Faa Accused Of Destroying, Withholding Documents Agency Trying To Conceal Information About Sen. Daschle, Official Says

A Federal Aviation Administration official says documents sought in connection with a fatal plane crash have been improperly withheld, and, in some cases, destroyed by his agency in an apparent effort to conceal interventions by the Senate minority leader, Tom Daschle, on behalf of a friend.

The official, Gary M. Baxter, also said the documents could have proved embarrassing to the FAA, whose second in command is Daschle’s wife, Linda.

The accusations came in a letter from Baxter, an FAA inspector, to Sen. Larry Pressler, a South Dakota Republican who is chairman of the Commerce Committee, which has jurisdiction over the agency. Baxter, who works in the Great Lakes Region office of the agency in Des Plaines, Ill., also sent Pressler a copy of a memorandum he said he wrote to his lawyer last May 13, the day he said he was told of the destruction of documents.

The FAA has asked the Transportation Department’s inspector-general to examine the accusations.

Baxter was in charge of collecting documents from agency files that were being sought by lawyers for the widows of three government doctors who were killed in a plane crash last Feb. 24 in Minot, N.D. The plane was owned by B&L Aviation of Rapid City, S.D.

The widows have raised questions about whether Daschle had acted improperly to help B&L, whose owner, Murl Bellew, has been a longtime friend of the Daschles. The senator had undertaken a two-year effort to strip the U.S. Forest Service of authority to inspect air charter companies after aviation inspectors repeatedly warned that B&L was shoddily run and should be barred from doing government business.

Daschle, of South Dakota, said through his spokesman, Ranit Schmelzer, that he had no knowledge of any effort to destroy or withhold FAA documents.

Baxter’s memorandum, dated May 13, said that when he requested some documents from the agency’s office in Rapid City, S.D., he was told by Cathy Jones, the office manager, that she had destroyed several at the orders of David Hanley, a manager of the Great Lakes Region because they portrayed the Daschles in an unflattering light.

Baxter said in his memorandum that Jones told him the file about the plane crash and B&L Aviation “contained information with the possible appearance of improper intervention by Senator Daschle on behalf of the FAA” in the dispute with the Forest Service. “This, she stated, would make the FAA look bad” because of Mrs. Daschle’s position.