Lone-star justice: conservatives thought Clinton-bashing Judge Royce Lamberth was on their team--until he went after the bushies.

• Author: Mencimer, Stephanie

SIX YEARS AGO, NEARLY 300,000 Native Americans filed a class-action suit against the U.S. Department of the Interior alleging that the department had grossly mismanaged trust funds holding more than $3 billion owed to them from oil and gas leases on Indian land. During the course of the litigation, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth instructed Interior to shore up the abysmal state of computer security for the funds.

In response, for almost two years, the department dutifully sent the judge quarterly reports describing the tremendous progress it was making to that end. Upon receiving those reports, most judges would have passed them to a clerk, duly noted, and moved on to other business. But Royce Lamberth is no ordinary judge. Suspicious, he decided to check out the government's claims and hired some hackers to break into Interior's computer system to see whether, in fact, the trust-fund security had been upgraded.

Turns out, not only could the hackers get into the system with techniques available to any second-rate high-school computer geek, they were able to set up a trust account and make adjustments to it undetected. The department's computer systems were so vulnerable that on December 5 last year, Lamberth ordered the department to disconnect the trust fund accounts from the Internet until firewalls could be established to protect the Indians' money.

Typically inept, Interior reacted by disconnecting all its Internet links. Soon, outdoors types found themselves unable to find camping reservations at national parks. Indian Health Service doctors had their email cut off. And Interior Secretary Gale Norton found herself on trial for contempt of court.

Testimony during the contempt trial has revealed that attorneys from Norton's office massaged reports to the judge. They also allegedly pressured Interior staffers to change critical facts to cover up the fact that, for two years, the department had done almost nothing the judge had ordered, hoping that the appeals court would throw the Indians' suit out all together.

Late last year, when Norton's own staffers testified that they wouldn't sign off on her reports to the judge because they were so misleading, Lamberth urged Norton to "throw herself on the mercy of the court." Instead, as Lamberth has noted, "The Secretary has decided to contest everything and throw down the gauntlet." Consequently, Lamberth said, he was ready for the fight. "I can give them their worst nightmare."

Norton's handling of the trust-fund case suggests that, despite Lamberth's warnings, she thought she had nothing to fear from a fellow Republican appointed by her party's greatest hero, Ronald Reagan. Norton, perhaps, can be excused for believing Lamberth was on her team. After all, he is the very same judge who, for eight years, dogged the Clinton administration with a ferocity only seen in independent prosecutor Ken Starr.

In 1993, Lamberth socked the Clinton administration right out of the gate, fining Ira Magaziner nearly $300,000 for lying in court about the makeup of Hillary Clinton's health-care task force. Lamberth allowed Judicial Watch bulldog Larry Klayman to depose everyone from George Stephanopoulos to famous fundraiser John Huang in suits against the administration that most judges would probably have thrown out as frivolous. In one of those suits, the judge accused President Clinton of criminal behavior and asked the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia to investigate the president's alleged violation of the Privacy Act. And in 1999, he fined former Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt and Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin more than $600,000 and found them in contempt of court in the same suit in which Norton is now under fire.

Lamberth's Clinton-bashing made him a conservative hero, bringing calls for his appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court and glowing praise from The Wall Street Journal editorial page even as Clintonites reviled him as a partisan nutcase unfit for the bench. It's no wonder conservatives fell into shocked silence when Lamberth turned his fiery temper upon Norton.

Lamberth's treatment of Norton suggests that the Bush administration could be in for a rough ride as more White House business lands in D.C.'s federal court before one of its most colorful and no-nonsense judges. Sitting on one of the nation's most powerful trial courts, Lamberth has wide reach. His jurisdiction covers criminal cases from the smallest D.C. drug bust to congressional mail fraud. He also handles a battery of civil lawsuits covering most of the federal government (including the military). On top of all that, Lamberth is the chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court, where he oversees Justice Department applications for secret wiretaps of alleged spies and terrorists.

That combination of powerful posts made Lamberth a serious thorn in Clinton's side, and promises to do the same for Bush. Attorney General John Ashcroft's order to government agencies to ignore Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, his refusal to turn over the names of immigrants detained in terrorism investigations, plus Dick Cheney's refusal to identify the members of his energy task force, have already sparked a flurry of litigation, some of which may eventually make it into Lamberth's courtroom. And as history shows, Lamberth may be a Republican, but he has never been a friend to an administration that specializes in keeping secrets.

The Cowboy and the Indians

Sitting on a hard bench in Washingtons E. Barrett Prettyman U.S. Courthouse in January, I am struggling to stay awake. A lawyer from the U.S. Attorney's office is grilling some poor sap about a computer system that has been imploding at the Interior Department's Bureau of Indian Affairs. His questions are filled with cryptic acronyms like TAAMS and IIM, test scripts, exhibit 12, tab 4 ... My eyes are getting heavy. It's a month into the Norton contempt trial and the witness has been on the stand now for days. It's freezing cold in the courtroom -- a strategy Lamberth reportedly employs to keep people awake. In my case, it's not working.

As the government lawyers drone on with questions about the minutiae of memos, my head bobs from one side to another. A guy in the corner is already asleep. Suddenly, though, I'm jolted awake by a booming voice from the bench, "Does this have a page 2?" When I open my eyes, Lamberth is squinting at a piece of paper and flipping it back and forth. Apparently the exhibit pages are misnumbered 1 and 3, even though it's only a two-page memo. "All these assistant secretaries signed this without a page two?" Lamberth asks, shaking his head in bemused disgust.

What's amazing about Lamberth's outburst is not what it reveals about sloppy government, but what it reveals about the judge. Not only has Lamberth managed to stay awake during the hours of tedious testimony, but he is closely following every turn of the questioning and scrutinizing each piece of evidence along the way. He knows the material as well as any of the lawyers.

In fact, as the day proceeds, the judge frequently turns his Churchillian profile towards the witnesses and interrupts the lawyers to ask a question ("So what you're saying, essentially, is the system just didn't work?"), and he is not immune from mocking the various absurdities of federal bureaucracy. ("You know any banker would be in jail for handling funds like this, don't you?")

Cobell v. Norton has been dragging on now for more than five years, and ranks as one of...