Wampum

For as long as I've been writing on Cobell, I've believed that all the delay, particularly by the Bush Administration, had as much to do with fear from the energy and extraction industries as it did with government distain for its trust duties. Now, reading these quotes from the Cobell spokesman, I'm even more convinced:

Bill McAllister, a spokesman for lead plaintiff Eloise Cobell, said the new hearing was a major milestone in the case that shows Robertson's intention to resolve the issues after years of delay. "We've been saying for some time [that] where the two parties parted company is the question of what type of accounting can be done," he said.

Cobell's side has argued that the government does not have the records needed to accurately reconcile the roughly 500,000 individual trust funds in dispute. McAllister said the government should not rely on existing records, as it has proposed to do, but should recreate transaction records for oil and gas lease payments.

McAllister said some of the questions he would like to see the court address are how far back the review should go, which trust beneficiaries have the right to an accounting and how many records must be validated.

The court has concluded, and the government admitted, that millions of records, including receipts, have been destroyed over time. Thus, if you want to "re-create" records, you have to go to the leasees, in this case, the resource extraction, timber, farming and grazing industries, to get the amounts. I believe this terrifies many of such leasees, as it could potentially expose vast under- and non-payments of royalties, much like has been recently uncovered on federal non-Indian lands.

The head of the Justice Department which is overseeing the government's defense in Cobell is acting Associate Attorney General Matthew J. McKeown. McKeown, like his predecessor, Sue Ellen Wooldridge, (now married to indicted former Dep. Sec. of the Interior, J. Steven Griles,) came from Interior, where he worked as Deputy Solicitor, first to fellow Idahoan and withdrawn Circuit Court nominee Bill Myers, and later to Wooldridge.

Just how is McKeown going to defend the actions of the office which he formerly held? BTW, McKeown's former boss, Bill Myers, is now a lobbying partner with two other former Assistant AGs of the Environment and Natural Resourses division, Tom Sansonetti and Kelley Johnson. Johnson, you all might remember, is well known here at Wampum for her part, along with then White House aide Kyle Sampson, in the 2002 firing of Special Trustee, Tom Slonaker.

You can't get more incestuous and corrupt as this gang of bandits. It makes the USA scandal look tame in comparison.