by Bill McAllister Denver Post Washington Bureau Chief The Denver Post Barely a month after Congress directed the InteWrior Department to settle the massive lawsuit over its 300,000 mismanaged Indian trust accounts, the chances of an out-ofcourt resolution of the billion-dollar dispute have faded dramatically.
Treasury officials admitted last week that they had destroyed another four boxes of documents related to the claims, a statement that infuriated lawyers for the Indians. The lawyers quickly threatened to reopen the first phase of the case.
“We’re back at all-out war,” said Dennis Gingold, the Washington lawyer who has taken a lead role in pressing the case. Efforts to resolve the case out of court have collapsed, said Gingold, who used to practice law in Denver.
Gingold disclosed that lawyers representing American Indians had reached an agreement with the Interior Department on Aug. 14 that would have resolved all the issues from the first phase of the case. In return, the government would drop its appeal of the dispute to a federal court here in Washington and begin to wrestle with the issue of how much damages the Indians are due.
But Gingold said Assistant Attorney General Lois J. Schiffer intervened and insisted on rewriting the settlement. Justice has claimed a right to oversee the case because of “procedural issues,” Gingold said.
Gingold said Schiffer’s actions have proved fatal to the settlement efforts.
As a result, Gingold, who is pressing the class action lawsuit along with the Boulder-based Native American Rights Fund, plans to go back into federal district court here and seek to reopen part of the first phase of the case. He will allege that the government has continued to destroy documents needed in the case in violation of the orders of District Judge Royce C. Lamberth.
The issues in the 4-year-old lawsuit are huge. At stake are billions of dollars that the government has had in trust for about 300,000 American Indians, monies that were largely from oil, gas and mineral leases of lands owned by Indians but managed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
For decades, it has been wellknown that the the accounts were a mess. But despite repeated warnings from the General Accounting Office and members of Congress, the government had been unable to straighten out the accounts and tell the account holders how much money they have.
Lamberth has ruled that the government breached its trust responsibility to the Indians and he has ordered a second phase of the case on the amount of damages that the government must pay. That amount is in the billions, according to all sides in the case.
Interior officials from Secretary Bruce Babbitt on down have said that the Clinton administration would like to resolve the issue before leaving office. In October, Congress added its directive in the department’s appropriations bill, telling Interior officials to resolve the issue quickly and without another trial.
But Gingold’s comments and the latest disclosure about more lost records make it unlikely that any resolution will be reached before Jan. 20 when Clinton and Babbitt leave office. That means a new cast of negotiators will have to take over any efforts to resolve the case and the appointees who have to handle such issues probably won’t be in place until sometime in the middle of next year.
That puts the issue back in the courts. As Gingold pointed out, the issues there have once again become heated.
Lawyers for the Indians are demanding that the Treasury Department identify what sanctions the agency took against several lawyers who were aware of the first major document destruction in the case. They have the support of Dow Jones & Co., publisher of The Wall Street Journal, in that request.
Gingold and his colleagues also are pressing the government about destruction of e-mail messages that may involve the case and the four boxes that were destroyed recently at the Fort Worth, Texas, federal records center. Government lawyers have maintained that the destruction of the records was accidental.
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