Editor’s note: Honolulu Civil Beat editors and reporters met with Anne Lopez, attorney general for the state of Hawaiʻi, on Monday. She was accompanied by Hawaiʻi Solicitor General Kaliko Fernandes. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Lopez was asked first about the strategy behind her office‘s response on May 1 to a lawsuit filed April 30 by the Trump administration seeking to preemptively halt a separate lawsuit — also filed May 1 — by the Hawaiʻi attorney general against major oil companies that alleges deceptive conduct contributing to climate change.
Lopez: I won’t go into too many details. Obviously, I will tell you that we will be litigating this in-house. My department will be combating this unprecedented lawsuit, and we’re doing that because, one, I have confidence in my department, (solicitor general) Kaliko Fernandes and (special assistant) Dave Day, but also because this is a direct attack on our state of Hawaiʻi’s sovereignty, and it is unprecedented because filing a lawsuit to stop somebody from filing a lawsuit doesn’t even make sense in sort of a rational and reasonable way…