Lawyer urges Interior misconduct probe
The Denver Post
By: Bill McAllister
Denver Post Washington Bureau Chief
August 22, 2001
WASHINGTON – In a stunning reversal, the Interior Department’s top lawyer has called for an internal investigation into whether senior Bush and Clinton administration officials have engaged in misconduct in fighting a lawsuit over Indian trust accounts.
The action by newly installed Interior Solicitor William G. Myers III could pose potentially embarrassing problems for Interior Secretary Gale Norton and her top aides. Bruce Babbitt, the Clinton administration’s secretary and some of his aides, also could be implicated in the investigation.
In a memorandum made public Tuesday, Myers asked the department’s inspector general to launch an inquiry into whether the Norton aides properly reviewed an accounting decision by Babbitt or worried too much about “the litigation posture of the department” in the lawsuit.
Myers also called for an investigation into how Babbitt seemingly dodged a court order calling for a historical accounting of the admittedly mangled trust accounts that the department holds for more than 300,000 American Indians.
Interior officials also should question whether workers misled court officials about whether a $40 million computer system was working, Myers said. That was one of the major findings of a court monitor who said that top Interior officials should have known during the Clinton administration that the computers were not functional, although they bragged in court and before Congress that they were working.
The solicitor’s action came only days after an Interior spokeswoman assured reporters that the department had complied with a federal judge’s suggestion that Interior officials needed to consider whether their lawyers should be sanctioned in the case.
Noting that Treasury Department lawyers had been reviewed by their department, U.S. Judge Royce Lamberth questioned why Interior and Justice Department lawyers seemingly had escaped similar review.
Justice Department lawyers subsequently disclosed that their Office of Professional Responsibility was looking into the case. Myers acted Friday, sending a copy of a highly critical report by a court-appointed monitor to Earl E. Devaney, the department’s inspector general.
In addition to the reviews of two lawyers, which an Interior spokeswoman, Stephanie Hanna, had mentioned, Myers cited six instances that needed to be investigated. Both Interior lawyers were said to have been cleared by internal reviews, according to Hanna.
Myers also called for an investigation of whether Interior officials retaliated against a New Mexico woman by ordering her reassigned to Reston, Va., from Albuquerque. Allegations of document destruction should also been studied, he recommended.
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