Hasty Pudding?
The Washington Times
Inside the Beltway Column
March 14, 2001
Harvard’s new president, Larry Summers, has more in common with another famous Harvard alum and Washington figure, Robert Rubin, than the university’s directors may realize.
Besides their Harvard degrees and their tenures as secretary of the Treasury under President Clinton, both Mr. Rubin and Mr. Summers managed to get tangled up in Cobell vs. Norton, a lawsuit that accuses Treasury of mismanaging $90 billion in individual Indian trust accounts.
U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth found Mr. Rubin and his Cabinet colleague, then-Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, in contempt of court on Feb. 22, 1999, after they repeatedly violated a court order to stop destroying Indian trust documents. Mr. Summers was deputy Treasury secretary at the time.
It turned out that during the contempt trial, Treasury workers in suburban Maryland destroyed another 160 boxes of trust records, a fact that six Treasury officials hid from Judge Lamberth for four months.
A court-appointed special master who investigated that lapse later called Treasury’s Indian trust system clearly out of control. On Nov. 2, Mr. Summers, who by then had succeeded Mr. Rubin as secretary, filed with Judge Lamberth, under seal, the results of Treasury’s internal investigation of the six officials’ document-destruction cover-up. The Indian plaintiffs and Dow Jones & Co. Inc., publisher of the Wall Street Journal, immediately asked that the report be made public. A decision is pending.
The Indian plaintiffs also asked Judge Lamberth to impose sanctions, possibly including contempt, against Mr. Summers for filing a frivolous motion to seal the report. That matter is also pending.
Judge Lamberth socked Mr. Rubin and Mr. Babbitt with more than $600,000 in penalties, but emphasized that next time, the Treasury secretary — not the taxpayers — would pay the price, possibly including jail time.
If that happens, Mr. Summers will be off to a fast start as a Harvard president of distinction.
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