Aurene Martin: Portrait of a Corrupt Insider

Former Acting Assistant Secretary of Interior Aurene Martin has had her fair share of controversies, but she has deftly, and without principle, used her status as an insider to maneuver around them.

Prior to her appointment at Interior, Martin was a congressional aide to Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell, the Chairman of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee where Senator John McCain convened hearings to investigate Republican super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff’s tribal lobbying.

While McCain was dressing down Deputy Secretary of Interior Steven Griles over any actions he might have taken within a public capacity on behalf of Abramoff, the Committee ignored another questionable relationship which was written up in the Village Voice: that of former McCain presidential campaign worker and tribal lobbyist, Scott Reed, who was aggressively lobbying Martin and sabotaging professional rivals within the agency who did not kowtow to his demands on behalf of clients.

Reed was also actively working behind the scenes to advise Abramoff’s former tribal clients on their participation in the hearings before he, Martin, and Campbell helped themselves to Abramoff’s lucrative portfolio.

Among the clients they claimed through Abramoff’s ouster was the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe of Michigan.

Upon entering private practice, controversy again dogged Martin who began lobbying on behalf of the Saginaw Chippewas against a rival interest, the Bay Mills tribe, whose paperwork and confidential information she had overseen in her capacity as a public servant. Questions can easily be raised about whether she did indeed discharge her duties with integrity or whether she acted in a self-serving fashion with an eye to shoring up business for herself as a future lobbyist.

“Aurene rationalized that she could legally do this since she was not working as a lawyer in the BIA and therefore did not need to be mindful of prospective conflicts of interest,” inside sources said.

Another tribe has also come forward to cry foul: the Muweka Ohlone Tribe, which has sued Martin for rejecting its petition to acquire federal recognition, describing her decision as “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, (and) not in accordance with the law.”

Independent of the merits of the case, what makes Martin’s decision suspect is that within weeks of entering private practice as a Partner in the Indian law group of Holland & Knight, she was lobbying the Department of Interior on behalf of a Lower Lake Rancheria, a landless tribe seeking to build a casino in Oakland, California.

Amazed at her enterprise, her new employer issued this statement: “Even by Washington standards, Aurene Martin’s spin through the revolving door was a quick one…Ethics laws ban senior-level government officials from directly lobbying their former agencies for one year. But Martin benefited from a special exemption: Since the 1970s, ex-(Bureau of Indian Affairs) officials have been able to represent tribes before their former agency without waiting out the one-year cooling-off period….There are ethical controls in place aimed at restricting the ability of those officials to lobby their former agencies on behalf of industries and special interests. But Martin’s move is one of many examples of ways around those controls.”

By refusing to grant federal recognition to the Ohlone while employed at the Department of Interior, Martin ensured this tribe would not have the legal standing to acquire a casino.

Subsequently and perhaps predictably, once that tribe’s federal recognition was denied, the Lower Lake Rancheria announced its plan to pursue gaming in Oakland on lands sacred to the Ohlones.

Revealing the network of cronyism in place, former Assistant Secretary of Interior Kevin Gover, who was lobbied by Martin’s future business partner Larry Rosenthal, had extended federal recognition to the Rancheria in 2001.

Despite her deft legal maneuvering, in December of 2008, Tribal Council Minutes reveal that a request was made for the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe “to approve payment for legal bills covering the preparation and filing of Aurene Martin’s response to the allegations filed (sic) D.C. Bar.”

The nature of the alleged complaint was not immediately known, though inside sources at Bay Mills conceded that they were aware that an ethics complaint had been filed against Martin. “While her conduct appears to many of us as unethical, Aurene has argued that she was operating within the law,” inside sources said, acknowledging that Bay Mills did not file the complaint.

Accompanying this Minute was a codicil that the decision was “tabled…to amend the political contribution plan,” raising questions of whether tribal donations to elected officials influenced the outcome.

Whatever the case, Martin no longer appears to be employed with Holland & Knight nor her subsequent employer, Ietan Consulting. Clearly she is a woman on the run. What she is running from is anyone’s guess.

Susan Bradford is the author of Lynched! The Shocking Story of How the Political Establishment Manufactured a Scandal to Have Republican Super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff Removed from Power. For more information, please visit: www.susanbradford.org.

© Susan Bradford 2012

Watch Aurene discuss Bay Mills and lobbying Sen. John McCain at the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe: