[Popocatapetl]

I'm surprised Lambeth kept his cool as long as he did. The Interior Department has just treated the whole case with utter contempt and arrogance from day 1. Concealing records, destroying records, perjury, endless delays, and generally just blowing off their responsibilities. You can't make us do anything we don't want to.

I have never heard of a federal judge who swallowed so much abuse without going postal. Several of those Interior attorneys would have been serving years in jail if I had been on that bench. For the last seven years I would have been issuing bench warrants when any of those bureaucrats tried to pull my chain or blow me off.

Let's see how responsive an undersecretary can get when federal marshals haul him to court in handcuffs to testify under oath.

[sinkspur]

Congress may ultimately decide the case, however. The plaintiffs have offered to settle, and are working with Senate Indian Affairs Committee Chairman John McCain, R-Ariz., to come up with an amount.

This case is, and always has been, about money.

[maine-iac7]

utter contempt and arrogance from day 1.

The whole ball of wax.

If any other 'monority' were treated as the American Indian - the unseen minority = there would be hell to pay

[MACVSOG68]

The Interior Department has just treated the whole case with utter contempt and arrogance from day 1. Concealing records, destroying records, perjury, endless delays, and generally just blowing off their responsibilities. You can't make us do anything we don't want to.

Interior Department employees and managers have spent tens of thousands of hours attempting to comply with the orders of the special master. The BIA, MMS, OST, and BLM have worked relentlessly to attempt to protect records (forever, under the orders), and to attempt to recreate what existed more than a hundred years ago. Every effort to make a reasonable settlement has been turned down, in spite of a complete lack of any evidence of any underpayment to the allottees. Lamberth has shut down computer systems time and again, delaying accurate accounting and payment to the very Indians he is (for all intents and purposes) representing.

Special offices were set up in Interior, high level officials appointed, new procedures established, and million of dollars spent on trying to comply with the numerous one sided decisions of this absurd judge.

But Cobell and her attorneys, with the help of Lamberth has turned this $67 finding into a $178 billion claim. No evidence, nothing. Interior has done audit after audit, using most of the big name audit firms as well as Interior audit resources.

Good riddance!

[muawiyah]

What is most unimaginable about this case is that there are folks who believe that Interior Department records since the beginning of time should have been maintained somewhere nice and safe, and neatly filed by subject and tribe.

Sorry, folks, that's not how government records are maintained over long periods of time.

For the most part records are placed in boxes, labels showing agency and date are placed on the boxes, and they are shipped off to a federal records center, somewhere, somehow.

Water seeps in. Fires happen. Paper crumples. Ink fades. Boxes are misplaced (among millions of other boxes).

I think Judge Lamberth forgot about the "passage of time" and what it does to boxes of paper.