Maui County has been airing its laundry in public for a week now. Mayor Richard Bissen faces a close race for reelection. He is in open conflict with his police chief, John Pelletier, whom the Maui Police Commission placed on leave last Wednesday.
Pelletier answered with a press conference. He said the mayor is under criminal investigation, and the suspension was payback.
The latest entry in the saga is a press release on County of Maui letterhead, with Mayor Richard Bissen’s name at the top of the masthead. It comes from the Department of the Prosecuting Attorney, led by Andrew Martin. It is meant to settle the matter. Instead, it raises more questions than it answers about a county where all the rules seem to have been thrown out.
For those catching up: on Oct. 7, the Maui Police Commission voted 6-0 to place Pelletier on paid administrative leave.
Two days later, Pelletier sat down with his lawyer, Eric Seitz, for a 34-minute press conference. They maintain there was no factual or legal basis for the suspension. They say a lawsuit is coming. And they say they have proof that Bissen lobbied commissioners to remove the chief on two occasions: first last year, during the Diddy allegations, which the commission declined to act on, and again now.
Pelletier and Seitz then named two criminal investigations of the mayor. These, they say, help explain the mayor’s effort to remove Pelletier.
The first concerns the allegations behind Leo Caires’s civil suit, filed in April. Pelletier called it a case of corruption, fraud and retaliation. Those claims were sent to the state attorney general.
The second is a new investigation by the Maui Police Department into a felony with the mayor as suspect. Pelletier would say little more. It began in August, he said. He had recused himself. Deputy Chief Wade Maeda was in charge. Seitz said they raised it because it bears on the mayor’s actions against the chief.
“People have been quiet about [Bissen] because they’re scared of retaliation,” Pelletier said. “If you’re going to do this to the police chief? No wonder they’re scared.”
Bissen says no one has told him he is under investigation for anything. He says he learned of the commission’s vote only after it was made. Commission Chair Frank Tam calls the claim that the mayor influenced the decision “100% untrue.”
Enter Andrew Martin. The title of his press release is “Prosecuting Attorney Andrew Martin Refutes Claim that Mayor is Target of Criminal Investigation.”
The release walks through a timeline. Martin’s office opened a probe into county grant funds in January 2025. It worked the case jointly with the state attorney general. In March 2026 it handed the state sole say over any charges.
Martin says Pelletier broke a “fundamental tenet of criminal investigations” by naming a target in public before any arrest or charge. He says the chief “told the public something that is simply not true.”
The problem — which any first-year law student would spot — is that the headline and the body don’t add up. The headline refutes that the mayor is the target of criminal investigation. The body shows only that Bissen was not the target of one investigation, back when Martin still ran it.
Plenty of agencies can run an investigation: county, state, and federal. Pelletier named two investigations. One is run by the attorney general’s office. The other is a felony case he says his own department opened in August.
Martin’s release addresses the first. It does not mention the second. And on the first, Martin says the mayor “was not” a target of an investigation whose charging decisions he gave up six months ago. What the state has done with it since is not his to say.
It is somewhat unusual for a chief prosecutor to display such a loose grip on the basics of how law enforcement works. But nothing about the Maui situation is usual.
“The one who states his case first seems right, until the other comes and examines him.” So says Proverbs. The cases have been stated, but the examining has barely begun.
This much is on the record. Three weeks before the election, a police chief has been sidelined without a reason the public can judge. That chief says the sitting mayor is under two criminal investigations, one of them by his own department. And the prosecuting attorney, appointed by the mayor, has put out a release on county letterhead saying the mayor is not a target of one of them.
Though dated Oct. 13, as of this writing the press release still does not appear on the county’s news page. You can find it attached below.
The commission that removed the chief owes the public a plain statement of why. The prosecutor who wrote this press release owes the public precision. Say what your office knows, and stop there.
Officials who want to be trusted with power have to speak as if their words will be examined. They will be.
A government that cannot manage that much has already told voters something, whatever the letterhead says.
Maui voters are left to sort out the mess. It gets messier every day.
Author Sterling Higa can be reached at hello@sterlinghiga.com.
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