Sunday, October 21, 2001 - WASHINGTON -
Accusing federal officials of "endless broken promises, chronic half-truths and outright lies," lawyers for a group of
American Indians want a federal judge to jail Interior Secretary Gale Norton and 38 others for failing to
clean up trust accounts of 300,000 American Indians.

In a motion filled with harsh rhetoric, the attorneys also urged U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth to yank
the long-troubled accounts from Norton's department and place them under a court-appointed receiver.

Interior spokeswoman Stephanie Hanna rejected the idea of transferring the accounts outside the department.
"We feel that the proper place for trust reform is in the Bureau of Indian Affairs," she said.

The new motion is not the first time lawyers for the Indians had urged Norton be cited for contempt in what
has become a bitterly contested lawsuit over billions of dollars that the government has held for decades. The
government has conceded it cannot vouch for the accuracy of the accounts.

This time the lawyers filed a sweeping request with the judge, urging that he cite a total of 39 Interior
and Justice officials from both the Bush and Clinton administrations, including Norton's Democratic
predecessor, Bruce Babbitt. They should be jailed "up to 180 days each" and individually fined, the motion said.

The 74-page motion, filed late Friday afternoon, was the culmination of months of maneuvering by lawyers in
a 51/2-year-old lawsuit that represents one of the biggest challenges that Norton, the former Colorado state
attorney, faces in her Cabinet position.

Written by former Denver lawyer Dennis Gingold, the motion reserved some of its harshest language for
Norton.

"There is no doubt who is responsible for this fiasco," Gingold alleged, citing reports by a court monitor. ". . . Both
Mr. Babbitt and Ms. Norton and their senior managers are the problem; they have failed as fiduciaries and maladroitly have covered up their failures."

Despite recent promises by Norton to reconcile the accounts, the lawyers alleged that accounts are in worse
condition today than on June 10, 1996, when Gingold, with the backing of the Boulder-based Native American
Rights Fund, sued the government over them. The accounts, some of them 100 years old, were established to
hold monies from oil and gas revenues on Indian lands in the West.