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WASHINGTON, D.C. (July 3, 2003) - Interior Department workers are continuing to destroy Indian trust records, a top Interior official has conceded in court testimony.

Ross Swimmer, the department's special trustee, acknowledged Wednesday that a massive destruction of individual and tribal trust records had been uncovered in Farmington, N.M., earlier this year despite repeated orders and warnings from U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth to preserve all trust records.

Preserving the trust records is critical to resolving the claims of Indians that they have been cheated out of billions of dollars from the government-arranged leases of their lands in the West. That claim is the subject of a seven-year lawsuit in which a group of Western Indians have won court orders for a full accounting of funds that should be in their individual trust accounts.

But the latest disclosure that Interior employees are still throwing away trust records troubled Lamberth, who five years ago issued his first warnings about trust record destruction.

"I don't understand why five years later I'm still getting reports like this," the judge said after Swimmer's testimony.

Swimmer, who was the government final witness in a trial to determine how to reform the much-trouble trust system, also admitted bafflement at how workers at the Farmington Indian Minerals Office could have destroyed what a report described as "a large volume" of trust records.

"This obviously is a very egregious action," an obviously embarrassed Swimmer told the judge. Under questioning by Keith Harper, a lawyer representing the Native American Rights Fund, Swimmer attempted to minimize the losses, saying that the records could be reconstructed, but only at "enormous expense" and time.

After discovering massive document destruction five years ago, Lamberth issued strict orders to Interior and Treasury Department officials to preserve all trust records. He ultimately held two Clinton administration cabinet officers, Interior secretary Bruce Babbitt and Treasury secretary Robert Rubin, in contempt over the document destruction.

The latest disclosure of trust record destruction came as the government was concluding its case for a reform of the trust system, a reform plant that lawyers for the Indians said falls far short of the full accounting Congress and the courts have ordered.

Swimmer said some workers at Farmington believed the documents they were destroying were duplicates or unnecessary, but under questioning Swimmer said some Interior workers there appear confused over what a trust record is. "I can't understand why anyone would say that that copy of a document is not a record," he told Harper.

At that, Lamberth said the problems Interior is facing "may be beyond [the] training" of government workers.

"It's just beyond me," Swimmer said, admitting he was baffled at the destruction at Farmington.