The NRA’s Petty Infighting Might Be an Early Sign of Its Downfall

Last week, as the NRA's annual convention got under way in Indianapolis, two of its highest-profile executives—chief executive Wayne LaPierre and president Oliver North—each became embroiled in a complicated tangle of intertwined financial scandals. The fallout from their mudslinging contest could threaten the outsize influence the National Rifle Association has wielded in American electoral politics for decades—and perhaps the organization's very existence.

A few days before the convention began, North suddenly demanded LaPierre's resignation and announced that an internal committee would review "damaging" claims of LaPierre's purported financial malfeasance. In addition to a "devastating account" of the NRA's balance sheet, he threatened to release details of sexual-harassment charges against an unnamed staffer and of LaPierre's allegedly excessive travel expenses, which North asserted could place the organization's tax-exempt status in jeopardy. The Washington Post reports that North's letter covered, for example, "more than $200,000 of wardrobe purchases" on the part of LaPierre, which raises the obvious question of how many frumpy blue suits one man can own.

LaPierre, of course, was having none of this, and responded with his own letter in which he characterized North's gambit as a grand extortion scheme and vowed to "stand and fight." LaPierre won. Over the weekend, North abruptly announced that he would not seek a second term as president, as the NRA's board had "informed" him that it would not endorse his re-election bid. In a prepared statement to stunned members, which NRA vice president Richard Childress read from the podium in Indianapolis, North reiterated his belief that the organization is in "clear crisis" and that its finances require immediate review in order to preserve the aforementioned nonprofit status. On Monday, the board re-elected LaPierre to his position, and selected Carolyn Meadows as its next president.

Also on Monday, a concerned President Trump—who delivered a keynote address at the convention last week—urged his pals to "stop the internal fighting" and "get its act together quickly." But his exhortation is a gross oversimplification of the NRA's problems, and it might also be a little too late.

At the root of the drama is the NRA's relationship with Ackerman McQueen, the Oklahoma-based ad agency behind some of the NRA's more memorably terrifying lines of argument over the past few decades. (The agency, according to The New York Times, was behind former NRA president Charlton Heston's famous proclamation that the government would have to pry his guns "from my cold, dead hands.") Ackerman McQueen has played a key role in the production of NRATV, a 24-hour streaming channel that specializes in the production of cartoonish Second Amendment agitprop. The NRA apparently grew uncomfortable with the extremist tone of NRATV, whose on-air hosts occasionally issue calls for open civil and/or race war. Earlier this month, the organization sued Ackerman McQueen in federal court over a raft of alleged over-billing practices and dubious spending habits.

This is where North comes in: As it turns out, he has a side agreement with Ackerman McQueen to host an NRATV program entitled Oliver North's American Heroes that is completely independent of his leadership of the NRA. According to LaPierre, this bit of double-dipping nets North "millions of dollars annually," and yet North would not share with the NRA—of which he was, again, the president—any information about his contract as its lawyers prepared their legal case against its ad agency. "I will not judge Col. North," wrote LaPierre, "but must report what many of you already know: He has contractual and financial loyalties to AM." Two of the gun-rights movement's most successful grifters, in order words, are publicly accusing each other of using their tremendous wealth and power to grift a little too opportunistically.

Much of this diligent executive finger-pointing likely stems from a recent investigation launched by New York attorney general Letitia James, who on the campaign trail referred to the NRA as a "terrorist organization" and vowed to look into its tax-exempt status if she were elected to the office she now holds. Sure enough, on Friday James issued subpoenas to several as-yet-unnamed NRA-affiliated individuals and sent litigation hold letters in which she ordered the NRA and related entities to preserve documents in anticipation of litigation. (As the Times notes, the NRA is incorporated under the laws of New York, which gives her office jurisdiction over its activities.)

NRATV's forays into political advocacy—among the many, many other NRA expenditures that are unrelated to the integrity of the sport of competitive shooting—are exactly the sort of thing that might prompt regulators to conclude that a nonprofit is no longer entitled to special legal treatment. This is, in other words, a very bad time for the NRA to keep sloppy books, which is why its leadership team is combing over its relationships with outside vendors, searching for improprieties it could use to shift blame for any improper conduct James's team might find. In the meantime, NRA's higher-ups have every incentive to scapegoat one another for hypothetical damning revelations about how the NRA spends its millions that could soon come to light.

The petty infighting is only the latest embarrassing setback for the NRA, which despite two full years of unified Republican government has failed to advance any of its major legislative initiatives to the president's desk. For the first time in nearly a decade, gun-control groups outspent gun-rights groups in the 2018 midterms, and the resulting Democratic House majority has basically torpedoed the NRA agenda for the next two years. In its most recent financial disclosures, the NRA reported a 22 percent drop in membership revenue, which occurred even though it raised dues twice since the beginning of 2016. Perhaps most troubling of all, though, are poll numbers indicating that clear majorities of both Democratic and Republican voters continue to favor tougher gun-safety laws. If these trends continue, it will be a lot tougher for LaPierre (or anyone else at NRA headquarters) to misappropriate money when there is just not enough money to misappropriate anymore.