Earlier today, I shared with you Ben Cayetano‘s response to our story where he repeated his claim that the Pacific Resource Partnership ran a push poll against him. He also threatened to sue PRP chief John White over the “smear campaign.”

This afternoon, PRP hit back, putting out a press release reiterating the claims it made yesterday.

We will not be silenced by bully tactics and threats of lawsuits. We maintain that these illegal donations are directly tied to non bid contracts awarded by the Cayetano administration. They are part of the pay to play culture that permeated the Cayetano campaign and his administration. His record as governor should be reviewed as he tries to resurrect his political career to become Honolulu’s next mayor.

Cayetano’s campaign also reached out today to share the 2006 Attorney General opinion that effectively instructs the Campaign Spending Commission to forgive debts when a campaign is unable to remit money collected from illegal contributions. Here’s the conclusion paragraph, which backs up Cayetano’s argument that he’s not obligated to pay back the $531,000 his campaign owed after he left office a decade ago.

Given that we cannot simply impute knowledge of a false name contribution, it would be inappropriate to penalize the candidate by treating the reference to “escheat” as being the equivalent of a fine. … As such, the term “escheat” is simply a forfeiture of whatever the candidate’s committee has up to the amount of the false name contribution.

Read the full letter here: