Judges Suspend Court Monitor

Federal appeals judges on Thursday suspended a lower court official who harshly criticized the Interior Department’s management of hundreds of millions of dollars of American Indian money.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ordered Joseph S. Kieffer III removed from his duties as court monitor or any other capacity for U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth, who had found Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton in contempt over mismanaged American Indian royalties.

The three appeals judges who initialed the order said that they were acting on their own initiative, not at the request of the government or plaintiffs in the case, and that the suspension was effective until they issued further orders. Their action came late in the day after hearing the government’s appeal of a contempt ruling against Norton in the long-standing case of a mismanaged system of royalties.

Congress assigned Indians small parcels of land in 1887 and directed the Interior Department to manage the royalties. An undetermined amount of money was lost or stolen or never collected for more than a century. The suit claims the government mismanaged from $10 billion to $40 billion through failures of the Trust Asset and Accounting Management System.

At the hearing, Chief Judge Douglas Ginsburg questioned Kieffer’s multiple roles.

Lamberth appointed Kieffer in April 2001 to track the department’s reform efforts and to file progress reports with the court, and Norton’s agency had given Kieffer access to employees and information needed for his inquiry.

Later, government attorneys asked Lamberth to call off Kieffer after he harshly criticized the management of the money.