Norton Contempt Trial Opens Over Indian Trust

Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton went on trial Monday on charges of contempt of court, accused by a federal judge of lying to him about her efforts to clean up the long-mismanaged Indian trust fund system.

U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth ordered testimony to begin about the Interior Department’s mishandling of the multibillion-dollar fund, held in trust for 300,000 Native Americans. The trust holds and distributes fees for 54 million acres of land leased for drilling, grazing and logging. The fund, the department acknowledges, has been mismanaged almost since its inception more than a century ago.

The Interior secretary, whose presence is not required at the civil proceeding, did not attend the first day of the trial. She is expected to testify later this month that she has made a good-faith effort to correct decades of fund mismanagement and tried to submit accurate reports to Lamberth, who has sought for five years to straighten out the tangled system. The trial could last for several weeks.

Mark Nagle, an assistant U.S. attorney representing Norton, told Lamberth: “Evidence will demonstrate that contempt of court is not warranted.” Nagle said he would provide a fuller explanation of Norton’s case later.

Thomas M. Thompson, the congressional overseer of the fund and the trial’s first witness, said he found records in disarray dating back more than 100 years. The Bureau of Indian Affairs, a division of Interior, has been trying to establish an accurate database, “but it’s pretty clear there wasn’t anyone managing the process on a day-to-day basis,” Thompson said. He began looking into the trust fund at the request of Congress in January 1999.

The government has admitted that it cannot determine how much money is involved because the records are, in Thompson’s words, “jumbled and confused.” About $500 million in royalties is believed to be deposited into the fund each year. Many documents were mishandled, destroyed by floods or simply lost, and Thompson said he found a lack of security for records stored electronically, leaving them open to tampering.

Besides money owed to living Native Americans, there is a backlog of 15,000 probate cases in which Interior officials have not been able to determine how much is owed to the heirs of deceased Indians, he told the court. These probate accounts, which may total as much as $100 million, have been locked up for as long as six years awaiting determination of who owns the leases, Thompson said.

To protect the trust-fund records, the judge last week ordered all Internet and computer connections in the Interior Department shut down after finding them particularly vulnerable to hackers.

But after protests of the U.S. Geological Survey, a division of Interior, that its Web site was needed for public information in event of a major earthquake, Lamberth issued a formal order Monday that any connections not related to the trust fund could be restored.

Crediting Norton’s actions since she took office early this year, Thompson told the court that she had instructed her aides to undertake a historical accounting of trust-fund money and to consider how to “prioritize” this work.

More recently, Norton announced she was reorganizing management of the fund under one official and would consult with representatives of Native Americans and other interested parties on reform efforts. An initial meeting is to take place Thursday in Albuquerque.