From: Indian Trust ListServ
Date: Friday, February 15, 2002 05:30:49 PM
To: Indian Trust ListServ
Subject: COBELL v. NORTON
 
  February 15, 2002

WEB ALERT


The Cobell plaintiffs have filed a new motion with the court asking that 
the Secretaries of Interior and Treasury be found in contempt for 
suppressing evidence and advancing legal arguments that they knew to be 
false.

The plaintiffs’ motion is posted at www.indiantrust.com.

The motion charges that government attorneys sought a favorable ruling 
from Judge Lamberth, claiming that the General Accounting Office had 
performed an accounting of IIM trust accounts.

Government lawyers did not reveal an Aug. 27, 1999 letter from GAO 
stating that our records do not establish that GAO conducted a ‘final’ 
GAO comprehensive audit of IIM accounts, nor do they establish any 
regular practice of auditing IIM accounts.

A senior Interior Department official, John Berry, distributed the GAO 
letter to the department’s Cobell litigation team, but said nothing to 
the Indian plaintiffs or the judge.

It was not until December 4, 2001.15 months after the GAO Letter was 
transmitted to Mr. Berry, that the Special Master and plaintiffs were 
made aware of the existence of the GAO letter.

The plaintiffs’ motion filed today contains a fascinating historical 
account (on p. 13) of the true state of IIM accounting:

On February 8, 1933, Senator William King of Utah delivered a fierce 
condemnation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs...King also addressed flaws 
in individual Indian moneys. As he had traveled to Indian reservations 
with a subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, the 
subcommittee had ‘become accustomed to endless queries and complaints by 
individual Indians and by tribes of Indians having to do with their 
stated inability to obtain from the Indian Bureau an accounting for their 
money, individual and tribal, which is held and administered under trust.

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