WASHINGTON -- 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 Mr. Daschle's wife, Linda.
The accusations came in a letter from Mr. 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. Mr. Baxter, who works in the Great Lakes Region office of the agency in Des Plaines, Ill., also sent Mr. 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.
Mr. 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 Mr. Daschle had acted improperly to help B&L;, whose owner, Murl Bellew, has been a longtime friend of Mr. and Mrs. Daschle. 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.
Mr. Daschle, of South Dakota, said through his spokesman, Ranit Schmelzer, that he had no knowledge of any effort to destroy or withhold FAA documents.
Mr. 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.
Mr. Baxter said in his memorandum that Ms. 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.
The memorandum continues: "Cathy said she had a conversation with Dave Hanley and said Dave told her to destroy or get rid of these documents."
Mr. Baxter wrote that Ms. Jones said she was unsure if she had destroyed all the documents she was asked to and that she sent several of the remaining pages to Mr. Baxter with yellow stickers to indicate which other ones Mr. Hanley might want to review for possible destruction.
Mr. Hanley, in an interview on Friday, vehemently denied having asked anyone to destroy FAA documents. "This is absolutely not true," he said.
Donald P. Zochert, an FAA spokesman, said that Ms. Jones denied the accusations and declined to comment further.
Baxter said he was acting as a whistle-blower in sending the accusations to Mr. Pressler. Mr. Pressler said he thought Mr. Baxter's account sounded detailed and plausible and should be pursued in a congressional investigation.
But Mr. Pressler said the situation put him in an awkward position; he has had a strained political relationship with Mr. Daschle, his fellow South Dakota senator. "I don't want this to be politicized."
As a consequence, he has turned the documents and the issue over to Sen. John McCain, an Arizona Republican who now heads the aviation subcommittee.
But on Friday, Mr. McCain said through his spokesman, Deirdre Blackwood, that he "has no intention of holding hearings on this matter at this time." Ms. Blackwood said that McCain thought the Baxter accusations would best be handled by the Transportation Department's inspector general.
In explaining his motive in trying to eliminate the role of Forest Service aviation inspectors, Mr. Daschle has insisted that he was not trying to protect B&L.; Rather, he said that he was trying to streamline government by eliminating duplication of government inspections of air charter services by the Forest Service and the FAA.
Mr. Baxter told Senate aides that among the documents either withheld or destroyed was an account of how Mr. Daschle worked with the FAA and B&L; Aviation to get the Forest Service's "nose out of the FAA's business." One document, he pTC said, showed that FAA personnel in Rapid City helped B&L; Aviation pass inspections from the Forest Service by cleaning up its records. Mr. Baxter said that in the document, the FAA boasts to Mr. Daschle and seeks his gratitude for helping B&L; deal with the Forest Service inspectors. Ms. Schmelzer declined to comment on this issue.