because his business is largely about the Trump brand, people could still kiss up to him by going and staying at the Trump Hotel because they'd know that at the end of his term, whatever that may be, he's probably going to be better off. And he would know, too, if he saw them there. So I don't know if it's possible to, I don't know if there is a perfect fix. But even in the business transaction context, I think the emoluments clause might apply because if he's getting business that he wouldn't have gotten otherwise, then I think you could probably view that legitimately as a gift. I think so. And in fact, As opposed to just handing you money. Exactly. So in addition to those two, there's a third one that we were talking about off-air that I don't remember the group that is filing that one, but a third lawsuit where there are actually damages. And those damages are the neighboring hotels that have foreign entities that have had their offices in these hotels for years are relocating to the Trump Tower. So that in itself, and the justification is, and what we hear from abroad is well, we understand that President Trump likes to be praised. He likes to, he likes to have nice things said about him and he likes patronage. So therefore we will do this. Those are the things that... Well, and that's exactly why I think these cases have, there's a possibility that the plaintiffs could win them because there's a couple of reasons. One is that he hasn't put a, he hasn't recused himself from his business as he hasn't put everything in a blind trust. It's far from blind. But, and if he had my guess is he would win because there's only so much you can do. I mean, I don't think to be President of the United States, you should be required to sell off all your assets. And I just don't, I don't think it's, you know, you can't limit the presidency to people who don't own businesses. I'm okay with that, but he hasn't done everything he can. And because of what you're talked about, I think they have a chance. Yeah, I think so. And to at least make him do what he said he was going to do. At the very least. At the very least, yes. Okay, so let's move on. So with regards to Russia collusion and all that stuff, what we had yesterday was the Attorney General Jeff Sessions' testimony. And what I heard in this testimony, it was interesting. First of all, it seemed like it was bully tactics. He showed up and tried to like slap everybody around saying this is completely ludicrous and how dare you. This is an affront and it's offensive that you're accusing me of these things. And so he tried to push it back on everybody. But as he was questioned over and over and over again, primarily by the Democrats, his reply was often I don't recall. I can neither confirm nor deny. Or it would be inappropriate to answer based on longstanding rules and principles. From what I've heard and from what I've read, there are actually no longstanding rules and principles about this. So we're going to get to that in a minute. But my question is, what was the point of his testimony then? If what he was going to do was show up there and say, this is ridiculous and I'm offended by this, but I'm not going to answer any other question, why was he there? Well, he was there because they asked him to be there. He volunteered for this one. He knew he was going to be asked later, but he volunteered for this one to come right on the heels of Comey. This gets in the lawyer land real quick and it's an area that I don't know a lot about because my understanding is that executive privileges can only be claimed by the president. And then beyond that, unless there's some specific privilege that you're claiming, you have to speak. And of course they don't want to claim, they want to stay as far, the Trump administration guys want to stay as far away from pleading the Fifth Amendment, which is a privilege because that would indicate that there might actually be something wrong. Which is that I can neither confirm nor deny. He's very close to both of those. Most of it is the normal human instinct to talk about things that are in your favor, you want to talk about them and things that are to your disadvantage or make you look bad. You don't want to talk about them and that's my read. They're perfectly prepared to talk about all the internal discussions as long as it's something that's popular to talk about. Or that he's going to damage them potentially. If it's about potential treason, then they... Then we don't want to talk about it. You don't want to talk about it. To that point, we have a clip. And we have a clip from a number of years ago they would like to show. So we'll put that clip up in a minute and then we'll talk about it right afterwards. What is it that I as a member of Congress or any member on this Congress either side out? What is it that you believe we don't have the right to see? See this is the way our government works. We get to do oversight. That's why since 1814 this committee has been doing that. There's executive privilege. Let me help you. There's executive privilege. Has the president invoked executive privilege in this case? The answer is no. Good. That's right. The answer is no. I think the director made principal decisions about what to say to Congress when he was here and also what to provide to Congress. As far as the... Wait, where do I find that? Personally, I didn't... Do we just let everybody in government