The Honolulu City Council has approved paying a prominent San Francisco-based law firm up to $225,000 to help city attorneys fight a federal investigation, although the focus of the probe is uncertain.

At issue are employee emails or other data seized in January.

Acting Corporation Counsel Paul Aoki and his department have said very little, even to Council members, about the request to hire Farella Braun and Martell LLC as special deputy corporation counsel. The firm is needed to help “on matters involving criminal law,” the department has said.

Aoki on Friday declined to answer specific questions about the hire. A city spokesman, in a statement, said: “The firm was hired for its expertise in matters the Department of the Corporation Counsel does not normally handle. This is being done in accordance with the law.”

The Council, on Wednesday, voted 7-2 to approve Resolution 19-216, for $75,000 in additional funding to Farella.

Council members Heidi Tsuneyoshi and Kymberly Pine voted against the funding.

Tsuneyoshi declined to give her reasons for voting “no,” she said, because they are based on discussions that took place with city attorneys during closed-door, executive session meetings of the Council Executive Matters and Legal Affairs Committee.

Pine said one reason she voted “no” was because she didn’t like the idea of spending public money on something for which the public is being “left in the dark.”

In March, the Council approved $100,000 be paid to the firm via Resolution 19-47, also under the vague description of “matters involving criminal law.” It is unclear when the remaining $50,000 was approved.

Councilman Ron Menor, chairman of the legal affairs committee, which considers requests for private counsel, said he and his colleagues believe Farella’s hire is tied to search warrants executed in January by federal investigators who seized records from the Department of Information Technology and possibly other agencies.

In mid-January, Mayor Kirk Caldwell confirmed to reporters that federal investigators served a search warrant on the Department of Information Services at the Frank Fasi Municipal Building in connection with the broad-ranging investigation into corruption that centered around former Police Chief Louis Kealoha and his wife, Deputy Prosecutor Katherine Kealoha. Caldwell made the statement during a press conference announcing that city Corporation Counsel Donna Leong was being placed on paid leave because she had received a target letter in connection with the Kealoha case.

Menor said among the items seized were copies of emails of city employees.

“What happened was, as a result of the search warrants, Corporation Counsel came to the conclusion that they felt that the emails that were seized by the federal government contained information that should not have been disclosed under federal and state law,” he said. “The city attorneys felt that there may have been information protected by the attorney- client and work product privileges, and potentially the right to privacy.”

Corporation Counsel told Council members that city attorneys should have been present “to review and challenge the seizure of some of these emails,” or at least had the materials reviewed by an independent federal “taint” team to determine which ones should have been declared “privileged” and should not have been handed over to the investigative team, Menor said.

City lawyers immediately sought through the U.S. District Court to block the investigative team from viewing the materials until such a review could be conducted, and Farella was hired in February to assist first by conducting its own review of thousands of pages of documents, Menor said.

Farella has since asked a federal judge to conduct an “in camera,” or private, review of the documents to determine which can be disclosed, Menor said. “Right now the matter is pending before District Court,” he said.

Those proceedings, however, and documents tied to them appear to be under seal and closed to the public.

Menor said Council members have not been told if there is a court case tied to the proceedings and, in fact, have not been told exactly what federal investigators are looking into.

“We just have a contract number (for Farella),” Menor said. “I really don’t know and I can’t speculate because we don’t know where the federal government is coming from. And actually, I get a sense that Corporation Counsel isn’t sure in regard to what the federal government is looking at.”

Federal investigators may intentionally be vague because they don’t want to tip their hand about a case to the wrong parties, he said.

It could be tied to Leong and the settlement payment made by the Police Commission to Louis Kealoha, he said. But at the same time, federal investigators have subpoenaed records from the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation involving alleged, unspecified instances of wrongdoing tied to the $9.2 billion rail project that has nearly doubled in price in recent years. He noted that before the creation of HART, the city Department of Transportation Services had oversight over the fledgling rail project.

Among the questions the Honolulu Star-Advertiser asked Aoki’s agency was what law the city is using to preclude the public from knowing the details of Farella’s hire.

Menor said he is a strong proponent of government transparency and that keeping information from the public should not be taken lightly. However, he said, “we rely on city attorneys to divulge what should be disclosed to the public under the law.”

Menor said he is confident the proper decisions will be made by a judge, who is supposed to be an independent arbiter. “Ultimately, it’s going to be the decision of a federal District Court judge to decide what should be or should not be divulged.”