Posted on: Friday, January 18, 2002

Campaign discrepancies puzzle Harris' top aide

By Johnny Brannon
Advertiser Staff Writer

Harris: Criminal probe of fund raising

The chief fund-raiser for Mayor Jeremy Harris' 2000 re-election committee said yesterday that campaign workers could have mistakenly attributed donations to people who didn't make them, but that he would be shocked if campaign finance reports had been deliberately falsified.

"Anything can happen, but that would surprise me," said Peter Char, the deputy treasurer then and for Harris' current campaign for governor.

The state Campaign Spending Commission voted Tuesday to seek a criminal probe of Harris' fund-raising efforts after investigators identified numerous contributions that exceeded legal limits. Some people listed by the campaign as donors said they never gave money, according to the commission.

Char, a Honolulu attorney who said he has known Harris since 1993, said, for example, that a contribution could inadvertently be attributed to someone if their name appears on a check from a joint account with a spouse.

If the signature on the check is not clearly legible, a campaign volunteer might attribute the donation to the other person, Char said.

Five contributions to Harris from employees of the Geolabs engineering firm or their spouses were attributed to other people, according to a summary of that segment of the commission's investigation.

Commission executive director Robert Watada agreed that campaign workers sometimes make honest mistakes when recording the source of donations.

"But that's not what happened in this case," Watada said. "A lot of things can happen, but we verified fairly clearly what happened here. I think this was very deliberate."

Geolabs agreed to pay a $64,000 fine for making more than $127,000 in illegal donations to Harris; Gov. Ben Cayetano; Lt. Gov. Mazie Hirono, Maui Mayor James "Kimo" Apana; Fred Holschuh, a former candicate for senator in a Big Island race; and former Honolulu mayoral candidate Arnold Morgado.

Geolabs president Clayton Mimura did not return repeated phone calls from The Advertiser. Geolabs attorney Phillip Li has said the company did not provide some of the names of people linked to Geolabs that the campaign listed as donors.

"It appears to have been done by someone Geolabs is not familiar with," Li told the commission on Tuesday. He could not be reached for further comment.

Watada said yesterday that although Geolabs made illegal donations to the other politicians, no evidence of deliberate wrong-

doing by campaigns other than Harris' had emerged.

"We have the records and we're looking at them, but we don't see a pattern of that nature," he said. "If in fact we feel there was an intentional violation by anyone else, we'll certainly bring them before the commission," Watada said.

Harris has repeatedly charged that Watada is part of an organized effort to harm his chances of being elected governor. Watada dismissed that as "the usual spin we can expect."

Char said he believed it was possible that Harris was the victim of a smear campaign, but that he did not believe it was as orchestrated as Harris has suggested.

"I don't think a particular candidate or group of candidates is pushing buttons, but there may be some misguided individual or individuals," Char said.

Cayetano said he would be very surprised if Harris had any personal knowledge of the kind of problems his campaign is alleged to have.

"Usually campaign fund-raisers are left to other people in the organization," Cayetano said. "That's the way I do it. We don't get involved in the details."

Cayetano, who appointed the commission's five voting members, said his confidence in them remained strong. "I have no reason to believe that these folks are not honest people, that they're doing the very best that they can under the circumstances," he said.

Advertiser staff writer Lynda Arakawa contributed to this report.

Reach Johnny Brannon at jbrannon@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8070.