Charges fly in trust reform dispute

FROM THE ARCHIVE

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MONDAY, MAY 20, 2002

A federal judge and attorneys for Secretary of Interior Gale Norton traded barbs last week over the Bush administration's efforts to fix the historically mismanaged Indian trust system.

Amid a full-scale attack on one of his officers, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth issued an order decrying the "shipshod and haphazard way" the government treats records belonging to 300,000 American Indians. While allowing Department of Interior officials to keep watch over the documents because they promised to keep his court informed, he derided their "sad and cynical" complaints of additional oversight.

"The court has yet to see any 'effective operations of the Interior Department' regarding these individual Indian trusts," Lamberth wrote on May 17.

But those words were just a small picture of the sparring that has occurred since a court investigator released his most recent report earlier this month. After refusing requests to strip his work of passages the government said were damaging to Norton and other officials, Joseph S. Kieffer III was slammed in a lengthy document -- a part of which was filed under seal -- authored by the Department of Justice.

Government attorneys accused Kieffer of overstepping his bounds by making public a dispute over the role of the department's top trust reform official, a presidential appointee. Calling on the "improper" report to be rejected in its entirety, they said it was filled with "unsubstantiated theories and opinions" that questioned Norton's judgment of the performance of Special Trustee Tom Slonaker.

"[T]he court monitor opines on the qualifications that Interior officials must possess, the role Interior officials must be assigned, which officials must manage which projects, which officials' advice the Secretary must accept, and which officials' advice she must reject," the May 16 filing stated.

"The court monitor is not conducting himself as an objective observer and reporter," the defense team added, "but rather has sought to become an active agent in the decision-making process."

Attorneys representing the Indian beneficiaries quickly responded with a filing of their own. Saying the objections lodged on behalf of Norton were "groundless," they asked Lamberth to refer her defense team to a federal disciplinary panel for alleged "misconduct and unethical behavior."

The acrimony comes ahead of a long-awaited contempt decision Lamberth has mulled since he concluded Norton's trial in February. The Bush administration faces five charges for regarding the handling of the trust, including the submission of false and misleading reports and the failure to protect the assets of Indian account holders from computer hackers.

A guilty finding guarantees the imposition of fines against the government. The last time he ruled the government in contempt, Lamberth awarded the plaintiffs' attorneys about $600,000 for the Clinton administration's failure to produce records relevant to the case.

Contempt could also lead to the appointment of a receiver to handle the Individual Indian Money (IIM) trust, a system which sees about $500 million in transactions for land and royalty owners throughout the country. Doing so would be extraordinary and uncalled for, according to the government, although Lamberth's own words seem to point to no other solution for years of fiduciary incompetence.

"The record of this case suggests that 'fixing the system' has gone so far in the wrong direction that the [Indian beneficiaries] are worse off today than they were six years ago, when this case was filed, or even one year ago," Lamberth wrote on Friday.

Norton declined to elaborate at length on the dispute when asked by Indianz.Com last week but said her department was working with Lamberth's court. "I will have to let the filing that we are making," she said, "stand for itself."

"That is all I have to say."

Related Documents:
Lamberth Order (5/17) | Support for Kieffer (5/16)

Relevant Links:
Indian Trust, Department of Interior - http://www.doi.gov/indiantrust
Indian Trust: Cobell v. Norton - http://www.indiantrust.com
Trust Reform, NCAI - http://130.94.214.68/main/pages/
issues/other_issues/trust_reform.asp