Editor’s note: Honolulu Civil Beat editors and reporters met with Anne Lopez, attorney general for the state of Hawaiʻi, on Monday. She was accompanied by Hawaiʻi Solicitor General Kaliko Fernandes. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Lopez was asked first about the strategy behind her office‘s response on May 1 to a lawsuit filed April 30 by the Trump administration seeking to preemptively halt a separate lawsuit — also filed May 1 — by the Hawaiʻi attorney general against major oil companies that alleges deceptive conduct contributing to climate change.

Lopez: I won’t go into too many details. Obviously, I will tell you that we will be litigating this in-house. My department will be combating this unprecedented lawsuit, and we’re doing that because, one, I have confidence in my department, (solicitor general) Kaliko Fernandes and (special assistant) Dave Day, but also because this is a direct attack on our state of Hawaiʻi’s sovereignty, and it is unprecedented because filing a lawsuit to stop somebody from filing a lawsuit doesn’t even make sense in sort of a rational and reasonable way.

They admit in the complaint that only Hawaiʻi knows what’s in their complaint. And that was true, but they went ahead and filed. So I see this as a great opportunity for Hawaiʻi to show what we’re made of, and that we will fight back, and we will do so aggressively.

Did you want to add anything, Kaliko?

Fernandes: I think AG Lopez summed it up. Right now, what we have from the federal government is the complaint, and it does seek to stop us as a sovereign state with rights to file claims. They seek to stop us from doing that. It is unprecedented. We do think that this is federal overreach. So we will be vigorously defending in that lawsuit.

Now that there is a precedent, do you have any sense that there may be other preemptive actions that you need to be prepared for going forward from the administration?

Fernandes: I don’t know that I have anything specific in mind, but as you folks have seen, they have done this with multiple states. It’s not just Hawaiʻi. There are a few states now that they are trying this tactic.

Lopez: And they’ve also made it clear that they do not want states enforcing their own climate change laws, and that they will seek to stop that. The other lawsuit that was filed was against New York (and Vermont), and that had to do with their climate change superfund account, not any lawsuits that they were bringing.

The other action that happened out of your office recently was a letter from you folks expressing concern that the U.S. Health and Human Services Department is withholding tens of millions of dollars for funding family planning for low-income and uninsured individuals. This is not a lawsuit. You wrote the letter with 20 other attorneys general. What can you tell us about that?

Fernandes: This is Title X funding, which is family planning funding. We are one of a handful of states that got completely zeroed out by the Trump administration, and as our letter reflects, we do think this is crucial, vital funding.

We know what happens when Title X gets cut. It happened during the first Trump administration, and as our letter highlights, this is going to lead to higher rates of STIs, more unplanned pregnancies. Those are the kinds of harms we can expect from having our funding stream being completely cut off. And it was cut off allegedly because Title X grantee. It’s the sort of DEI-type of concerns that were cited.

So what we’ve done here is we led with the state of California, which is similarly situated to Hawaiʻi and shares the same Title X grantee, but we were joined by a coalition of states to urge Secretary Kennedy to reconsider this decision.

You’ve had a busy four months. I was looking back over your press releases. On Jan. 21, the very first day after the inauguration, Trump wanted to end birthright citizenship, essentially not wanting to recognize the 14th Amendment. And you jumped in right away, joining 18 other attorneys general challenging that executive order. What has it been like for your office? Talk about that word “unprecedented,” it’s just been a real roller coaster, because there’s been other challenges since then as well.

Lopez: I’m not going to use the word roller coaster. I will say that last spring, several Democratic attorneys general were already meeting to talk and plan for the event of a second Trump presidency. And during that process, they were looking at the issues that they could anticipate arising. And birthright citizenship wasn’t a secret from anybody. And after the election, Hawaiʻi joined that group of Democratic attorneys general — there are now 23 of us. So as a group, we were prepared to file that lawsuit the very next day, because we were anticipating that that would be one of the first things he would do upon his inauguration.

Were you involved then with that discussion that went on last spring?

No, we were not. We joined pretty much after the election this last year. In my personal capacity as attorney general, the (Maui) wildfire pretty much took all of my attention for the first year and a half or so, and we were really focused on that. So finally, we had some breathing room this last summer, and we could start looking outside of what we’ve been doing.

How do the AGs coordinate?

I have to say that (District of Columbia Attorney General) Brian Schwalb has been really our leader. We’re more of a cat herder. He’s got 23 attorneys general, plus all of our offices, our deputies and our PIOs and schedulers, and he’s done a really magnificent job of getting our meetings scheduled, of keeping an agenda, making it tight so that when we’re all on the phone, we know exactly what we’re there to talk about.

