Indians rip Babbitt’s late effort
The Denver Post
By: Bill McAllister
Denver Post Washington Bureau Chief
January 25, 2001
WASHINGTON – Lawyers for American Indians challenging the federal government’s admitted bungling of their trust accounts on Wednesday accused former Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt of initiating a last-minute effort to resolve the dispute that has “no chance of success.” In what is the latest in a series of challenges to the final acts of the Clinton administration, the lawyers urged a federal judge to reject a Babbitt plan for a “statistical sampling” of the individual Indian trust accounts at the heart of the Indians’ massive lawsuit against the government.
The lawyers said Babbitt approved the sampling plan Dec. 29 as one of his final actions and informed a federal court of the action Jan. 8, shortly before he left office. The plan will cost taxpayers $17 million to $70 million, and some Interior officials have told them the sampling will be “a significant waste of time and money and that the government is incapable of furnishing an accurate and complete accounting of the trust accounts,” the lawyers said in a news release.
At stake in the lawsuit, filed by the Colorado-based Native American Rights Fund, is the accuracy of thousands of individual trust accounts that the federal government established for about 300,000 Indians. Those accounts were to hold money that the government received from private industry for minerals, oil and gas that were taken from the lands. Congress, in urging the Interior Department to settle the lawsuit last year, suggested it take a sampling approach, examining a limited number of accounts and then applying what it finds to all of the accounts. Stephanie Hanna, an Interior spokeswoman, said the department long has insisted that “the only way to get to the bottom of this is through some statistical sampling.” She added that there is “no way to estimate any other alternative.”
The Indians already have won the first phase of their 1966 lawsuit against the government. But the Clinton administration appealed a district court ruling that the government had breached its trust relationship with the Indians.
The government has conceded that its records are a mess and has no way of knowing how accurate the individual account balances are. The lawsuit attempts to force the government to make an accounting for the funds. In an internal memo dated Dec. 21, Kevin Gover, the former assistant interior secretary for Indian affairs, argued for a sampling of the accounts, saying the department, Congress and “outside third parties” had reviewed the issue of how to reconcile the accounts. “Each agrees that a complete transaction-by-transaction accounting for every account would cost hundreds of millions of dollars and take many years to complete,” he said.
That would be so costly that it would force the department to turn to Congress for added appropriations, he said. But Dennis Gingold, a former Denver lawyer who is handling the case, argued in his motion that during settlement talks last year, two Interior officials told him that sampling would be ineffective and would fail to accomplish the accounting that the courts have ordered.
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