by Bill McAllister
Denver Post Washington Bureau Chief
The Denver Post
WASHINGTON – At least one box of documents that may be needed by investigators attempting to reconstruct trust accounts for thousands of American Indians has been destroyed by workers at the Federal Reserve Bank in Denver, according to letters obtained by The Denver Post.
The destruction, which violates court orders and Treasury Department directives, apparently occurred in October or November 1999, but it was not reported until this week, according to the letters.
Dennis Gingold, a former Denver lawyer who is the lead attorney for the Indians, said the destruction was the latest in a series of incidents that had prompted a federal judge to issue contempt citations against two cabinet secretaries in the Clinton administration.
“It’s a serious problem,” Gingold said. “We’re learning of documents being destroyed every day.”
The document destruction is the latest twist in a massive four-year lawsuit filed by the Colorado-based Native American Rights Fund that demands that the government provide a full accounting of the billions of dollars it holds in trust accounts for more than 300,000 American Indians. Because trust records have been poorly or improperly kept, the government cannot reconcile the individual accounts and may owe the Indians as much as $10 billion, lawyers have said.
Neither Gingold nor other lawyers involved in the case could say what the documents destroyed in Denver included. One government official, who declined to be named, said that the Justice Department had no reason to believe that trust records were among the documents destroyed in Denver.
Gingold said, however, that bank records are crucial to the ongoing investigation because they should include records of any payments that the government has made to the 300,000 Indians who have government trust accounts.
Carl M. Gambs, senior vice president and manager of the Denver Fed, declined to discuss the incident. He referred inquiries to the Justice Department. Officials there also declined to comment.
In a letter dated Wednesday, Walter T. Eccard of the Bureau of the Public Debt, a Treasury Department agency, informed the Justice Department of the bureau’s discovery of the destruction in Denver. “Treasury is quite concerned about this incident,” Eccard said, promising a detailed description of what happened.
In July 1999, Treasury officials had warned all Federal Reserve banks in the nation not to destroy any records that may be related to a massive lawsuit over the trust accounts. Since then, Gingold and others have learned of records being destroyed at several banks.
Those discoveries apparently have triggered a nationwide audit at all federal reserve banks to discover whether other records also may have been lost. It was apparently this effort that prompted the discovery this week about the Denver destruction.
Lawyers for the Indians have complained that continued destruction is proof of the federal government’s bad faith. By the government’s testimony, the accounts are so mismanaged that it’s impossible to know their proper balances.
Government attorneys have maintained it will take years to reconcile the accounts.
Some of them date back as far as 1887 when Congress passed a law designed to make Indians financially independent by giving them 80- to 160-acre tracts of lands. The government was supposed to act as trustee for monies raised from the sale of oil and other minerals on those lands.
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