The staff meet every day on their own, and they talk about all the issues that occur from the last 24 hours from staff among the various AGs. I think that we have a really collaborative and collegial group of people. We like each other, we talk openly with one another. We problem solve. Every now and then we disagree, but we are focused on what we as a group need to do to move forward to combat the violations of the rule of law.

Fernandes: As AG Lopez mentioned, the staff meets daily. We are in very constant communication, and that is one of the nice things — despite the difficulties that this administration has posed for the state of Hawaiʻi and for the nation — is getting to meet other people in other states. And there’s pretty much always something to discuss, some new policy or new decision from this administration. And as AG Lopez mentioned, we’re quite collaborative, but usually there are a handful of states that will step up to take lead on a certain issue, and we’ve done so a few times. And that’s sort of how the group operates.

There’s 140-plus executive orders since the second administration took office. Can you give us a little bit of a sense of how you prioritize your efforts?

Lopez: The first thing we have to do is to determine if we have standing, if the state has been harmed in some specific way that would allow us to go into court and file a complaint. And you’ll see that there are some cases where maybe there’s 17 AGs — fewer or more — and some of the reasons are the state doesn’t have standing. One state or another might not have standing on that particular issue, and so we don’t join those particular lawsuits in terms of what’s a priority.

How do you figure out the harm part?

Lopez: That’s a good question. The reason I didn’t want to use “roller coaster” is because it hasn’t been up and down, it’s just been full throttle straight ahead every day. And it is people like Kaliko and Dave Day who are doing this in addition to their regular jobs.

And during the legislative session!

Lopez: During the legislative session, and other demands. And Dave is my legislative liaison, doing a lot of work.

How do we determine whether there was harm or not? Initially we had some sort of trial and error processes. But now I think every agency in the state knows that if their grants have been cut off, or if they’ve been harmed in some way, they email us, they let us know so that we can start talking to them, asking them the questions that we need to ask to determine what that harm is, and if it’s a harm that is specific to the executive order or whatever action is happening.

And as time has gone on the state agencies have actually gotten, I think, very good at knowing when there’s a problem and making sure we know that there’s a problem. For instance, the administration has been playing a lot of games with all of this. So they’ll stop some grants. Just before we have a hearing in court, suddenly the grant will turn back on again, and then after the hearing, it might turn off again. And so our agencies, the people in the agencies, have gotten pretty good at letting us know when these kinds of things are going on. That’s generally what we do.

So a cut in the budget is something that’s already happened, right?

Lopez: Usually it comes in the form of we tried to draw down money from this grant, and we were told we can’t, or we were told they’re doing a manual review.

And the orders that we have are very, very clear that the government can’t do anything to freeze or impede. There’s all kinds of excellent words that describe the things they can’t do, and they do all of those things intermittently. And so staying in touch with our agencies allows us to know when they’re doing those things, what they’re doing. And I think I’d we’ve had two motions to enforce.

Fernandes: The case Anne is referencing is what we call the Office of Management and Budget case. If you remember, this is pretty early on in the administration when we all woke up and everybody’s federal funds were turned off. That was sort of an across-the-board freeze of our federal funding.

Lopez: And that’s what sort of triggered the beginning of this whole process. And so twice the court has issued orders to the government to tell them that they have to stop impeding the access.

Much of the talk out there is that it is only the courts that can really do something here. But they also move at a much slower pace, although they’re granting motions here and there. And yet we’re dealing with a president who is unceasing in these actions. Are you at all concerned about having to wait for the court to help people being harmed right now?

Lopez: And that is why we are seeking the temporary restraining orders (in the HHS lawsuit), and then subsequent to that, the preliminary injunctions. And we have been successful among the Democratic attorneys general, we’ve been successful in every case, with the exception of one that is sort of floating out there waiting for a judge to make a decision. But we’ve been successful and the judiciary is working the way it was meant to work.

“This is the way the judiciary operates. And we just have to take a deep breath and be patient.”

Attorney General Anne Lopez

This is just Anne talking at this point, but the Supreme Court has been accepting some of these cases outside of the normal course of the way it hears appeals. And I’m not sure that’s the best way to do it, when they start issuing opinions without all of the facts in front of them. And so I think it’s okay for us to be patient. Things aren’t moving as fast as we would like, except that we have been getting the injunctions and the TROs in a very timely manner. People keep waiting for the constitutional crisis. They keep waiting for things to move faster. This is our form of government. This is the way the judiciary operates. And we just have to take a deep breath and be patient.

