According to tribal spokesman Scott Ferson, half a dozen tribal leaders attended several Pombo fundraisers and eventually wrote $2,000 personal checks to the lawmaker's Rich Political Action Committee.
In all, at least $20,000 in Mashpee money flowed into Pombo's coffers soon after a September 2003 meeting the congressman had with Norton and R. Lee Fleming, who oversees the Native American recognition program.
The two-week run of donations accounted for about 5% of Rich PAC's roughly $400,000 in revenue for the 2003-04 election cycle, according to two databases of political contributions.
Said Ferson: "Contributions to political candidates are perfectly legal ... and Pombo became our friend."
According to two people familiar with the 2003 meeting -- one who requested anonymity because of the investigation -- Pombo was forceful in asking whether the government was "holding things up unnecessarily" against the Mashpee.
The other person, Robert E. Jordan III, the Washington lawyer representing the Mashpee, said Pombo "was pressing his views."
"My impression was he was genuinely aghast at the glacial pace of the whole recognition process and thought something ought to be done," Jordan said.
Norton's office said it could not recall the meeting, and Fleming did not return phone calls.
But Fleming has publicly defended the way his office handles the often-cumbersome recognition process. He has said his staff is too small to handle all the petitions from various tribes, and that some requests entail up to 30,000 pages of documents for review.
The federal recognition process traditionally has been a lengthy one. The government reviews a tribe's history and ancestry as well as the genealogy of its members to determine whether it is a bona fide Native American tribe. A federally acknowledged tribe is eligible for special housing, education, healthcare and other federal programs.
In his advocacy for the Mashpee, Pombo led a special committee hearing in 2004. He was seeking support for a bill he sponsored allowing tribes that had petitioned for recognition before 1988 -- the year of an explosion of Indian casinos and of tribes' petitions for federal recognition -- to be moved to the head of the line. The still-pending bill would apply to about a dozen tribes, including at least two from California, according to Interior Department records.