decide that they're based on their own individual principles? That's what... See, it's trust but verify is how it works. You don't get to decide what I get to see. I get to see it all. I was elected by some 800,000 people to come to Congress and see classified information. I was elected by my colleagues here to be the chairman of this committee. That's the way our Constitution works. Will the FBI provide to Congress the full file with no redactions? A personal identifiable information. I cannot make that commitment sitting here today. Then I'm going to issue a subpoena and I'm going to do it right now. So let's go... I've signed this subpoena. We want all the 302s and we would like the full file. You can accept service on behalf of the FBI. Certainly. You are hereby served. We have a duty and a responsibility. You can cite no precedent, nothing in the Constitution, no legal precedent. You know this is important to us. You now have your subpoena. We would all like to see this information. Wow. It's all I can say to that. That should have been verbatim what was mentioned and what was said yesterday in the testimony, in that entire hearing with testimony of Attorney General Jeff Sessions. That in itself could have been said verbatim. It wasn't quite said, but it could have been. So given that, given that, what is the credibility that we should have now as far as Attorney General Jeff Sessions? I mean, how do we begin to perceive credibility based on hearing that from a Republican chairman of the committee just not even a decade ago? Well, I mean, I think that if you... This is a situation where again, human nature is to protect your own and to attack your enemy's rights. That's what's going on here. They're protecting their own and protecting their enemies. I mean, protecting their friends and going after their enemies. But to say that it's inconsistent, it's easy to say that it's probably hypocritical, although I think both parties are probably guilty of that when it comes to investigating the other guy. But what I think the Republican, the calculus that they're going to have to figure out and I think they're still working on is if all the stuff that's being said about Trump is actually true, that he did collude with the Russians and what would probably be borderline treasonous, and he did obstruct justice, which is the way I read the exchange with Comey, at what point do they throw him overboard? Right. Yeah. And where are we at that point? And where are we? My theory is that the poll numbers have to get somewhat worse before that happens. It depends on the poll numbers because his recent negatives are at 60 percent. That's true. But if you look at how gerrymandered the Congress is, there's a lot of districts where that 37 percent that still supports Trump, that's like 80 percent of the electorate. And in the Republican primary, it's probably 90 percent of the electorate. Exactly. So I think that the numbers have to go down to about 30 percent approval for about two months. And then Republicans start saying, okay, it's to my political advantage to distance myself from Trump. Whereas right now they're still looking at it as my political advantage to stay with him. To stay with him. Now, is that the right thing to do? I don't think so. I don't think it's the right thing to do for the country. I think history is going to be very unkind to the Republican Congress we have right now. Yes. Yes. And I think it's also quite possible that the Republican Congress won't be a Republican Congress in a couple years. And that's what we're all hoping for. So all right, I'm going to end the show here, but then I have a final question that we can go out on. So thank you for joining us. This is thing Tech Hawaii's Movershakers and Reformers, Politics in Hawaii series. Thanks again to my guest today, Senator Karl Rhodes. Here's the last question for us to go out on and they can roll it off as they need. How does perjury work in this case? To me, this seems like it's clear obstruction. He doesn't want to answer questions as far as sessions is concerned. How does perjury work? And did he in his statement say, no, I didn't have any meetings at the Mayflower or anything like that. And then later in his testimony, he said, well, okay, I may have actually met with him. And there are now pictures of him having shaking his hand at the Mayflower sessions, that is. So how does perjury work in this sense, from a judiciary perspective? You should have asked me that before. There's a very specific checklist of things you have to have to perjure yourself. So under oath is one of them. I think, I don't remember them all. I think it has to be a material fact. So it can't just be any little accidental lie or fib. And I think there's some other things, there's some other elements too. And it's actually quite hard to prove. But I think that's why sessions was equivocating so much. Because if you just say, I don't know, I don't remember, then you have to prove that he didn't, that he really couldn't remember. And that he did that on purpose. And so that's what I think he was worried about, is he was trying to avoid the perjury trap. Yeah, yeah. Well, and that's, I don't recall, has been a common place for how many decades in these settings. So anyway, okay. Thank you for joining us. Thank you. I appreciate the time. Thank you. Good to see you. A good conversation. I always enjoy this, and we'll see you next time.