I believe the governor set aside $20 million for your legal efforts.

Lopez: He originally added $10 million to our litigation fund. We have a standing litigation fund. He started with $10 million. That was the budget that went to the Legislature.

This is in December, post election.

Lopez: Right. And during my budget briefings, I had to say that there was no way I could spend $10 million in one year. And knowing the kind of economic issues the state has, I said that I was okay if it’d be reduced to $5 million. Our litigation fund had been reduced to $2 million a year. So we still had money in that that we’ve been using. But currently we’ve done everything in house, along with the other attorneys general offices — all of the briefing, all of the writing, all of the research is happening within all of the different AG offices.

So we have not spent more money yet. I fully anticipate that that day is going to come, and we’re the only state where the governor and the Legislature got behind us and said we need to be prepared to fight. And not only did they want to be prepared, but ended up budgeting $4 million for us in the next fiscal year. And I’m very happy with that amount.

The North Carolina Democratic attorney general, his Republican state legislature passed a bill prohibiting him from participating in lawsuits on the executive orders. That’s kind of the extreme, right? His legislature saying he can’t even participate in these lawsuits, to us, where the Legislature and the governor are saying we need to make sure you have the funds you need to fight this. And then there’s 22 other offices of varying levels of resources. And so the $4 million, in my mind, isn’t just for the state of Hawaiʻi to use for the state of Hawaiʻi’s efforts. It is to use as part of this coalition of 23 Democratic attorneys general to use as part of this whole process

Are you at all worried about retribution? This is a president that ran on a platform of revenge and getting back at his enemies. You’re seeing what’s happening on social media, judges being singled out and so forth. Is that something at all of concern to your office?

Lopez: It is of concern. I think that in Hawaiʻi we are kind of fortunate to be so far away. People don’t think about us a whole lot.

There’s a couple of different types of retaliation. Obviously there’s the economic retaliation, and so I don’t make any decisions about our lawsuits and what I want to be out front over without talking to the governor and the Legislature, because they’re the people who need to make decisions about how strong of a case do we want to make, given the fact that the retaliation could be a substantial financial loss. And so we talk about those things, and we talk about the legal issues related to that so that they can make decisions.

Is this intruding on local enforcement efforts from your office? You’re so focused on the Trump administration. And everybody has staffing shortages, right? Are you able to sort of function, or are local issues getting not neglected, but maybe put aside?

Lopez: No issues are being put aside. This is where Kaliko and Dave come in, and they’re so important. Kaliko’s appellate deputies, her deputy solicitors in general, are doing a lot of the heavy lifting for the work that we need to do internally related to the Trump work. That means that their normal workload, which is working on the appeals that we have — helping our different divisions who are going in front of an appellate court working with them — they are clearly overworked and exhausted, and when I get emails from them at 1:30 in the morning, I know that they’re overworked.

“We’re the only state where the governor and the Legislature got behind us and said we need to be prepared to fight.”

Anne Lopez

But I think part of what has for the time being made it tolerable, perhaps, is that every other AG’s office is working on these things together. And one of the sort of fun things we have discovered is the time zone change can also allow sort of this waterfall of work. So if we’re doing work, we get it to the East Coast. We go to bed when they’re getting up in the morning, and when we get up, they have a new version of something.

So I think we’re getting into a rhythm of that. I have a couple of times asked deputies from other divisions who have subject matter expertise, or who are just very competent, intelligent deputies who I know want to work on this stuff. And I have asked a few to work and obviously their client work comes first, without a doubt.

Are you worried there might be more preemptive lawsuits? It’s such a crazy time right now.

Lopez: I think we have to assume they’re up to no good, and they will continue some of these efforts. This (Big Oil) lawsuit — and Kaliko will probably be upset if I say it — but this lawsuit is so laughably, you know, stupid. She she would say it much more nicely, and she’d be more erudite. It’s just so ridiculous that if this is what they’re going to bring at us, that I think some of my deputies will say, “Bring it on,” like this is red meat.

At some point, I think they’re going to hit a point where they can only do so much, and the courts are constantly pushing back at them at this point. So I think they’re going to have to think about what their priorities are, given the fact that they’ve got so many orders telling them to stop doing so many of the things that they’re doing.

I’ll let Kaliko respond to how to phrase that in the filing.

Fernandes: We think it’s, as you said, meritless, borderline frivolous.

I know that you guys put a lot of effort into the wildfire investigative report. I see that this year the Legislature did address some of the priorities. How did that all play out for you?

