COUNTERPOINT
What's up with Dewey Kim?
By Robert M. Rees
Moderator of 'Olelo Television's "Counterpoint" and Hawai'i Public Radio's "Talk of the Islands"
It is now possible to piece together what happened to Dewey Kim, the state deputy attorney general who was summarily removed from his investigation into allegations of fraud surrounding the state's failure to comply with the Felix Consent Decree.
Kim, an investigator with a record of bulldog-like success in supervising the Medicaid Investigations Division, early this year requested to see the work I'd done on Felix. He appeared to be off and running on the right track.
On May 15, Kim participated in the attorney general's press conference to announce first findings. Said Kim, "This is a rather large investigation, and we're trying to take the most obvious stuff first and then get into the more ... systematic types of schemes."
Only a few days later, Kim was removed from the Felix investigation. Not since Attorney General Margery Bronster terminated deputy Bill Tam, then assigned to the Commission on Water Resource Management during the Waiahole Ditch case, has our AG's office so blatantly silenced someone doing his duty.
Because the AG's office suffers inherent conflicts — for example, in the Waiahole case it represented the Department of Agriculture and others opposed to the Water Commission even while one of its deputies was representing the commission — it claims to be constructed of firewalls, sometimes referred to as Chinese walls, that seal off and ensure independence for any given function.
What precipitated the intrusion into Kim's hermetically sealed independence, a violation of the firewall principle, was his phone call of May 16, the day after the press conference, to the court master in the Felix case, Jeffrey Portnoy.
Recalls Portnoy, "He called because he was angry about a quote of mine in response to the press conference, something to the effect that I didn't think $1,800 (the amount of money involved in the first case) constituted evidence of a massive fraud."
Portnoy advised Kim that ex parte contact is inappropriate, but didn't terminate the conversation. Kim went on to talk about "widespread fraud" and, according to Portnoy, "lectured me on programmatic issues, and gave anecdotal examples of Felix as a disaster."
Portnoy advised Chief Judge David Ezra, deputy AG Russell Suzuki and attorneys for the plaintiffs about the call.
Suzuki reported the flap to Attorney General Earl Anzai. Poof! Kim was transferred to torts and apparently told to keep quiet. Anzai won't comment other than to say, "Dewey Kim was transferred for reasons which cannot be discussed publicly because it is a personnel matter."
Later, Anzai and Gov. Ben Cayetano wrote letters to the court disavowing Kim's views.
In retrospect, Kim's removal and the letters may have constituted interference with an independent investigation, a violation of the firewall principle heretofore so vigorously defended by the AG's office as a justification for its myriad of conflicts.
Among other things, the transfer of Kim has enabled the state to continue its fiction that everything was going well with Felix compliance until the Senate-House committee and Deputy AG Kim came along.
In addition, Kim's transfer has left his Felix investigations in limbo. We know, for example, that Kim questioned state employees at the Department of Health about Kapi'olani Hospital's HealthHawaii pilot project for delivery of Felix services on the Big Island.
What Kim was told by at least one witness led him to make inquiries about the legislative auditor's finding that the DOH overpaid Kapi'olani HealthHawaii by at least $2.3 million.
Reportedly, Kim either had negotiated or was negotiating a $1 million settlement with Kapi'olani, a settlement that provided for access to Kapi'olani's records. Now, no one seems to know anything about it. Kapi'olani Hospital won't comment.
Meanwhile, at least one good thing has come of all this. Judge Ezra, who himself had questioned the conflicts within the AG's office even before the Kim incident, has indicated he may ask the Hawai'i Supreme Court to consider the issue. Our AG's office may be required at last to articulate how it handles its systemic conflicts, and perhaps even to explain exactly why it pushed Kim aside at a critical moment.
