Cohen linked to purge of papers in Indian-fund case

WASHINGTON — An Interior Department lawyer claims that the agency’s deputy solicitor asked him to destroy documents relating to one of two much-disputed cases involving allegations that Indian trust funds have been mishandled.

In an affidavit, lawyer Ralph Williams says Edward Cohen, the department’s second-ranking lawyer, “directed” him to reconcile data in various trust-fund accounts and told him that any information that didn’t fit with Mr. Williams’s analysis “could be purged from the files.”

Judge Royce C. Lamberth of U.S. District Court disclosed the document Thursday after it had been secretly submitted to him and issued an order prohibiting Interior Department officials from taking any retaliatory action against Mr. Williams. The judge also ordered the agency to prepare for trial on a related case in June, a year and a half earlier than the government requested.

The department’s chief counsel, John Leshy, said he was “confident” that none of the department’s legal staff ordered the destruction of documents. Defending Mr. Cohen, he said, “I am certain that this allegation will be proved false.”

Neither Mr. Williams nor Mr. Cohen could be reached for comment.

The alleged order to destroy documents, which Mr. Williams said he ignored, is the latest twist in a tangled case that has become a major embarrassment for the Clinton administration. Last month, Judge Lamberth cited Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt and Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin for contempt of court for repeatedly failing to produce trust-fund records to meet court-ordered deadlines. Mr. Babbitt wasn’t implicated in the alleged order to destroy documents.

“My best guess is they’ve been destroying documents all along, and they’ve been trying to cover it up,” said Eloise Cobell, the lead plaintiff in a class-action case brought on behalf of more than 500,000 Indians who have had accounts in a banking system maintained for individual Indians by the Interior Department.

A second case, involving tribes’ complaints that Interior has lost billions of dollars in a separate banking system that kept money on behalf of the tribes, is under negotiation between the tribes and the Interior Department. It isn’t clear which accounts Mr. Williams was working on in December 1997, when Mr. Cohen allegedly said some documents could be destroyed.

In the order setting a June trial, Judge Lamberth noted that the Justice Department “has now chosen to replace nearly their entire slate of attorneys assigned to this case.” The department had initially asked for a trial date in 2001, which would put the matter before the next administration.