Norton ordered to stand trial
Rocky Mountain News
November 29, 2001
Judge told Interior in 1999 to account for royalties owed Indians By Deborah Frazier and Gary Gerhardt, News Staff Writers Interior Secretary Gale Norton was ordered Wednesday to stand trial Dec. 3 for allegedly violating court orders she inherited and misleading a federal judge about billions of dollars of royalties from Indian land.
U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth ordered the trial for Norton and Neal McCaleb, assistant secretary for Indian affairs and head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, to show why they shouldn’t be held in contempt of court. In 1999, the Washington-based judge ordered the Interior Department, then headed by Bruce Babbitt, to piece together how much is owed to more than 300,000 Indians who sued the department, claiming more than $10 billion in royalties from Indian lands.
Norton, a former Colorado attorney general, took over the Interior Department on Feb. 1. On Wednesday, Lamberth ordered Norton to show that she complied with his 1999 order.
“The record is clear that Secretary Norton violated his orders,” said Keith Harper, an attorney for the Boulder-based Native American Rights Fund that filed suit on behalf of the Indians.
“The court won’t stand for Norton doing this,” he said. “Once we have dealt with this, we can concentrate on the main issue of the royalties from Indian land, which our experts said will exceed $10 billion.”
Norton also must prove that she did not commit “a fraud on the court” by filing false or misleading reports about the status of the accounting and the department’s current system of tracking the Indian royalties. In 1999, Lamberth held Babbitt and then-Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin in contempt and fined them $600,000 for failing to produce documents in the case.
At an Oct. 30 hearing this year, Lamberth scolded the Interior Department’s lawyer and advised the lawyer to “throw yourself on the mercy of the court,” rather than defending conduct he called “so clearly contemptuous.” An Interior Department spokesman was not available for comment. “Interior will have some explaining to do,” said Lorna Babby, a NARF attorney in Denver. “They will say they inherited this from the Clinton administration, but what they are doing now is as bad or worse.” The lawsuit stems from the mismanagement of royalties from mining, grazing, timber harvesting and other activities on 54 million acres of Indian land held in trust by the Interior Department since 1887.
Payments were supposed to be made to the Indian beneficiaries, but much of the money was lost, misappropriated, stolen or never collected. In 1999, Lamberth ordered Interior to fix the system and account for the lost money, but the department has failed to do either despite spending $614 million on the effort, according to reports by court-appointed watchdogs. “There is no group in this country that would tolerate this kind of theft,” said Glenn Morris, an attorney, University of Colorado professor and American Indian Movement leader in Denver.
Lamberth has scheduled a hearing for Friday to determine who may be needed to testify at the Dec. 3 contempt trial.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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