Opinion ID: 186000
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Specification Four

Text: 76 In specification four the Secretary was held in contempt for committing a fraud on the court. We note initially that fraud on the court is a narrow concept, limited to the most egregious conduct involving a corruption of the judicial process itself. 11 Charles Alan Wright, Arthur R. Miller & Mary Kay Kane, Federal Practice & Procedure § 2870, at 418 (2d ed.1995). 77 The district court held Secretary Norton in contempt for filing false and misleading quarterly status reports starting in March 2000, regarding TAAMS and BIA Data Cleanup. Contempt Opinion, 226 F.Supp.2d at 124. Of those eight reports, however, the first four were filed prior to Secretary Norton's taking office, and she therefore cannot be held criminally liable for anything in them. The remaining reports do not rise to the level of fraud on the court. 78 The court complained that the fifth report provided a positive assessment of the status of TAAMS based on nothing more than speculation and wishful thinking. Id. at 80. Of the sixth report, the district court said the Department was misleading the court when it represented it was moving ever closer to being able to implement fully the title and realty portions of TAAMS, and that it had conducted specific tests that indicated that it was almost ready to deploy TAAMS. Id. at 82. Regarding the seventh report, the court noted the Department's concession that it had not met certain goals and complained that the Department presented a positive picture of TAAMS despite the fact that the agency was not ready to deploy or implement the land management system as scheduled, and ... clearly was not going to be able to deploy or implement it anytime soon. Id. at 83. The court also objected that Interior did not provide the Court with anything close to what can be construed as a complete picture of the system's status. Id. 79 Finally, with regard to the eighth report — which was the first to be filed after Interior had received EDS's assessment of the project — the court noted both Secretary Norton's concession that previous reports had been inadequate, and the Secretary's attempts to improve the quality of the reports. Id. at 84-85. The district court appeared to have no quarrel with the content of the eighth report. Instead, the court inferred from admissions in the eighth report that the inadequacies of the previous reports were intentional and contumacious. See id. at 80 (completion dates in fifth report, in light of the later filed quarterly status reports, [were] based on nothing more than speculation and wishful thinking); id. at 82 (sixth report particularly misleading (and troubling) in light of the Department's Eighth Report); see also id. at 84 (quoting Secretary Norton's testimony that seventh report gave an insufficient picture and was not a particularly good document). 80 We find the reasoning of the district court mystifying. The court is surely correct in stating that the eighth report does not absolve[ ] the defendants of responsibility for any past wrongdoing. Id. at 126. But neither does the Secretary's candid critique of prior reports, made in the light shed by EDS's evaluation, lead to the conclusion that those reports were intentionally false and misleading; the district court's findings of fact simply do not support its conclusion that Secretary Norton committed a fraud on the court. To be sure, the earlier reports painted an overly sunny picture of the status of the TAAMS project and were misleading about the progress being made in ways painstakingly identified by the district court. The district court made no finding, however, that Secretary Norton had any personal knowledge that the fifth, sixth, or seventh reports were false or misleading. 81 In light of the above, we conclude that the district court erred as a matter of law in holding Secretary Norton in criminal contempt on specification four.