Evidence so far shows Shirley can be manipulated

Much ado about nothing.

That's about the case so far with revelations that have come out of an investigation against President Joe Shirley Jr. in connection with the tribe's dealings with OnSat during his administration.

The Navajo Nation Council placed Shirley on administrative leave with pay while all of this is sorted out and the details of the investigation have been kept, as much as the tribe is able, secret.

But one of at least three investigative reports has been leaked to local media and while it shows a number of cases where tribal officials may have committed wrongdoing and even fraud in the handling of the payments to OnSat, the case against Shirley and his staff is largely circumstantial.

What's come out so far shows Shirley mainly using his influence to make sure that OnSat received checks for its billings, going as far as hand carrying the documents himself to various tribal departments to make sure that the check was issued.

To bring this into perspective, one has to understand that the tribal system of paying vendors leaves a great deal to be desired and that causes problems not only for the president's office but every program in the tribe.

It's important that vendors be kept happy so oftentimes program directors find themselves with no other option but to hand carry documents around to various offices to make sure that checks come out on time. It's done here in the tribe on almost a daily basis.

So having the tribal president or one of his staff do that for a vendor is not unusual.

There is no indication that he or anyone in Shirley's office was aware that the tribe was overpaying OnSat - to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

But there is evidence to support a charge that Shirley was taken in by Dave Stephens, the owner and CEO of OnSat, and that Stephens was able to use his connection with Shirley and the Navajo Nation to promote himself as a leader in Internet technology before the United Nations in an effort to get contracts to provide these services to undeveloped countries throughout the world.

Shirley's main problem was in trusting Stephens but he isn't the first Navajo leader - and he won't be the last - to be taken in by a smooth talking non-Native who seemed to have all of the answers.

Stephens came onto the Navajo Reservation with promises to bring the Internet to the grassroots Navajo and thereby bring all tribal members into the computer age.

And he seemed to have the credentials to do this. Even officials for the United Nations were taken in by his grand schemes to do the same thing for undeveloped countries in Africa.

Stephens' idea was for the Navajo Nation to be a leader in bringing this technology to the world and at the time, it seemed feasible. One could understand why Shirley, who suddenly found himself traveling all over the world and talking to world leaders, would be taken in by all of this.

He would have been wise to have stepped back in the midst of all of this and listened to the grumblings that were going on within some circles of the tribal government about OnSat's undue influence. If he had, a lot of this would have been avoided.

The bottom line is that the evidence that has been presented so far has shown Shirley to be human and able to be manipulated but there has been nothing made public so far that would warrant his permanent removal from office.

This doesn't mean that further investigation won't find a "smoking gun" that would show Shirley to have had more of an involvement in the matter.

It also doesn't mean that Shirley is out of the woods since there may be enough evidence in the minds of those council members who want to get rid of Shirley because of his efforts at reducing the council's power.

This may be enough for them to remove Shirley in the hopes that all of that talk about government reform will just go away.

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