by Bill McAllister
Denver Post Washington Bureau Chief
The Denver Post
WASHINGTON – The judge presiding over Interior Secretary Gale Norton’s
contempt trial moved closer Thursday to sanctioning Norton and her chief
Indian aide as he repeatedly expressed frustration at how he was misled and
“duped” by government officials in both the Clinton and Bush
administrations.
U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth interrupted the government’s chief
lawyer several times during final arguments, asking him point blank why the
department’s failure to give him a complete and accurate picture of their
troubles managing more than 350,000 Indian trust accounts didn’t amount to
contempt.
Lamberth’s comments indicated that the 29-day-long contempt trial for Norton
and her chief Indian affairs aide, Neal McCaleb, may have failed to sway the
judge’s pretrial opinion that some of the secretary’s actions were “clearly
contemptuous.”
Thursday, even Norton’s chief defender, Mark Nagle of the U.S. attorney’s
office here, conceded that the defense was seeking neither vindication nor
exoneration for the deeds that have left the trust accounts a mess.
Nonetheless, Nagle argued that the officials’ actions didn’t rise to the
level of contempt.
Dennis Gingold, the former Denver lawyer who has led the challenge to the
government’s handling of the trust cases, disputed that. And he laid the
blame squarely on Norton, the former Colorado attorney general.
“Nothing has changed at the Interior Department,” Gingold said. “The only
thing we have seen from this secretary is a plan to have a plan. And they
weren’t as sophisticated as the plans from the previous secretary.”
In 1999, Lamberth held the previous secretary, Bruce Babbitt – along with
Robert Rubin, the Clinton administration’s Treasury secretary, and Kevin
Gover, its Indian affairs director – in contempt in the same case. As a
result, their departments were fined $625,000 for failing to protect trust
documents.
Norton testified in the case last week, assuring the judge that she was
finally making progress with the accounts, which have not been audited for
decades. Lawyers for the Indians say the government may have cheated their
clients out of as much as $10 billion by failing to properly account for
oil, gas and grazing leases of Indian lands in the West.
When one Indian leader told Lamberth on Wednesday that he had not received
any of his grazing lease money – held up by a shutdown of Interior computer
systems that grew out the trust case – the judge was furious. He said that
seemed to contradict assurances he had been given only this week that trust
payments are now being made in a timely manner.
“It is very troubling that on the 29th day of this contempt trial, I’m still
dealing with word games,” the judge said Thursday. “It’s beyond belief how
this court gets control of this case.”
At several points in the final arguments, Lamberth also lamented the lack of
security around the trust accounts. Some of his concerns relate to a
Denver-based computer system run by Interior. “Untold amounts of money could
have disappeared and Interior could not have told me how much,” he told
Gingold.
“That’s what is most shocking: the amount of money that is at risk. That the
trustee (Norton) can callow that amount of money at risk is mind-boggling.”
The judge has given both sides until Thursday to file written conclusions
about the contempt case. Lawyers said that suggests he is likely to rule in
March.
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