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American Indians seek to strip trust fund from Interior Department
By ROBERT GEHRKE, Associated Press
WASHINGTON (October 19, 2:28 p.m. ADT) - The Interior Department should lose control over royalties from American Indian lands because it continues to mismanage hundreds of millions of dollars, the Indians' attorneys contended Friday."Endless broken promises, chronic half-truths, outright lies to this court, and the fumbling paralysis" of Interior Secretary Gale Norton and other senior officials show the department cannot correct the historical mismanagement and is unfit to manage the money, attorney Dennis Gingold wrote.The court should appoint an outside receiver to fix the trust fund, he said in his motion filed in U.S. District Court.The government established the trust funds in 1887 to collect Indian royalties from grazing, logging, mining and oil drilling on 54 million acres of Indian lands. Payments were to have been made to tribal members.Filed in 1996 on behalf of 300,000 American Indians, the class-action lawsuit claims the government squandered at least $10 billion from the trust fund and possibly several times that amount.The government admits the accounts have been mismanaged. Much of the money was lost, stolen or never collected.Roughly $500 million a year now flows through the trust accounts.Two years ago, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth balked at appointing a receiver and allowed the Interior Department to retain oversight of the trust with court supervision. He also ordered the department to piece together how much money should be in the accounts.A series of stinging reports by two court-appointed watchdogs since then has spelled out Interior's failures and provided ammunition for the plaintiffs.The reports said the Interior Department failed to make progress toward the court-ordered historical accounting, knowingly misled the court about the status of trust reform, destroyed and withheld evidence, failed to protect whistle-blowers adequately, hindered the court's investigators and failed to provide necessary leadership.Interior spokeswoman Stephanie Hanna said the department still believes "we are the proper agency to implement trust fund reform.""It's a complicated situation and one that dates back a long time and one that we're committed to carrying out carefully and to the best of our ability," she said.The plaintiffs' motion also asks Lamberth to hold Norton, her predecessor Bruce Babbitt and 37 other current and former Interior and Justice Department officials and attorneys in contempt of court with the possibility of jail sentences.Several similar contempt motions are pending.In 1999, Lamberth held Babbitt and former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin in contempt for failing to produce documents related to the case.
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