The fight over water is nothing new on Maui. But the impact on the county’s ability to battle fires is coming clear. With wildfires ravaging West Maui on Aug. 8, a state water official delayed the release of water that landowners wanted to help protect their property from fires. The water standoff played out over much of the day and the water didn’t come until too late. The dispute involved the Department of Land and Natural Resources’ water resource management division and West Maui Land Co. , which manages agricultural and residential subdivisions in West Maui as well as Launiupoko Irrigation Co. , Launiupoko Water Co. , Olowalu Water Co. and Ha’iku Town Water Association. DLNR delayed releasing water requested by West Maui Land Co. to help prevent the spread of fire, sources familiar with the situation said. Specifically, according to accounts of four people with knowledge of the situation, M. Kaleo Manuel , a Native Hawaiian cultural practitioner and DLNR’s deputy director for water resource management, initially balked at West Maui Land Co.’s requests for additional water to help prevent the fire from spreading to properties managed by the company. A Note On Anonymous Sources Civil Beat generally uses on-the-record sources. However, we occasionally use unnamed sources when a source is sharing important information we wouldn’t have otherwise been able to obtain and when they could face negative consequences for speaking publicly. The reporter and at least one editor must know the identity of the source and the use of anonymity must be approved by a senior editor. You can read more about our anonymous sources policy here . According to the sources, Manuel wanted West Maui Land to get permission from a taro, or kalo, farm located downstream from the company’s property. Manuel eventually released water but not until after the fire had spread. It was not clear on Monday how much damage the fire did in the interim or whether homes were damaged. Manuel declined to be interviewed for this story. DLNR’s communications office said in an email that it was supporting the state’s emergency communications response and “unable to facilitate your inquiry at this time.” Glenn Tremble, an executive with West Maui Land Co. said to have knowledge of the dispute, did not return a request for comment. However, Gov. Josh Green spoke candidly Monday during a press briefing about conflicts over water on Maui – although not the DLNR-West Maui Land Co. incident directly – and encouraged news media to explore the issue. The conflicts are rooted in the diversion of water by large plantations, which starved downstream users from a resource essential for Native Hawaiian agriculture, particularly the traditional practice of growing taro or kalo . But the governor said conflicts over water are being reshaped in an age of climate change and wildfires. Now the conflict includes opponents who do not want water to be used to fight fires, the governor said. “One thing that people need to understand especially those from far away is that there’s been a great deal of water conflict on Maui for many years,” Green said. “It’s important that we’re honest about this. People have been fighting against the release of water to fight fires. I’ll leave that to you to explore.” “We have a difficult time on Maui and other rural areas getting enough water for houses, for our people, for any response,” Green added. “But it’s important we start being honest. There are currently people still fighting in our state giving us water access to fight and prepare for fires even as more storms arise.” Green said the state is in the midst of a “comprehensive review” by Attorney General Anne Lopez of decisions made before and during the firefighting efforts. “There will be multiple reviews at every level,” he said. In 2022, two Maui senators, Gil Keith-Agaran and Lynne DeCoite , introduced a measure to push DLNR to allow fresh water to be used to fight fires and pointed to West Maui as being particularly vulnerable. The bill noted that “in 2019, West Maui suffered from an active fire season in which wildfires scorched twenty-five thousand acres of land.” It would have required DLNR to “cooperate with the counties and reservoir owners to develop protocols and agreements for the use of reservoir waters for fire safety purposes.” Specifically, the measure said, “The protocols and agreements shall address the emergency use of reservoir waters for prevention, control, and extinguishment of fires while taking into account the various competing uses of reservoir waters.” The bill died without a hearing. Civil Beat’s coverage of Maui County is supported in part by a grant from the Nuestro Futuro Foundation. Former Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan on Tuesday morning hammered his party for standing by former President Donald Trump even after being indicted four different times on 91 criminal charges. Appearing on CNN, Duncan once again begged Republicans to find a non-indicted presidential nominee to be its standard bearer in the 2024 presidential election. "They know the right thing to do here," Duncan said of Republicans. "The right thing is to call Donald Trump out for lying, misleading us, and taking our Republican party straight to the ditch. That's what's happened here, and until we all want to stand up and speak as loudly and clearly as we possibly can that the Republican Party needs to use this as a pivot point, to hit the reset button, to go to a GOP 2.0 that really gets us back to talking about the policies." The problem, however, is that a majority of Republican primary voters seem completely devoted to Trump, despite the fact that the GOP lost the White House and both chambers of