Lopez: I’m feeling good. There’s sort of two separate tracks that are occurring. They did pass the fire marshal bill, and in the fire marshal bill, they included several of the priorities that are in the report on the top 10 priorities. And so the fire marshal will actually be responsible for some of the requirements, such as the community planning education. And so I was really pleased that that was included into that bill, and the Legislature supported that and worked hard to make it robust.

The second part is that the Fire Safety Research Institute recommended that we hire the Hawaii Wildfire Management Organization to take point on these priorities, these state priorities. We did that. We’ve entered into a contract with HWMO. Elizabeth Pickett is the co-director of that organization, and she gave to me their plan going forward, how they’re going to work.

The biggest part of their work is going to be making sure that all the executive branch agencies who have a stake in what’s happening participate in providing what are their stress points in terms of resources to do some of the work, and what do they bring to the table to help meet some of those goals they have.

“We are one of a handful of states completely zeroed out by the Trump administration in family planning funding.”

Hawaiʻi Solicitor General Kaliko Fernandes

I understand that there’s been a conditional acceptance of the position for the fire marshal, and I’ll let you talk to the fire council about that, but the person really comes incredibly well-referenced, and FSRI thinks she’s wonderful. And I think we’re really lucky to have somebody of her caliber accept this job. So I think we’re going to see a lot of work happening over the next 12 months between the fire marshal position and HWMO enrollment.

What about the wildfire report did not get done that you wish would have gotten done at the Legislature this year? I think some of your recommendations are also at the county level as well.

Lopez: FSRI had 10 recommendations for the county and 10 recommendations for the state. I will say that in a perfect world where we had lots of money and we didn’t have to worry about other priorities, it would have been nice to have everything that FSRI recommended.

What makes me very happy is that, through consultation with FSRI and HWMO, the legislators listened to them very closely and recognizing they couldn’t do everything in one year they worked on what are the priorities.

Was there one thing in particular that you wish they would have done but didn’t get done?

Lopez: No, actually, because I think that, in my mind, the things that were really important really have to do with the getting a fire marshal who was very experienced, who could come in and bring in the agencies that need to participate in this. I think you guys read in the report that you know it wasn’t just the Legislature ignoring this as a priority for the last 20 years — it was every agency, county and state. And we know that, because if they thought it was a huge priority, they would have been banging the drum and getting in front of the Legislature every year.

I did hear somebody say, “Well, it was the Legislature’s fault because they didn’t appropriate money.” But if the agencies aren’t seeking the funds to do things, then it’s everybody’s fault. If we’re going to hold government accountable, we’ve got to get everybody at the table and willing to work. And this is the first time in probably the history of the state where that’s happening, people are really sitting down and taking these threats seriously.

This is on fireworks. A number of bills were passed, increasing the penalties, allowing for sting operations, I think, drones in some capacity or another, and then, of course, extending the life of the task force that came up with some of these very recommendations. And then the explosives unit in the Department of Law Enforcement. Are these tools really going to be what you need in order to make sure we don’t have what happened on New Year’s Eve happen again?

Lopez: Let me first say that we have to be careful about saying we’re going to do something so that it never happens again. And that’s the same with the wildfire report. And the reason I say that is because this is sort of a new process for all of us. And DLE, with Mike Lambert directing them, along with his relationship with the Honolulu Police Department, I think they are very well prepared to start implementing these efforts. And as we go along, we’ll discover something might not work that we thought would be great.

One of the things is being able to issue citations, and I’m very hopeful that that will make a big difference. Because if a police officer doesn’t have to stop and be at a house for five hours doing something and trying to collect evidence that the forensic expert can look at, then that gets them back out on the road and lets them do their job.

A couple other things that were part of the governor’s package. House Bill 992 — this is on revised regulations for charitable solicitation platforms. It’s something that the former House Speaker Scott Saiki pushed. We had reported on how a group formed to seek donations after the wildfires was a little sketchy. But the bill died.

Lopez: One of, I think, our biggest discoveries during the fire was the charitable fraud that can happen. And we need to be able to look into those platforms to find out exactly what they’re doing and how they manage the legal side of it, how GoFundMe manages what it’s doing, those different kinds of platforms. So we’ll keep pushing that until we can get it passed.

Was there anything in particular Legislature-wise that was of importance to your office that did or did not make it through?

Lopez: The asset forfeiture bill. We worked hard to make a compromise with the House and the Senate. We certainly recognize that our programs can improve, and certainly the reporting in my office on asset forfeiture has left a lot to be desired. So we do have work we need to do to improve, but the changes that the Legislature wanted to make, and in fact ended up making, just make the program unrealistic to enforce it.

