Okay, this one's going to take a minute...
I think you all know that I am a candidate running for a seat on the NRA Board, and that I am highly critical of the current "leadership." You also might know that I'm a regular columnist for Firearms News and Ammoland.com.
I wish Blaine Wade had offered a similar disclosure at the opening of his post, as Mr. Wade is a current member of the NRA Board of Directors. He's been on the Board since about 2016.
The statement from the NRA is an outrageous distortion of the facts.
Let's start with the opening line:
"A jury verdict in a high-profile New York trial confirms what the National Rifle Association of America (NRA) contended all along – that it was victimized by certain former vendors and "insiders" who abused the trust placed in them by the Association."
A full year before Letitia James filed her suit against the NRA, I opined in an Ammoland column that the NRA Board had two choices:
1. They could remove the miscreants and fix the problems, admitting any wrongdoing, and facing whatever uncomfortable music might come along with that admission, or
2. They could circle the wagons around Wayne LaPierre and keep circling right down the toilet.
The Board, including Mr. Wade, chose option 2.
Apparently, in NRA-speak, "all along" means since last month when Wayne resigned "for health reasons," because that's when they first admitted that "insiders" (besides Josh Powell, Wayne's hand-picked deputy who was briefly assumed to be his successor, who was tossed under the bus early on) had anything to do with their problems, and it's very significant that they did not mention LaPierre by name in this statement, even though he was the key "insider" at the heart of all of the problems.
Had the Board chosen option 1. above, sending LaPierre on his way with honor and a nice bonus (in spite of some grumbling from some NRA members for that part), then rooting out other improprieties and cleaning house, they could have avoided the NY AG's suit entirely. Instead they spent well over $100 million on lawyers and legal maneuvering, including over $13 million on a sham bankruptcy (which conveniently opened their books for the world to see), losing well over a million members, and watching annual revenues decline from almost $400 million, down to around $200 million, reelecting LaPierre 5 times, and consistently declaring that the AG's investigation and eventual suit were nothing but "politically-motivated BS," "witch hunts," "wholly without substance..." I guess that's what they meant by "all along."
Something else I've said repeatedly since this all started, is that there's no question that Letitia James hates the NRA and wants to destroy it, and that her investigation into the NRA and eventual suit were absolutely politically-motivated to a large degree. AND the investigation and suit were unfortunately not baseless, as the evidence kept growing that showed that LaPierre, former Treasurer Woody Phillips, Josh Powell, several members of the Board of Directors, a number of other current and former employees, and a number of vendors that were close to LaPierre, were padding their own pockets to the tune of millions to tens of millions of dollars a year at NRA member expense.
Reading Mr. Wade's comments here really raised my blood pressure, and I could go on for pages and pages explaining the facts and pointing out the fallacies and distortions in his comments and the links he shared, including the effort to cloud the issue by conflating two very different lawsuits, but I won't do that to you.
If you are interested, you can go to my website or Ammoland.com and do a search on "NRA." It will return years worth of articles by me and others, discussing the case and looking at the evidence. You'll see that long before this case got to trial, and after LaPierre's stories had gone through multiple revisions and variations, LaPierre had admitted to virtually all of the charges that had been made against him. Still members of the Board like Mr. Wade kept insisting that it was all BS and that people like me who were reporting on the mess were either misguided, being sucked in by "liberal media lies," or were actively trying to sabotage the NRA.
I take significant personal offense to all of those suggestions.
By the way, this was just the first of two trials scheduled in this case. The second trial is scheduled to begin in mid-July. In it, the judge will hear arguments and decide what remedies he will apply to get the NRA back on track and serving the members. My personal hope is that he will remove most, if not all of the current Board for their complicity in this fiasco, and appoint a Members Committee -- ideally chosen from candidates suggested by the various State Associations -- to oversee a total reorganization of the Association, including a reduction of the Board of Directors down from the current 76 members, to something more reasonable like 9 to 15 qualified, working members.
I'll also add that LaPierre did not receive any golden parachute, and he and the NRA stated in open court that he would not be employed or paid anything by the NRA in the future. It's troubling that Mr. Wade didn't know this.
Finally, on the subject of, "We fixed everything back in 2018 and everything's super above-board and beyond reproach now..."
It just came out that Tyler Schropp, the head of Development at NRA (one of LaPierre's closest pals and one of NRA's highest paid employees) has promoted Wayne's niece -- in Omaha -- to a $300k per year department head position in his division of NRA. (Nothing to see here... Everything's fine... Move along...)
