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The BIA is under the Interior Department and collects about $330 million a year in royalties and leases on behalf of 300,000 Indians across the country. The department is the subject of a class-action lawsuit by Indian landowners across the country who say the agency has squandered millions in land revenues.
Trust fund accounts from land in Palm Springs and other Southern California communities amount to about a fifth of the income generated from trust lands nationwide, said Vicki Forrest, a regional trust administrator for the Interior Department in Southern California.
The Agua Caliente control much of the land in the Palm Springs area, with individual tribal members owning about 19,400 acres and the tribe itself owning about 3,200 acres, according to an Interior Department figure reported by the Tiller's Guide to Indian Country.
In California (the Pacific Region) there are five offices - one Regional and four Agency, covering the 104 federally recognized tribes in California. Of the four agency offices, Palm Springs is the only to handle the trust responsibilty of just one tribe - the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians. The tribe's reservation lands cover a section of central Riverside county, an area overseen by the U.S. Attorney's office in Los Angeles.
Up until last November, when she announced she would be resigning to enter "private practice", the USA for that office was Debra Wong Yang. Since the USA purge controversy has come to light, Yang's resignation has sparked increased scrutiny, particularly since Yang resigned to join a firm, Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher, which represents an individual, Rep. Jerry Lewis, R-CA, Yang's office was then investigating.
However, I'm not completely convinced that was the issue, as the investigation had already been initiated, and would have most likely continued after Yang's departure. Instead, perhaps it was the investigations and prosecutions which were never started wherein the actual truth might lie.
The purpose of the Inspector General's office in every Administration department is to investigate the actions of its employees. If it finds wrongdoing, the IG then reports and recommends further action to the appropriate authorities, usually the area US Attorney's office. The IG's office cannot prosecute or institute any form punative action - only the DoJ can litigate and the Administrative department sanction or fire the official, staff member or contractor. The IG is a toothless pitbull.
While there have been instances where US Attorneys have taken up cases after referral from US IGs, such actions have been few and far between when the report emanates from Interior IG Earl Devaney's office. For example, when the number two official at the Office of the Special Trustee, Donna Ewing, and two of her New Mexico office staff, brothers Doug and Jeff Lords, were found by Devaney to have engaged in clearly unethical, and potentially criminal behavior with an accounting firm with a contract with OST for trust fund and risk management services, New Mexico US Attorney David Iglesias passed on the case.
Or the instance of David Smith, Deputy Assistant Secretary, Fish, Wildlife and Parks. According to Devaney's report:
[Smith] inappropriately designated Houston as a port of entry under the Endangered Species Act of 1973 in order to allow a personal friend to import wildlife and wildlife products into the country. During the course of our investigation, a second allegation surfaced concerning the acceptance of prohibited gifts by Smith.
Although the investigation found that appropriate administrative procedures were followed in the designation of the port of Houston, Smith’s involvement in the designation, given his personal relationships with individuals who benefited directly from the port’s designation, was inappropriate, creating an appearance of preferential treatment. The results of the investigation also show that Smith failed to comply with regulations on the acceptance and disposition of prohibited gifts under the rules and standards set forth in the Standards of Ethical Conduct for Employees of the Executive Branch (Standards of Conduct), 5 C.F.R. Part 2635.
The Report of Investigation was presented to the Fraud and Public Corruption Section of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia. The U.S. Attorney’s Office declined prosecution in lieu of administrative action by the Department.
The US Attorney for the District of Columbia in late 2005 when the case came before the department? Ken Wainstein, confirmed in November, 2005. Not surprisingly, Wainstein had a record of not prosecuting cases, which Senator Patrick Leahy noted when Wainstein was nominated in 2006 for the newly created position of Assistant Attorney General for the National Security Division:
Recently the Chairman and I received a letter from the Fraternal Order of Police. The FOP "endorsed" Mr. Wainstein "in order to facilitate his departure from the U.S. Attorney’s Office." They criticized him for being "unwilling to perform" the function of investigating and prosecuting an alleged attack on a police officer. That is not what I would term high praise for his judgment. I ask that a copy of the letter be included in the record.
And as reprehensible as it was that Interior Department officials allowed Washington football team owner Daniel Snyder cut down federally protected trees, when they lied then about it to investigators, did DoJ do anything?
Our investigation determined that P. Daniel Smith, former Special Assistant to the NPS Director, unduly influenced the decision to grant Snyder permission to cut the vegetation on the easement by inserting himself into the process through personal communications with Mr. Snyder, his representatives, and C&O NHP officials. Smith asserted, in two interviews with investigators, that he became involved in the tree-cutting issue at the request of NPS Director Fran Mainella. Mainella and several other witnesses denied Smith’s assertion. This investigation was declined for prosecution by the United States Attorney’s Office, Washington, DC.
