REPORT BLASTS TREASURY OVER INDIAN CASE
Court Expert Finds System 'Out of Control'

By James Warren 
Washington Bureau 
December 7, 1999 
reprinted from Chicago Tribune

WASHINGTON -- The Treasury Department covered up the destruction of 162 boxes of
records possibly relevant to a major Native American-rights case as
part of a "greater pattern of obfuscation" pervading the
multibillion-dollar dispute, the judge in the case was told Monday.

A court-appointed expert reported that Treasury officials, including
many lawyers, were grossly inept and inattentive to the judge's
demands for full disclosure, reflexively tried to shift blame and may
well have misled him intentionally, thus violating codes of legal
ethics.

    "This is a system clearly out of control," reported special master
Alan Balaran in a 122-page report requested by U.S. District Judge
Royce Lamberth.

Disclosure of the report followed a failed attempt to block its
release by the Justice Department, as well as by the Treasury
Department's assistant general counsel, deputy assistant counsel and
three other department lawyers.

"It has already been almost seven months since this matter (the
destruction of the boxes) was brought to the court's attention,"
Lamberth wrote Monday in rejecting the government's confidentiality
request, which was made Friday. "The court is unwilling to allow
additional weeks, or months, to go by before this material is placed
on the public record."

Candor already was central to the case, a dispute focused on
government management of trust accounts dating to the 1880s. The
accounts were meant to compensate Indians for use of their land after
the government broke up reservations and leased land to oil, timber
and other companies for a fee. Individual Indians were given 80 to 160
acres each but were not trusted to handle the accounts.

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