Group Seeks Jail for Babbitt in Whistleblower Case
The Denver Post
By: Bill McAllister
Denver Post Washington Bureau Chief
August 17, 2000
WASHINGTON – Lawyers for a Colorado-based group have asked a federal court to jail Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt and up to nine other federal officials for allegedly retaliating against a Bureau of Indian Affairs supervisor who has cooperated with them in a major lawsuit against the government.
Attorneys for the Native American Rights Fund of Boulder urged a federal court master to recommend the officials be held in civil contempt for actions against Mona Infield, a BIA computer specialist in Albuquerque. She has filed several affidavits critical of the agency’s handling of billions of dollars in trust accounts that the BIA held for Native Americans.
The rights fund sued the government in 1996, claiming gross mismanagement of the trust funds that contain revenue from oil and gas leases and other activities on Indian lands dating to 19th century.
In papers filed late Tuesday in Washington, lawyers for the rights fund allege that BIA officials recently stripped Infield of her duties at a BIA office in Albuquerque and sent her home with nothing to do after she continued providing the lawyers with affidavits.
Those actions allegedly violated a court order, drafted by the government, which promised no retaliation against any BIA employee active in the case.
Keith Harper, one of the fund’s Washington lawyers, said the request is one of several sanctions the fund will seek against officials who have blocked efforts to learn what happened to the 500,000 trust accounts the BIA is supposed to manage. No date has been set for a hearing on the effort to jail Babbitt and the others, Harper said.
Interior spokeswoman Stephanie Hanna rejected the fund’s allegations. Infield, a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, was offered a number of job options when the department decided to move her work on the trust accounts to suburban Washington, Hanna said.
Infield accepted none of the offers, some of which would have allowed her to remain in New Mexico and continue working at her current pay grade, Hanna said. “The department does not feel that this was either retaliation or that anything unfair was done,” Hanna said.
In papers filed with special master Alan Balaran, lawyers for the rights fund and Infield told a different story. They said Infield was told she had to move to northern Virginia after first being offered a position that would allow her to remain in Albuquerque.
The decision to seek the contempt order against Babbitt, BIA director Kevin Gover and others who supervised Infield came after the collapse of talks with government lawyers over her status, Harper said in an interview.
In December, U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth issued a sweeping ruling that the government had breached its trust responsibility to Native Americans by decades of mishandling the accounts. The BIA has been unable to say how much money should be in them, citing lost records and sloppy accounting. Government lawyers are appealing the ruling by Lamberth, which said “it would be difficult to find a more historically mismanaged federal program than the individual Indian Money Trust.”
In February 1999, Lamberth held Babbitt, Gover and then-Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin in contempt for failing to produce documents needed in the case. In the new motion seeking the jail time for Babbitt, fund lawyers quoted the judge as saying: “I have a general philosophy that I don’t fine government officials that are in contempt. I put them in jail. I think that fines do no good. They just penalize the taxpayer.”
The judge has, however, assessed the government $600,000 for delays in reporting the destruction of 162 boxes of documents dealing with the trust accounts.
Harper said Infield provided the lawyers with critical information about a government contractor who moved some trust records without proper safeguards for their privacy. Infield’s complaint delayed the transfer of some trust programs from New Mexico and may have upset some of her supervisors, he said.
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