MONTANA SENATOR STALLS WEBSTER'S CONFIRMATION

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000504030001-2
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: January 20, 2012
• Sequence Number: 1
• Publication Date: May 15, 1987
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

STAT
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/01/20: CIA-RDP90-00965R000504030001-2
ARTICLE AP
ON PAGE
WASHINGTON TIMES
15 May 1987
Montana senator stalls
Webster's confirmation
J' By John McCaslin
NMSHINOTON TIMES
FBI Director William H. Webster
Probably never imagined tfflitlorse
thieves and other criminal elements
on Indian reservations would e n
issue during Senate confirmation of
his nomination to be
the CIA.
But that's exactly what has hap-
pened.
Although approved unanimously
by the Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence on May 1, Mr. Webster,
for the second time in as many
weeks, has seen the final Senate con-
firmation vote put on hold.
Last week it was Sen. Ernest F
Hollings, South Carolina Democrat,
who held up the vote - until he was
assured by the bureau that it would
aggressively investigate possible
criminal negligence by Foreign
Service officers in security viola-
tions at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow.
After that matter was settled, this
week Sen. John Melcher, a Montana
Democrat whose state is home to
seven Indian tribes, announced he
was putting a hold on the nomina-
tion.
Described by a colleague as "a
man with all the blunt stubborness
of the Montana plains:' Mr. Melcher,
a member of the Senate Select Com-
mittee on Indian Affairs, has de-
cided to put the Webster confirma-
tion on hold because of what he
called a "totally unsatisfactory" re-
cord by the FBI in its investigations
of crimes committed on Indian res-
ervations.
In an interview yesterday, the
Montana senator said as far as he is
concerned, the confirmation "will be
kept on hold until something is done
about the terrible situation:'
By a majority vote, the Senate
could override Mr. Melcher's hold,
but "I'll get the attention of the FBI
director long enough where he'll di-
rect his people to do something," the
senator said.
William M. Baker, the FBI's assis-
tant director for congressional af-
fairs, said yesterday that the bu-
reau's agents "have solved many
important crimes around the coun-
try committed on Indian reserva-
tions." He said the problems that do
exist are partly due to the remote-
ness of the reservations.
"The response time is a consider-
ation, especially when it involves the
preservation of a crime scene. We
will have an agent in one town and
he'll get a call to go to another [town]
and unless that crime scene is pre-
served it makes it difficult:'
"But we're working closely with
tribal police and the Bureau of In-
dian Affairs to increase existing in-
vestigative capabilities by those im-
portant police forces," Mr. Baker
said.
Mr. Melcher said yesterday that
the Senate Select Committee on In-
dian Affairs has been pressuring the
FBI to improve its record "for some
time now. I hoped we could work it
out peacefully," he said.
The senator also expressed con-
cern about the impact an FBI re-
organization plan in his state might
have on the reservations. The plan,
to be decided by the new soon-to-be
appointed FBI director, would shift
supervisory authority from the FBI
field office in Butte, Mont., to Salt
lake City, Utah.
"Are we going to get anywhere by
moving chain of command down to
Salt Lake?" Mr. Melcher asked.
He cited statistics yesterday that
show most serious crimes on res-
ervations go unsolved.
On the nation's 20th largest reser-
vation, the Blackfeet Reservation lo-
cated adjacent to Montana's Glacier
National Park, there were 99 in-
stances of bodily assault between
1983 and 1985, including homicides.
Of those 99 cases, three resulted in
convictions.
Similar statistics were recorded
for other reservations throughout
the state during the same two-year
period, including the Northern
Cheyenne Reservation, where out of
39 cases only four convictions were
reported.
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/01/20: CIA-RDP90-00965R000504030001-2