Wampum

This is what got Slonaker fired by Griles and Sampson.

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The Chairman [Sen. Inouye]. May I proceed by asking the Special Trustee questions? In the most recent report of the Court Monitor for the District Court in which the Cobell-Norton litigation is pending, the text of several memoranda that you have transmitted to Mr. Edwards was printed. In your memo of April 30, 2002, you stated:

"I do not believe an accounting as that term is generally understood in the established trust scholarship acceptable to either the beneficiaries or the Special Trustee can be constructed. Short of a settlement, the best that might be able to be accomplished is the identification of the gaps of information. With that, the Department could perhaps seek some instruction from the judge on how to proceed. I remain concerned, however, that I have not heard anyone in the Department define the characteristics of an accounting to include anything more than the funds actually collected by the Department. That of course is inadequate."

And in your memo of May 22, 2002, you stated:

"It is evident that the long term record of the Department's administration of the Indian trust accounts is incomplete to
some degree. In addition, during the past year, the Special Master has been able to breach the Department's electronic systems that house the trust data, thereby demonstrating that the data may not be accurate. Because it is the duty of the Trustee to know all the facts about the administration of the trusts, these flaws cause me to doubt the ability of the Department to show either itself or the beneficiaries in sufficient detail the nature and amount of the trust property and its administration."

Mr. Slonaker, in your official capacity and from what you know of the gaps in information, do you believe that a complete historical accounting of the Individual Indian Money accounts can be achieved?

Mr. Slonaker. Good morning, Mr. Chairman, Senator Campbell. No; not completely. It may be possible to reconstruct a good many accounts completely. Even identifying the assets and the flow of income from the assets, which by the way is something that's incumbent upon the trustee to do.

I believe that the Office of Historical Trust Accounting, however, can go quite a way toward identifying what the gaps are in the information. As the trustee, it's crucial that every effort be made by the trustee to make certain that we have exhausted every means to identify the assets and the incomes that belong to the beneficiaries, and bring that accounting right up to date.

The Chairman. You spoke of obstacles. In your view, what are the obstacles, legal or practical, that would be presented if the Congress were to pursue a path of settlement of claims?

Mr. Slonaker. The obstacles to the actual accounting itself I think are fairly well known in terms of their type. There are records that we believe are probably either destroyed or lost. There is, as the GAO panel already has indicated, there are situations where the accounting was not done properly, we believe, in the initial instance. So there are obstacles to getting a full and complete accounting.

What those obstacles are, which you termed as a gap, have to be further determined. They can only be estimated at this point in time.

The Chairman. Everyone seems to speak of missing or destroyed documents. Could you tell us as to when these
documents began to be missing or when the Government learned that they were destroyed?

Mr. Slonaker. I cannot, sir. We only have, at least I only have anecdotal evidence of missing documents at this point. I think that's the point of the historical trust accounting report in part, and that is that these gaps have to be
identified as to what point they started and where those gaps are and what the nature of the gap is.

The Chairman. So there is no proof or data to tell us when the gaps began to come into existence?

Mr. Slonaker. Not that I'm aware of, sir.

The Chairman. So these gaps or obstacles are such that settlement would be extremely difficult?

Mr. Slonaker. I think my response to that, Mr. Chairman, has to be that the Trustee needs to do everything in his power to establish what the liability of the Trustee may be. The size of the gaps, the nature of the gaps has yet to be discovered. Whether that lends itself to identifying a figure which in turn might lend itself to some sort of a settlement is not clear to me.

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So what was so awful about Slonaker's testimony? 1) He admitted there were "gaps" due to missing or destroyed documents, and thus, 2) the Court might have to provide other means of acquiring the information needed to provide a full, court-ordered accounting of the Individual Accounts. Some analysts for the Cobell plaintiffs had suggested obtaining that information from the leasors, a not-unreasonable idea. However, as we recently learned regarding other federal land leases, opening the lessors books can prove enlightening, namely to how many billions the US government has been defrauded by the likes of BigOil, BigTimber and BigCoal.

Update: Indianz.com editor Acee Agoyo kindly offered corrections to my post via email. As he was at the aforementioned hearing, he assued me that neither Senators Hatch nor Domenici attended. In fact, despite being on the SIAC, Hatch seldom attended hearings - he obviously had better things to do.

Also, neither Griles nor Norton told Slonaker what to say - they let DoJ and Sampson do that. But they certainly fired his tush after he testified as to the grand fiasco tribal trust reform had become.