by Bill McAllister Denver Post Washington Bureau Chief The Denver Post Feb. 13, 2001 – WASHINGTON – A lawyer appointed to resolve the tangled case of missing Indian trust records has complained that his efforts are being undermined by senior attorneys at the Justice and Interior departments, according to a letter obtained Monday by The Denver Post.
Special court master Alan L. Balaran notified the Justice Department in the Jan. 31 letter that the government lawyers had “launched a misguided campaign to undermine my authority.”
He vowed that their efforts would not continue.
The government lawyers “publicly call into question my ability to read,” and also claimed Balaran never practiced law and likened him to an investigator on a television series, he said in the sharply worded letter to a senior Justice Department lawyer.
“As I have been called worse things by better lawyers, I will not take these insults to heart,” Balaran told Phillip A. Brooks of the Justice Department’s general litigation division.
Brooks did not return telephone calls asking for comment on the letter. But in a Feb. 2 letter to Balaran, he rejected the charges.
“While we dispute your perception, this is neither the time nor the place to address such issues in detail,” Brooks said.
The terse exchange of letters may illustrate how much difficulty Gale Norton, the Bush administration’s new interior secretary, will face if she tries to bring the 4-yearold lawsuit to an end.
Both sides in the suit over the government’s admittedly mishandled trust accounts have dug in their heels over the production of missing records. Congress is urging the case be resolved out of court.
Named by a federal judge to help track down some of the missing trust records, Balaran said the government lawyers are hampering his inquiry. He ordered that any Bureau of Indian Affairs employee who wants to contact him directly about the trust records be allowed to talk to him “in complete confidence and without fear of reprisal.”
That order came after Balaran attempted to find out what happened at the Northern Cheyenne agency in Montana where boxes of records were reported destroyed. BIA officials have denied that charge, but Balaran in his letter said he will open an inquiry into the question.
In that letter, Balaran also made it clear that he views the lawyers, not members of the Office of Trust Records who handle the actual trust records, as his principal worry.
Balaran said “certain lawyers” working for the Justice Department and Interior’s Office of Solicitor have gone after him “in concert with OTR’s management.”
The government is appealing a ruling by U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth, who held that the federal government had breached its trust responsibility to the American Indians. The government is holding millions of dollars in trust for them, mostly from oil and mineral leases of Indian lands in the West.
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