FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE January 14, 2002 www.indiantrust.com JUDGE SUGGESTS TRUST PLAINTIFFS CALL NORTON AS WITNESS TO GET ANSWERS ON INTERIOR'S HISTORICAL ACCOUNTING FAILURE Secretary's Embrace of Babbitt's Sampling Scheme "Is Pretty Telling in Terms of Arrogance" WASHINGTON, D.C. - The judge presiding over the contempt trial for Interior Secretary Gale Norton suggested today that Indian trust plaintiffs will have to call Norton to the witness stand if they want to extract answers about why she embraced a Clinton administration plan for statistical sampling shortly after taking office in February 2001. As lead plaintiffs' attorney Dennis M. Gingold questioned a senior Interior budget official about Norton's decision, U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth interjected, "He didn't make the decision. She did." In that case, said Gingold, the plaintiffs may need to call Norton as a witness. "I'll be glad to have her here," replied the judge. Gingold said later that the plaintiffs will call the Secretary. The exchange came after a line of questioning by Gingold about Interior's repeated failure to provide Individual Indian Monies (IIM) trust beneficiaries with an historical accounting of their trust assets, despite orders from both Congress and Lamberth to do so. Gingold had just cited a statement by the late Rep. Mike Synar, a champion of Indian trust reform, that a BIA complaint in the mid-1990s about the cost of an accounting "is one of the most arrogant and offensive fabrications I have ever read." Getting Norton on the witness stand, said Lamberth, would be "pretty telling about what she [Norton] did in February 2001 in terms of arrogance." To the shock of many in Indian Country, Norton testified in February 2001, in her first appearance as Secretary before a Congressional committee, that she had decided to embrace statistical sampling - an idea hatched by former Secretary Bruce Babbitt - as the best way to conduct the historical accounting ordered by Lamberth. Two senior trust officials have testified in the contempt trial that they knew sampling would not comply with the court's order, which calls for an accounting of all funds in the IIM trust. Failure to perform the accounting is one of the contempt charges against Norton. Norton later dropped the plan and instead ordered a massive reorganization of trust responsibilities under the BIA. Interior official Robert Lamb, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy, Management and Budget, testified today that "Historical accounting is still under discussion within the department" - more than two years after Lamberth ordered it done, and seven years after Synar's exhaustive and scathing report - "Misplaced Trust" - was issued by the House Committee on Government Operations. Under questioning by Gingold, Lamb conceded that Interior planned as early as 1997 to proceed with a statistical sampling as a response to Congressional pressure for an accounting and the Cobell trust lawsuit filed in June 1996. With Lamb's participation, Interior sought an emergency $10 million supplemental appropriation from Congress in December 1997 or January 1998 to fund a limited sampling effort and to begin collecting IIM trust records. Interior stuck with the sampling scenario even after Lamberth ruled on December 21, 1999 that the government had a legal obligation to provide individual Indian trust beneficiaries with a full historical accounting of revenues from Indian-owned lands. Senior officials and department lawyers published a Federal Register notice in April 2001 to solicit the opinions of IIM accountholders directly. At an August 8, 2001 meeting attended by Lamb, Babbitt's chief of staff ordered officials to proceed with the sampling option, although Indian trust beneficiaries had rejected the idea overwhelmingly and opposed the effort in court as being in bad faith. Despite testimony in the past three weeks by senior trust officials Thomas N. Slonaker and his deputy, Thomas Thompson, that they strongly opposed statistical sampling in meetings and memos, Lamb testified today that they did not oppose the plan. "You didn't hear debate about whether the statistical sampling approach was wrong?" asked Lamberth. "No," said Lamb. "You didn't hear Tommy Thompson say it would be pointless, 'why are we doing this?'" "No," Lamb said. As his testimony ended today, Lamb apologized to the court for Interior's failure to make progress on an historical accounting. "Things fell apart. The wheels came off the wagon," he said. Gingold then pointed out that Lamb had apologized before, when he testified three years ago at proceedings in which Babbitt was held in contempt by Lamberth. ##### To subscribe to the Indian Trust mailing list, paste the following link into your browser: http://www.indiantrust.com/