Judge asked to hold Norton in contempt in Indian trust lawsuit
The Associated Press
By: Robert Gehrke
May 18, 2001
WASHINGTON (AP) American Indians who contend they were bilked of $10 billion in trust funds are asking a judge to stop the government from shredding documents relating to the case and to hold Interior Secretary Gale Norton in contempt of court. The same judge ruled two Clinton Cabinet officials in contempt in connection with the trust funds two years ago. The Indians hope to use documents in the case to reconstruct how much money is missing from the trust fund accounts, which were created to manage royalties paid for the use of Indian lands. Attorneys for the 300,000 plaintiffs in the class-action case have asked that the government pay the money back. ”The (Bureau of Indian Affairs) Office of Information Resource Management and its contractors have been destroying trust documents on a daily basis in violation of court orders,” said Dennis Gingold, representing the Indian plaintiffs. Earlier this year, Alan Balaran, a court-appointed investigator, paid a surprise visit to the document warehouse and pulled from a shredder a record of money paid out of the trust fund. BIA officials told Balaran similar documents were being shredded every day, Gingold said. Interior spokeswoman Stephanie Hanna criticized the plaintiffs’ latest motion, calling it the ”contempt du jour.” It is the third time U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth has been asked by the plaintiffs to hold Norton in contempt since she was confirmed as interior secretary. ”I think it’s ridiculous and people are just using it to generate publicity,” the spokeswoman said. Hanna said the document Balaran found was a printout used to test the computer system that stores the records and, since it included a Social Security number, it was shredded for security purposes. ”That’s a flat-out lie,” said Gingold. Even if the document was a duplicate, the BIA would have had to get the court’s permission to destroy it, and it did not, he said. A hearing on the motion has not been scheduled. In 1999 Lamberth held then-Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt and former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin in contempt and fined them more than $600,000 for failing to turn over documents related to the case. At a hearing in April, Lamberth said he was willing to take the same steps if the government doesn’t cooperate with the court. ”I don’t want it to come to that again, but I am prepared to do what is necessary to get trust reform accomplished,” said Lamberth. The Indian trust accounts came from an 1887 federal law that divided some reservation land into smaller plots for individual Indians. The federal government holds that land in trust for the Indians, meaning it cannot be taxed or sold. Many of the tracts are leased for grazing, logging, mining or oil drilling. Proceeds are supposed to be deposited in government accounts and then paid to Indian landholders. Since the beginning, however, those accounts have been mismanaged, the government acknowledges. Records for many were never kept, and documentation for others was lost or destroyed. Some of the money was stolen or used for other federal programs. Some lease proceeds were never collected. Thousands of the accounts have money but no names attached.
|
|
|