Again, US Attorney Ken Wainstein rebuffed Devaney.
And should I even mention the 146 page report by Devaney in 2004, documenting the misdeeds of Interior Deputy Secretary J. Steven Griles? It was Griles' testimony before the Senate Indian Affairs Committee which got him in hot water, not hosting dinner parties for DoI staff with oil, gas and mining lobbyists, or intervening on behalf of his former extraction industry clients. Those infractions went unaddressed by the DoJ and the DC US Attorney.
All and all, I found over a dozen incidents over the past few years where the DOI IG presented its report for action by a US attorney, and that office declined to pursue. The only cases litigated in the past year on the IG's recommendation were for improper use of the internet on government time.
Returning to the case at hand, of the pending report from Devaney's investigative team on the rampant mismanagement of the BIA's Palm Springs office, according to source documents central to the case, the investigation was opened in October 2006, after the office attorney, Robert McCarthy, made "claims of gross mismanagement of Indian trust funds". From the Desert Sun article:
"We confirmed that the BIA Palm Springs office has not implemented all of the OIG's audit recommendations, and officials conceded that problems remain within the lease management program," says a recent letter by Earl E. Devaney, the Department of Interior's Inspector General.
Officials locally also said their office is understaffed and the automated lease system they use is insufficient, according to the letter sent to Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., in response to an inquiry by her office.
The inspector general's office also confirmed that a BIA official and two staff members had received gifts - tickets to a Palm Springs film festival in 2004 and gift baskets stuffed with spa robes - from someone who leases trust land managed by the agency, the letter said.
...
In a memo two years ago to the inspector general, McCarthy wrote that the Palm Springs office lacked any kind of routine system to monitor compliance with the terms of leases, including rent payments, bonds, insurance or completion of development.
He also claimed that a software program had gone unused for years and that officials relied instead on "an ad-hoc system driven by complaints."
"A substantial amount of trust income has gone uncollected and much of it may be now uncollectible, for reasons that include poor bookkeeping, failure to calculate periodic rent increases, the statute of limitations, expired leases, limitations in lease terms, lessee bankruptcies, and lost opportunities to terminate leases in favor of more profitable redevelopment," McCarthy wrote.
[The identity of the responsible BIA official was not disclosed, but a fairly good guess, in such a small office, would be the director, Kim Snyder. A preliminary search has not turned up a great deal of information on Snyder, other than the very intriguing detail that prior to his position in Palm Springs, Snyder was BIA Liaison in the Office of Trust Responsibilities, Division of Energy and Minerals, in Lakewood, Colorado. Seemed a strange move, going from the BIA Mining office to an office with lots of leased land, though little of it for resource extraction purposes.]
I don't claim that Debra Wong Yang was conveniently "replaced" due to the IG's pending investigation and probably negative report - though it's certainly arguable that the Bush Administration wanted a true loyalist in that position once it became clear Devaney was going to investigate; no point in taking a chance with a 50 million/year plus revenue stream ripe for misappropriation. However, I would argue that it's perhaps just as likely a scenario as the one currently being pushed by many bloggers - that Yang had opened the investigation of a GOP Congressman five months previous. Occam's razor and all.
Something is clearly brewing in the Southwest which has many key former officials jockeying for position. Both former DoI Solicitor General (and former Bush federal court nominee) William Myers and former DoJ Environmental and Natural Resources head Tom Sansonetti are pulling in big bucks lobbying for an obscure oil & gas industry front group, the Fair Coalition, out of San Diego, headed by John McCain's former press secretary, Nancy Ives. Another lobbyist for the group, Marco Gonzales (no relation to Alberto), was Pete Domenici's key aide on Energy and chair of Viva Bush-Cheney in New Mexico. (Ironically, he also ran in the NM GOP primary against David Iglesias' #2 man at the USA office.) All told, the Fair Coalition spent nearly $2 million dollars in the past two years lobbying over a mere study of rights-of-way on Indian lands required by the Energy Policy Act of 2005. Ironically, or perhaps not, the rights-of-way in question are mostly located in New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona and Southern California, home to four of the purged US attorneys - five, if you include Yang. One of the two natural gas pipelines from Texas to the SoCal coast, along with a major east-west electric transmission line, runs right through the Agua Caliente reservation, on leased tribal land.
The Administration has yet to name a successor for Yang, whose new officemates at Gibson Dunn include former US Solicitor Theodore Olson and former appeals court nominee Miguel Estrada. The acting USA, George S. Cardona, has made it clear he's not seeking the job, though for undisclosed reasons.
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