GOVERNMENT DROPS ATTEMPT TO BLOCK COURT MONITOR’S REPORTS AS EVIDENCE

Judge’s Threat Leads to Speed-up in Norton Contempt Trial

WASHINGTON, D.C. ­ In a surprise move, government attorneys defending Interior Secretary Gale Norton against contempt charges today dropped their two-inch-thick list of objections against admitting a court investigator’s reports of trust mismanagement into evidence.

U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth immediately accepted the five reports by Court Monitor Joseph S. Kieffer III as evidence in the nearly two-week-old contempt trial. That in turn prompted the lead attorney for Indian plaintiffs in the case, Dennis M. Gingold, to cut his list of prospective witnesses from 26 to seven.

The reports provide extremely damaging documentation of Interior’s failure to reform the Individual Indian Monies (IIM) trust, provide an historical accounting of Indian trust beneficiaries’ money, provide even rudimentary computer security for trust accounting data or submit accurate and complete reports on their activities to Lamberth.

Government lawyers dropped their attempt to block the reports one day after Lamberth expressed displeasure with the trial’s glacial pace and threatened to assign Special Master Alan Balaran to begin gathering supplemental evidence not only against Norton and her co-defendant, Assistant Interior Secretary Neal McCaleb, but 37 other Interior and Justice officials whom Indian plaintiffs want held in contempt. The group includes several Justice Department lawyers.

A senior trust official, Thomas M. Thompson, testified today that Justice Department lawyers played integral roles in the drafting, editing and approval of quarterly reports required by the judge starting in March 2000. Kieffer’s findings demonstrate that the reports were seriously misleading and often outright false in the picture they gave of substantial progress on trust reform.

According to Thompson, Interior’s quarterly reports showed steady progress throughout 2000 and into fall 2001, when “little had, in reality, changed.” Thompson said that “Baby steps now are starting” ­ two years after Lamberth ordered Interior to reform the IIM trust.

The government also conceded today that there was no mention in Interior’s 7th Quarterly Report, submitted July 31, 2001, of the corruption of trust data in a test of the department’s fatally flawed new trust data computer system in May and June. Although a government attorney tried to minimize the omission, Gingold said, “The question is whether the Court was informed. The answer is no.”

“He just admitted the Court was not informed by DOI,” Lamberth interjected. “That puts you pretty far along on the fourth count [of contempt].”

Gingold said today that, with the Kieffer reports in evidence, his witness list will be narrowed to John Snyder, who works with Interior’s Chief Information Officer; Daryl White, the CIO; Anne Shields, chief of staff for then-Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt; Babbitt; Special Trustee Thomas Slonaker; David Shuey, a Justice Department lawyer, and former Interior deputy Solicitor Ed Cohen.

Testimony in the trial resumes tomorrow.