by Bill McAllister
Denver Post Washington Bureau Chief
The Denver Post
WASHINGTON – Accusing federal officials of
“endless broken promises, chronic half-truths and outright lies,” lawyers
for a group of American Indians want a federal judge to jail Interior
Secretary Gale Norton and 38 others for failing to clean up trust accounts
of 300,000 American Indians.
In a motion filled with harsh rhetoric, the attorneys also urged U.S.
District Judge Royce Lamberth to yank the long-troubled accounts from
Norton’s department and place them under a court-appointed receiver.
Interior spokeswoman Stephanie Hanna rejected the idea of transferring the
accounts outside the department. “We feel that the proper place for trust
reform is in the Bureau of Indian Affairs,” she said.
The new motion is not the first time lawyers for the Indians had urged
Norton be cited for contempt in what has become a bitterly contested lawsuit
over billions of dollars that the government has held for decades. The
government has conceded it cannot vouch for the accuracy of the accounts.
This time the lawyers filed a sweeping request with the judge, urging that
he cite a total of 39 Interior and Justice officials from both the Bush and
Clinton administrations, including Norton’s Democratic predecessor, Bruce
Babbitt. They should be jailed “up to 180 days each” and individually fined,
the motion said.
The 74-page motion, filed late Friday afternoon, was the culmination of
months of maneuvering by lawyers in a 51/2-year-old lawsuit that represents
one of the biggest challenges that Norton, the former Colorado state
attorney, faces in her Cabinet position.
Written by former Denver lawyer Dennis Gingold, the motion reserved some of
its harshest language for Norton.
“There is no doubt who is responsible for this fiasco,” Gingold alleged,
citing reports by a court monitor. “. . . Both Mr. Babbitt and Ms. Norton
and their senior managers are the problem; they have failed as fiduciaries
and maladroitly have covered up their failures.”
Despite recent promises by Norton to reconcile the accounts, the lawyers
alleged that accounts are in worse condition today than on June 10, 1996,
when Gingold, with the backing of the Boulder-based Native American Rights
Fund, sued the government over them. The accounts, some of them 100 years
old, were established to hold monies from oil and gas revenues on Indian
lands in the West.
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