Wayne LaPierre Nopes Out As NRA Reaches The Find Out

So nice that he won't have to pretend to like guns anymore.

Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

On Friday, Wayne LaPierre announced that he is resigning as chief executive of the National Rifle Association. In a letter to the board, LaPierre crowed that, after 33 years under his leadership, “the NRA’s mission, programming, and fight for freedom have never been more secure.”

In reality, the NRA’s donations, membership, and influence declined drastically in the past seven years, thanks largely to revelations that LaPierre and his cronies ran the charity as a virtual slush fund to subsidize their luxurious lifestyles. In 2020, New York Attorney General Letitia James filed a civil suit accusing LaPierre and his deputies of gross violations of state and federal laws. That trial starts today, and, even though Justice Joel Cohen already took dissolution off the table, it’s clear that the organization’s best days are behind it.

Even the NRA board connected LaPierre’s departure the to the litigation, appending this Mark McGwire-sized asterisk to his legacy in its public announcement:

With respect to the NYAG’s allegations, the NRA Board of Directors reports it has undertaken significant efforts to perform a self-evaluation, recommended termination of disgraced ‘insiders’ and vendors who allegedly abused the Association, and accepted reimbursement, with interest, for alleged excess benefit transactions from LaPierre, as reported in public tax filings.

Don’t let the doorknob hit ya …

The Salad Days, When Wayne And His Buddies Were Swimming In Lettuce

At the end of 2016, the NRA was riding high. It took in a record $367 million that year between dues and donations. True, it spent $413 million, putting it deep in the red for the year. But its investment of $54 million to support Republican candidates, including $30 million to elect Donald Trump, had paid off bigly, cementing the gun group’s reputation as a kingmaker in rightwing politics.

Turns out tying your fortunes to a guy reckless enough to publicly shout “Russia, if you’re listening,…” is not without risk, though, and soon it emerged that a good chunk of the NRA’s leadership had been playing footsie with Kremlin agent Alexander Torshin through Maria Butina, the red-haired honeypot indicted by special counsel Robert Mueller in 2018.

In 2015, Butina led a trip to Russia that included former NRA president David Keene, future NRA president Pete Brownell, and several other NRA officials, donors, and board members. The delegation was unable to arrange a meeting with Putin, but they did get facetime with then-Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin, who’d been under US Treasury sanctions since 2014, and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who got his own sanctions in 2022.

Later Butina and Keene teamed up on a plan to import seventy thousand tons of Russian jet fuel. And it would have worked, too, if there were a port on earth large enough to receive it. And if they’d had the cash to fund it. And if they weren’t goddamn idiots.

As for Brownell, the Russia trip was only the beginning of the problem.

Audit, Schmaudit

In July of 2017, the NRA audit committee met to get its arms around two interrelated accounting issues. First, the charity had been spending with reckless abandon and would soon exhaust its line of credit. And second, there was a total lack of supervision over disbursements in violation of federal reporting requirements, the NRA’s own bylaws, and the laws of the state of New York, where the charity is chartered.

Millions of dollars of donor money flowed to NRA executives and board members without the required disclosure on the charity’s annual IRS Form 990. To take just one example, the Wall Street Journal reported that the NRA had for years bought ammunition from a company called Crow Shooting Supply which is controlled by Pete Brownell. But it only started reporting that “related party” transaction in 2017, when it admitted that it paid $3.1 million dollars that year for bullets which it then turned around and “donated to local shooting groups.”

Similarly, LaPierre’s deputy Josh Powell signed off on a seven-figure contract to a fundraising firm without disclosing that the firm was paying his wife $30,000 per month, billable directly to the NRA.

But no one in the organization could hold a candle to LaPierre, who indulged in an absolute orgy of perks with the help of the NRA’s largest vendor.

AckMac Gack

In 1977, the same year that LaPierre began working for the NRA as a lobbyist, the organization hired the Oklahoma PR firm Ackerman McQueen, AKA “AckMac.” By the 2010s, AckMac was the NRA’s largest vendor by far, taking in tens of millions of dollars annually from the charity. AckMac was wholly responsible for the production of NRATV, a streaming network that mixed ammo porn and hunting shows with blood and soil culture war programming that frequently veered into the deranged. In one infamous episode, presenter Dana Loesch photoshopped Klan hoods onto beloved cartoon characters to protest the addition of a Kenyan train called “Nia” to the children’s show Thomas the Tank Engine.

Loesch was reportedly paid a million dollars a year to fulminate on camera to a tiny audience. But Ackerman didn’t care about viewers — it simply added Loesch’s salary to the NRA’s running tab for “media and advertising.” And, with nobody checking, that tab proved to be a great place to hide spending LaPierre wanted to keep off the NRA’s books.

