Cobell judge orders historical accounting trial

[Waya]

The Bush administration will have to defend its controversial historical accounting of the Indian trust at a trial this October.

In a five-page order issued on Friday, Judge James Robertson ordered the Interior Department to present its accounting of the Individual Indian Money (IIM) Trust at a trial starting October 10. He noted that it has been more than seven years since the government was told to account for at least $13 billion owed to more than 500,000 Indian beneficiaries across the country.

"More than seven years (and twenty-eight quarterly status reports) after Cobell V, it is both prudent and well within the supervisory powers of this court to review the accounting project in detail, and to do so in open court, where the government may present, and plaintiffs may test or challenge, the methodology and results of the accounting project up to the time of the hearing," Robertson wrote, citing the landmark December 21, 1999, decision that upheld the duty to account for the trust.

Robertson called the open-ended trial to address several unresolved questions in the long-running Cobell case. He hopes to determine whether the government has cured the breaches of trust identified in the December 1999 ruling, whether the accounting satisfies fiduciary trust standards and whether the accounting was "unreasonably" delayed.

With the proceedings set to "continue as long as necessary," Robertson also envisioned a visit to Interior's Indian records repository in Lenexa, Kansas. The Bush administration opened the center to maintain documents related to the IIM trust, which was created in 1887.

The decision marks Robertson's strong intention to resolve the 11-year-old case, which he inherited just four months ago after Judge Royce Lamberth was removed at the request of the Bush administration. It was Lamberth who wrote the Cobell V decision on the accounting, an order that was upheld by the District of Columbia Court of Appeals........



http://indianz.com/News/2007/002537.asp