Congress under his watch, despite the fact that he was the only president in American history to have been impeached twice, and despite the fact that he now faces nearly 100 criminal charges. RELATED: 'Voluntarily surrender by noon on Aug 25': Fani Willis demands Trump and his allies to submit for arrest Nonetheless, Duncan suggested that the GOP could dump Trump if everyone in the party stood up together and spoke with one voice. "We're going to continue to be embarrassed and our campaign speeches in the Republican Party are going to be from courthouse steps every single day," he said. "We can do better. We should do better. This needs to be the wakeup call. I have been vocal about this, we need to have everybody running for president stand up together... tell Donald Trump to get out of this race for the good of the party and for the good of this country." Watch the video below or at this link . He's 'taking our party straight into the ditch': Georgia Republican rips GOP for standing by Trump www.youtube.com CONTINUE READING Show less An Atlanta, Georgia, grand jury indicted former President Donald Trump on Aug. 14, 2023, charging him with racketeering and 12 other felonies related to his alleged attempts to overturn his 2020 election defeat in the state. Eighteen of Trump’s allies and associates, including former Trump attorney Rudolph Giuliani and former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, were also indicted for racketeering and other felony charges for their alleged involvement in the scheme. This marks Trump’s fourth indictment in five months – and the second to come from his efforts to undo the election results that awarded the presidency to Joe Biden. Fani Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, Georgia, started investigating Trump’s involvement in this alleged scheme, as well as that of Trump’s colleagues, in February 2021. In January 2021, one month before the investigation started, Trump placed a phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and pressed him to “find” enough votes to overturn Biden’s win. The Conversation U.S. spoke with Anthony Michael Kreis , a scholar of Georgia’s election laws, to understand the significance of the charges laid out in the 98-page indictment . Here are five key points to understand about the precise nature of the charges and why racketeering is at the center of them. Police officers block off a street in front of the Fulton County Courthouse on August 14, 2023, in Atlanta. Joe Raedle/Getty Images 1. Racketeering is different from conspiracy charges With a Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations, or RICO, charge , Willis presents a narrative that there were a large number of people involved in this case, but that they didn’t necessarily sit down at some point and over cocktails and say, “We are going to engage in this criminal act,” which would be a traditional conspiracy case. She is painting this picture of people winking and nodding and working toward this end goal of overthrowing the election, but without some kind of expressed agreement. The Georgia RICO law allows her to rope in a lot of people who allegedly were involved with this kind of approach. To be able to bring conspiracy charges, she would have to have an expressed agreement and a concrete act in furtherance of that conspiracy. And here there really wasn’t quite a plan – it is essentially a loose organization of people who are all up to no good. 2. Georgia – and Willis – have used racketeering charges before Traditionally in Georgia, RICO has been used to prosecute people engaged in very violent kinds of activity – for street gangs and the Mafia, in particular. It has also been used in other contexts. The most notable is the Atlanta public school cheating prosecution in 2015, when a number of educators were charged with manipulating student test scores. They wanted to make the public schools look better for various reasons. But they didn’t all know exactly what the other people were doing. Willis was the assistant district attorney prosecuting that racketeering case. It’s a tool that she likes to use. And it is a tool that can be really hard for defendants to defend against. Eleven of the 12 defendants were convicted of racketeering in 2015 and received various sentences, including up to 20 years in prison. Fani Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, Georgia, is seen inside her office in September 2022. David Walter Banks 3. Georgia law poses particular risks to Trump Georgia’s RICO law is much more expansive than the federal version of the law. It allows for a lot more different kinds of conduct to be covered. That makes it very easy to sweep people into one criminal enterprise and it’s a favorite tool for prosecutors. And the punishments for violating the state’s RICO are harsh. There is a minimum five-year sentence for offenders, and there can be a lengthy prison sentence for any co-defendants, as well. But it also introduces a new dynamic, which Trump might not be used to. There is a big incentive for people who are listed as co-defendants to cooperate with the state and to provide evidence, in order to escape punishment and secure favorable deals. This is probably the biggest risk to Trump, and the likelihood that he would be convicted in Fulton County rests with this. The other people involved in this are not all household names, and presumably have families and friends and don’t want to go to prison. They may well find themselves in a position to want to give evidence against Trump. 