For instance, LaPierre billed the company for more than $275,000 of clothing at the luxury Beverly Hills boutique Zegna. In 2016, an AckMac subsidiary fronted $37,337 for “Guest Lodging confidential per WLP” so that LaPierre and his entourage could stay at a luxury resort in Louisville, rather than the hotel where the rest of the NRA employees were booked during a convention. AckMac paid a makeup artist $16,359 for three pre-event glow-ups provided to LaPierre’s wife, Susan, head of the NRA’s Women’s Leadership Forum. And it provided a $4,000 monthly salary to LaPierre’s personal travel concierge — whose sole responsibility was booking trips for the LaPierre posse — although this woman was also being paid $19,000 a month by the NRA.

All of these perks were billed back to the NRA as “public relations and advertising” services.

Most egregiously, AckMac planned to buy the LaPierres a $6.5 million mansion outside Dallas, complete with two cars and a golf course membership. After the Parkland school shooting in 2018, the LaPierres purportedly required a safe house. And who can really feel safe without an outdoor pool, 10,000 square feet, and views of the greens? That deal fell through, but not because anyone involved suddenly realized it was a wildly inappropriate use of donor money.

Enter Ollie North

In 2018, Brownell decided that for whatever reason he couldn’t serve out his planned second term as NRA president. Luckily LaPierre had a ringer all ready to go.

“Oliver North is a legendary warrior for American freedom, a gifted communicator and skilled leader,” he gushed that May when he announced the Iran Contra figure as Brownell’s successor. “In these times, I can think of no one better suited to serve as our president.”

Accepting the honor forced North to give up his lucrative gig as a Fox News commentator. Luckily, AckMac stepped into the breach! It immediately hired North as a presenter on NRATV, for a reported $1 million per year.

But LaPierre’s delight at the coup of scoring North as the organization’s president was short-lived. Almost immediately, North began making noise about the impropriety of a public charity spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to ferry LaPierre and his wife around in private jets at a time when the organization had just nixed free coffee in the employee breakroom in an effort to cut costs. And he observed that LaPierre was violating the NRA’s bylaws by unilaterally approving massive pay raises for his buddies, such as increasing Powell’s salary from $250,000 to $800,000 in just 18 months. LaPierre also greenlit multiple severance packages disguised as six-figure consulting contracts.

By 2019, things had reached a total crisis, with LaPierre affecting to be SHOCKED AND CHAGRINED to discover that North was being paid by AckMac using NRA money. AckMac and the NRA descended into trench warfare litigation, and, in April, LaPierre engineered North’s ouster as head of the NRA board. But that didn’t solve the problem, since by then the NYAG was hot on LaPierre’s trail.

The Lawsuit

In August of 2020, the NYAG filed a complaint alleging gross violations of New York charity laws by the NRA, LaPierre, Powell, the organization’s chief legal officer John Frazer, and its former treasurer Woody Phillips. While the original complaint sought to dissolve the NRA entirely, Justice Cohen ruled in 2022 that “dissolving the NRA could impinge, at least indirectly, on the free speech and assembly rights of its millions of members” and the state could achieve its goals by “targeted, less intrusive relief.” But the sanctions and financial penalties still on the table are serious, and the NRA has been trying very hard to get out of this case.

In 2021, without telling the NRA board or its general counsel, LaPierre filed a bankruptcy petition on the organization’s behalf in the Northern District of Texas, taking advantage of a vagary of Texas law which allows a company to split itself into two entities: one containing the assets, and the other saddled with the debts. On the witness stand, he readily admitted that the bankruptcy was simply a stratagem to evade legal process in New York — a flagrant abuse of the court system. Judge Harlin Hale dismissed the case as “not having been filed in good faith both because it was filed to gain an unfair litigation advantage and because it was filed to avoid a state regulatory scheme.” He also upbraided LaPierre for the “surreptitious manner in which [he] obtained and exercised authority to file bankruptcy for the NRA,” noting that the secret transfer of $5 million to a lawyer in Texas to effect the bankruptcy filing was in itself an apparent violation of the NRA’s own bylaws.

Back in New York, discovery dragged on for another 18 months. A last-ditch effort to get the case postponed failed on Thursday. But on Friday, at the same time word of LaPierre’s resignation hit the news, Powell was inking a plea deal. In addition to paying $100,000 and accepting responsibility for his breach of New York charity laws, he agreed to testify as a witness for the state.

As the Washington Post reports, a six-member jury will be empaneled today to determine whether money damages are appropriate and to decide whether Frazer, the only defendant still with the NRA, should be removed. Then Justice Cohen will conduct separate hearings to determine the amount the individual defendants should have to give back to the NRA. With millions of dollars at stake and a statute which allows for double recovery, Powell’s $100,000 in restitution looks like a light slap on the wrist. His former colleagues, however, are likely having a very bad morning.