It requires certain actions that just won’t make sense in a real law enforcement way. So, for instance, if somebody is running a gambling house in the house they rent, this bill is going to require law enforcement to file charges against the owner of the property, and that it could be the property owner knows nothing about this. So if there’s no way to actually press charges, then we’re going to be stuck, right?

That does impact things, and the more difficult they make it, the more that takes time and energy on the part of the county police departments and as well as the prosecutors or my office if we’re prosecuting. It just makes it very difficult to run the program. And I understand why people have concerns about asset forfeiture. But if we do away with it, or we make it so stringent that we can’t actually be successful in seizing assets, then the people who are making money, who are benefiting from their illegal activity and their illegal assets, will continue to have access to those assets.

It’s been described by the ACLU and others, depending on your own financial resources, that it can be difficult to get that property back. But you’re saying it’s not that onerous.

Lopez: I don’t believe that it is. And I don’t think it should just be that easy to do it. Some of the assets that are are being seized are cars that were filled with drugs, jewelry and things that were purchased with money that came from illegal activity.

This is House Bill 126. Is it fair to say that you’ll be giving the governor your full judgment on this bill as he considers his veto intent list?

Lopez: Well, I won’t tell you what my advice to the governor will be, but I will tell you that I will tell him, and I already have told him, that we’re very unhappy. We worked very hard to compromise. I want to say we didn’t just oppose it. We met with Senator Rhoads and (House Judiciary) Chair David Tarnas repeatedly, so we were disappointed at the end of the day that all of that collaboration failed to bring us to a point where there was a consensus.

Do you feel it’s unworkable as it is?

Lopez: Yes.

What are your observations on the progress of the Law Enforcement Standards Board, which was intended to set up a statewide agency establishing minimum qualifications for law enforcement officers and etc. Any updates on how that process is going?

Lopez: I’m very happy with the process. When it was first passed, we weren’t given an appropriation, so we couldn’t actually hire somebody to operate the Law Enforcement Standards Board. Then, not this last session but the one before, we finally got money. We were able to hire an excellent executive director, Victor McCraw, and I’m really pleased with him. We’re a bit more organized. I think that he brings just a breadth of experience and knowledge that we’ll be able to get to work.

There’s one bill that did pass, a vehicular pursuit bill. And we opposed it, not because it’s not a good idea, but because it’s the job of the Law Enforcement Standards Board to come up with a policy like that. So I am recommending to the law enforcement community that we just let it pass, that we don’t try and fight it or see if we can get it vetoed or anything like that, because it has a two-year date on when the policy needs to come into place.

So in my mind, it holds LESB’s feet to the fire. They’ve got two years to get that policy done. And the other part that I like is that all of the county and state agencies are going to know we’ve got to work on this, and if we don’t, we’re stuck with what got passed. So let’s put something in that really makes sense.

We had Honolulu Prosecutor Steve Alm in here a couple weeks ago, and we asked him this question: It seems to be that whenever there’s corruption cases that come through and that prevail, they seem to come at the federal level. Steve defended that and said it’s not really best to compare the two levels of prosecution. But you must hear some of this as well. How come local law enforcement, local legal authorities don’t crack down on corruption? Why is it always the feds that have to come in?

Well, we’re doing it. The Legislature, a few years ago, created positions in a division for public integrity, and our division is SIPD — the Special Investigation and Prosecution Division. It has a public integrity unit to it. These investigations take more than, you know, just a few weeks. Sometimes they do take months and months to be able to collect the information that’s necessary to make a charge and feel confident about a prosecution. We have several investigations ongoing.

“I want people to see that we are we are evolving, and we are changing and we are improving all the time.”

Attorney General Anne Lopez

Having said that, I will say that we also have a very close relationship with the federal government. We are on a public integrity task force with the federal government, along with white collar crime and trafficking. And so those relationships are excellent. We work together. We work collaboratively. And the FBI actually, we have some deputies who are special U.S. attorneys, so they can actually charge and prosecute in federal court.

My hope is that instead of the feds bringing some of these cases, that it will come from my department, and if the federal law is stricter, then my deputies can prosecute in federal court.

Anything that we missed?

Lopez: I want to say that our department is an amazing department, the work that we’re doing. And I want people to see that we are we are evolving, and we are changing and we are improving all the time.

We have a workforce that’s retiring in large numbers. Last year, I had 12 deputies retire with an average of 27 years of public service each. So I lost like 250 years of institutional knowledge in one year. And so we’re working really hard to balance that, to allow this department to improve, so that by the time I retire we have new people in place, people like Kaliko, who I specifically wanted in this position, because she represents a new generation of leadership and passion for public service.