4. It’s ultimately about election law It looks like Georgia election law is taking a slight backseat to some of these other possible charges – of false swearing, giving false statements – which is not quite an election conspiracy, or election interference, which are distinct charges under Georgia law. The important lesson here is that Willis is essentially bringing an election conspiracy charge under RICO, so it is an election law violation by another name. What she is vindicating is not only the rights of Georgians to vote and have their votes counted. Willis is also preserving the integrity of the election system – to not have poll workers harassed, to not have people making false statements about the elections in courts of law, and to not have people tamper with an election. 5. This could influence future key elections Georgia has some serious contested elections ahead in 2024 and 2026. And people need to have faith in the system, the process, as well as in the institutions and the people. Fani Willis has a very important goal here – which is to expose the wrongs for what they were, to show people what happened here and to what degree it was criminal, if she can prove that. It’s also about reassuring people that if others engage in this kind of conduct, they will be penalized. Anthony Michael Kreis , Assistant professor of law, Georgia State University This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article . CONTINUE READING Show less Last night, Trump and 18 others were criminally charged in Georgia in connection with efforts to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 victory in the state. Trump was charged with 13 counts, including violating the state’s racketeering act, soliciting a public officer to violate their oath, conspiring to impersonate a public officer, conspiring to commit forgery in the first degree, and conspiring to file false documents. The indictment also charges some of Trump’s most prominent advisers, including Rudolph W. Giuliani, his former personal lawyer, and Mark Meadows, who served as White House chief of staff at the time of the election. This indictment follows a 2½-year investigation by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis — after audio leaked from a January 2021 phone call during which Trump urged Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to question the validity of thousands of ballots, especially in the heavily Democratic Atlanta area, and said he wanted to “find” the votes to erase his 2020 loss in the state. It is another step in America’s slow but steady process of criminal justice, another illustration that no one is above the law. Fani Willis and her staff deserve the nation’s thanks, as do Jack Smith and his staff, and Alvin Bragg and his staff in Manhattan. POLL: Should Trump be allowed to run for office? This is not easy work under the best of circumstances. When a rogue former president is on the loose, fanning the flames of anger and recrimination, the work is fraught and potentially dangerous. Early yesterday morning, before the Georgia grand jury met, Trump posted the following: I am reading reports that failed former Lt. Governor of Georgia, Jeff Duncan, will be testifying before the Fulton County Grand Jury. He shouldn’t. I barely know him but he was, right from the beginning of this Witch Hunt, a nasty disaster for those looking into the Election Fraud that took place in Georgia. He refused having a Special Session to find out what went on, became very unpopular with Republicans (I refused to endorse him!), and fought the TRUTH all the way. A loser, he went to FNCNN! I have no idea whether Mr. Duncan was intimidated by this post when he testified yesterday, whether he altered or downplayed his testimony out of fear of retribution by a Trump supporter. But the mere possibility raises a broader question that must be answered by the judges presiding over Trump’s trials — and very soon. Trump’s conditions of release at his arraignment earlier this month included a vow — which Trump swore to uphold — that he would not intimidate or harass witnesses and officers of the court or threaten the administration of justice. Yet he has not ceased posting inflammatory invective against potential witnesses, against potential jurors in Washington D.C., New York, and Georgia, against judges who have been assigned to hear the cases against him, against Special Counsel Jack Smith, and against other prosecutors. His wild statements endanger all these people — we know all too well about the violent proclivities of a subset of Trump supporters. His posts could silence potential witnesses in any and all of Trump’s pending trials. His rants could intimidate jurors, prosecutors, and judges. Trump’s posts continue to directly and explicitly violate the conditions of Trump’s release from jail pending trial. Last Friday, federal Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is presiding over the Justice Department’s case charging Trump with federal crimes in connection with seeking to overturn the 2020 election, repeatedly instructed Trump that he is bound by laws preventing him from influencing jurors or witnesses. She said any “inflammatory remarks” that could influence a jury would hasten a trial, and she warned that “I will take whatever measures are necessary to safeguard the integrity of the case.” Hours later, Trump called Judge Chutkan “highly partisan” and “very biased and unfair,” adding “She obviously wants me behind bars.” Friends, Trump is daring Judge Chutkan and other judges involved (or soon to be involved) in these four proceedings to revoke his release pending trial. He believes he can get away with intimidating and harassing potential witnesses, jurors, prosecutors, and judges. He is confident he is above the law. He must be shown he is not above the law. His release pending trial must be revoked. CONTINUE READING Show less