Government criticized for erasing e-mail records
in Indian trust fund case
The Associated Press
By: Robert Gehrke
July 30, 2001
WASHINGTON (AP) The Interior Department destroyed e-mails that may have dealt with mismanaged Indian land royalties, despite repeated court orders that the files be preserved, according to a court-appointed investigator. The data was supposed to be retained at the request of attorneys representing hundreds of American Indians in a lawsuit alleging that the government mismanaged at least $10 billion in royalties collected since 1887 from the use of Indian lands.
But from June 1998, when the court first ordered the data tapes preserved, until November 2000, tapes at a number of field offices were routinely overwritten and the information on them destroyed, said Alan Balaran, a court-appointed special master. He issued his report Friday. A report earlier this month from another court-appointed monitor said the government had failed to make any progress in reconstructing how much the Indian trust account holders are owed.
Dennis Gingold, the attorney representing the Indian plaintiffs, said the erasure of the e-mails is a serious case of misconduct. ”Destruction of evidence by the lawyers is as serious an ethical violation as you can make,” said Gingold. ”They’re reporting to the court that it’s being maintained, so they are perpetrating a fraud to the court and destroying documents.”
He said he would ask the judge to hold the Interior Department in contempt the latest in a serious of such requests. If the Justice Department attorneys recommended erasing the tapes, knowingly violating a court order, they should be disbarred, Gingold said.
Justice Department spokesman Charles Miller declined to comment. Interior Department spokeswoman Stephanie Hanna said that the department had told field offices dealing with trust fund issues not to recycle tapes. ”It’s the opinion of the Interior Department that we have made every effort to retain documents and e-mails that are now or were in the past relevant,” Hanna said.
The trust accounts were created to hold royalties from grazing, logging, mining and oil drilling on Indian land. The government holds the accounts in trust for Indian landholders.
From the start the accounts have been mismanaged, the government acknowledges, with shoddy record-keeping, money stolen or used for other federal programs or never collected.
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