And now:Ish <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: Indian Trust Papers Missing, Interior Aide Says http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-04/02/029l-040299-idx.html Lawyer, a Grievant Against Department, Tells Court He Had Refused to Dispose of the Records By William Claiborne Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, April 2, 1999; Page A02 An Interior Department lawyer who says he refused an order to get rid of Indian trust records involved in a class action lawsuit against the government has testified that more than half the documents are now missing. The lawyer, Ralph Williams, who had the job of reconciling discrepancies in the trust accounts, said in a deposition that he refused to dispose of the material because he believed that doing so would be illegal. But when the documents--which he said he returned to the department when he left the project in January 1998--were shown to him Wednesday as part of the deposition, Williams said, "That's not even half of it," according to a transcript made public yesterday. The allegation by Williams, who is under a court order protecting him as a whistleblower from retaliation by the Interior Department, came just six weeks after Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt was cited for contempt by U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth for failing to produce documents sought by Indian trust account holders as evidence in their lawsuit against the government. Lamberth is presiding over the suit against Interior for its management of 300,000 Native American land trust accounts worth more than $500 million. In addition to the $500 million in trusts owned by individual Indians, the department is responsible for $2.5 billion in tribal lease revenue, mineral royalties and court settlements that Native Americans allege have been mismanaged for decades. Williams, who still works in the department solicitor's office, said in the deposition and in an affidavit released by Lamberth last week that Interior Deputy Solicitor Edward Cohen told him that once he had reconciled payments to and disbursements from the trust accounts, "any other information which was inconsistent from my findings could be purged from the files." Williams said he believed that complying with Cohen's directive "could have resulted in the destruction or removal of information relating to payments" to Indians and pertinent to the lawsuit. At another point in his testimony, Williams said Cohen "did not want anything I produced . . . [that] would not support the numbers that I was supposed to pull together after spending five weeks on this project. Everything else, he said, we could get rid of it if it doesn't support this." Cohen did not return a call requesting comment and Interior Solicitor John Leshy said he had not read the deposition transcript and had no comment. He referred to an earlier statement in which he said, "I am confident that employees of the Office of the Solicitor who have worked on this case have never instructed anyone to destroy any records relevant to this case. In my years of working closely with [Cohen], I have found him to hold the highest ethical standards and I am certain this allegation will be proved false." Cohen's private attorney, W. Neil Eggleston, said it was "inconceivable that Mr. Cohen would have asked Mr. Williams to engage in illegal or unethical conduct, and Mr. Cohen did not do so." Eggleston said Cohen knew that Williams was a "disgruntled employee" who had filed grievances against another member of the solicitor's office and that he had asked Williams to reconcile the tribal trust accounts as a temporary task while awaiting his transfer to the U.S. Attorney's Office in the District. In his deposition, Williams, who is black, said he filed Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and Merit Systems Protection Board discrimination complaints against the solicitor's office because of grievances against his superiors. He said when he was working on the trust funds project he believed "they were setting me up to drop my EEOC complaint off the table, fire me." His lawyer, Phillip E. Thompson, said yesterday his client's allegations had led to "a very tense situation" in the office, where Williams currently is working on offshore minerals matters and issues relating to Year 2000 computer glitches. Thompson said the trust documents shown to Williams Wednesday were in a file folder only one inch thick, while the stack of documents Williams returned to his project supervisor last year was at least six inches high. "The order from the judge was to turn over all of the documents my client delivered. This isn't it," Thompson said. The Interior Department released a transcript of a voice-mail message Williams left for his project supervisor, David Moran, last April 13 in which Williams said he had not produced anything of substance in his trust fund work because he had "never really got a grip on the requirements of the project." The department also released an affidavit by Moran stating that Williams never had any "unique source documents" whose loss would have been irretrievable and that the reconciliation project never could have placed anyone in a position to alter or destroy trust fund account data. � Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& Tsonkwadiyonrat (We are ONE Spirit) Unenh onhwa' Awayaton http://www.tdi.net/ishgooda/ &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&
