Court decides secretary cannot be held accountable for past problems

WASHINGTON -- A federal appeals court threw out a contempt ruling Friday against Interior Secretary Gale Norton, saying she cannot be held accountable for her predecessors' mismanagement of a multibillion-dollar trust fund for American Indians.\nThe three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia also ruled unanimously that Norton's conduct did not constitute fraud. In issuing contempt citations last September against Norton and the assistant secretary for Indian affairs, Neal A. McCaleb, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth ruled that by their actions they had defrauded his court.\n"She simply cannot be held criminally to account for any delay that occurred prior to her assuming office," Chief Judge Douglas Ginsburg wrote for the panel.\nLamberth had reprimanded the pair harshly for what he said were attempts to hide their failures to comply with his 1999 order to account for royalties.\nThe panel also threw out McCaleb's contempt of court citation because they said it didn't specify an act or omission.\nInterior Department spokesman Dan DuBray said Norton and McCaleb were pleased with the ruling.\nThe case against the officials grew out of a $137 billion class-action suit filed in 1996 on behalf of more than 300,000 Indian plaintiffs. The suit alleged the Interior Department failed to manage properly oil, gas, mining and timber royalties from land the government assigned to Indians more than a century ago. The department believes the figure is much lower.\nThe Interior Department has spent more than $600 million to comply with instructions from both Congress and Lamberth, but accounting problems persist. Norton has blamed most of the problems on previous administrations and said most of her energy is devoted to fixing the mismanagement of the Indian royalties.\nLamberth is considering a final ruling in a 44-day trail that ended this month over which plan he should accept for straightening out the mismanaged Indian trust fund accounts that go back more than a century.\n"We're waiting to see the results of that trial. I don't know that the ruling has an impact on that," DuBray said.\n"It is regrettable that the Interior Department seems to be more concerned about fighting for themselves than in fighting for native Americans," said Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle, of South Dakota. "They have a legal and moral obligation to restore integrity to trust fund management as soon as possible."\nKeith Harper, an attorney for the Indian plaintiffs, called Friday's ruling disappointing, but said the ruling doesn't reflect the merits of the case and should not be viewed as an attempt to rein in Lamberth or exonerate Norton and her agency.\n"The central issue is still whether they're going to comply with their trust fund duties. They do not dispute they have a broken trust system, and Judge Lamberth has told them to go fix it," Harper said.\nNorton was the third Cabinet member that Lamberth held in contempt in the case, after the Clinton administration's Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt and Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin in 1999.\nThe appeals court also said the district court erred in appointing a special court monitor to oversee portions of the case over the objections of the Interior Department.\nThe monitor, Joseph S. Kieffer III, harshly criticized the agency's management of Indian money. In April, after oral arguments in the case, the appeals court suspended the monitor.\nGinsburg wrote that Kieffer's appointment amounted to "a license to intrude into the internal affairs of the department."\nLamberth also has been a harsh critic of government lawyers, calling their conduct repugnant and a mockery of the Justice Department's mission. He has recommended formal disciplinary proceedings against some lawyers.\nPeter Keisler, assistant attorney general for Justice's civil division, praised the ruling and said it "took note of the significant positive steps taken by Secretary Norton to address the issues presented in this case." The issues date back to 1887, when Congress assigned Indians small parcels of land and directed the Interior Department to manage the royalties. For more than a century, an undetermined amount of money was either lost, stolen or never collected.