Secrecy, Self-Dealing, and Greed at the N.R.A.
I look at the Real Clear Politics website pretty much daily. With a title like Secrecy, Self-Dealing, and Greed at the N.R.A. I couldn't help looking at the linked article, even if it was from the New Yorker.
Further reading lead me to find that the article was written by a staffer for the Trace a clearing house devoted firearms issues - not in a positive way. I still read the article because the first couple paragraphs hooked me.
The general gist of the article, which is long, covers the relationship between the NRA and it's public relations firm Ackerman McQueen. The article outlines some pretty suspicious practices regarding the relationship between top NRA brass and the firm, apparently primarily geared toward feather the NRA upper level's nests.
Here are a couple snippets:
On NRATV, the organization’s programming network, the popular host Grant Stinchfield might appear in a “Socialist Tears” T-shirt, taking a sledgehammer to a television set cycling through liberal news shows. The platform’s Twitter account circulates videos of the spokesperson Dana Loesch, a former Breitbart News editor who has said that mainstream journalists are “the rat bastards of the earth” and deserve to be “curb-stomped.” Over menacing images of masked rioters, she asserts that the only way to stop the left is to “fight its violence of lies with the clenched fist of truth.” A lawyer and activist called Colion Noir, whose real name is Collins Idehen, Jr., also has a large following. After the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida, Noir appeared in a video chiding “all the kids from Parkland getting ready to use your First Amendment to attack everyone else’s Second Amendment.”
Loesch and Noir have become the primary public faces of the N.R.A.; at events, enormous banners feature their images alongside those of LaPierre and Chris Cox, the organization’s top lobbyist. But Loesch and Noir are not technically employed by the N.R.A. Instead, they are paid by Ackerman McQueen, a public-relations firm based in Oklahoma. In at least one year, Loesch earned close to a million dollars, according to a source who has seen her contract.,,,,,,
,,,,The N.R.A. and Ackerman have become so intertwined that it is difficult to tell where one ends and the other begins. Top officials and staff move freely between the two organizations; Oliver North, the former Iran-Contra operative, who now serves as the N.R.A.’s president, is paid roughly a million dollars a year through Ackerman, according to two N.R.A. sources......
.....According to interviews and to documents that I obtained—federal tax forms, charity records, contracts, corporate filings, and internal communications—a small group of N.R.A. executives, contractors, and venders has extracted hundreds of millions of dollars from the nonprofit’s budget, through gratuitous payments, sweetheart deals, and opaque financial arrangements.......
......Marc Owens, who served for ten years as the head of the Internal Revenue Service division that oversees tax-exempt enterprises, recently reviewed these records. “The litany of red flags is just extraordinary,” he said. “The materials reflect one of the broadest arrays of likely transgressions that I’ve ever seen. There is a tremendous range of what appears to be the misuse of assets for the benefit of certain venders and people in control.” Owens added, “Those facts, if confirmed, could lead to the revocation of the N.R.A.’s tax-exempt status”—without which the organization could likely not survive......
.......Tax filings for 2017, the most recent year for which records are available, show that the N.R.A. paid Ackerman McQueen and its affiliates more than forty million dollars that year…….
,,,,,,Many N.R.A. employees have long suspected Ackerman of inflating the cost of the services it provides, but its relationships with executives remain strong. For instance, the company has worked closely with LaPierre’s wife, Susan, who maintains an Ackerman e-mail address and was briefly employed there, in the mid-nineties……
......As the relationship between the N.R.A. and Ackerman strengthened, some employees became disgruntled. “Most staffers think that Ackerman is too expensive,” Aaron Davis, who spent a decade working in the N.R.A.’s fund-raising department, told me. “They think they’re just using the N.R.A. to make a massive profit.......”
......As the firm’s employees visited the office more frequently, the staff began noticing Lexuses in the parking lot, alongside their own beat-up cars. “I mean, they had a lot going on for them, but they weren’t your folks who were interested in Second Amendment politics,” Davis said. They were “your typical New York or Austin types that are excited about doing really big projects and creative projects. N.R.A. being kind of propaganda gave them the opportunity to do marketing in a way they couldn’t do for any other organization......
.......Board members, particularly those who had served for a long time, grew uncomfortable. Once, Davis recalled, he took a board member to lunch to request a donation: “He just looks at me, and he goes, ‘You know, I like you, but I hate your department.’ I said, ‘Why?’ He says, ‘Because N.R.A. is not fancy Italian shoes with thousand-dollar suits. N.R.A. is the backbone of this country, wearing bluejeans and boots........”
My note: This has been going on for some time:
,,,,,In December, 1996, the N.R.A. board’s finance committee gathered at a Hyatt hotel near the Dallas–Fort Worth airport. According to minutes of the meeting, members discussed the fact that “the NRA has been technically insolvent for several years” and “has incurred substantial debt.” The minutes note “improvements in cost containment” but say that the exception was LaPierre, who “directed public relations expenditures, which were significantly over budget ($2,022,900) through the third quarter.” The committee agreed that “in our financial condition the NRA could no longer afford to spend large sums of money on Public Relations . . . nor can it afford to continue [to] allow the EVP to fail to follow the simplest of business procedures—having written agreements with vendors.”
LaPierre promised reforms. As a board member named Weldon Clark recalled, in an affidavit filed with the Federal Election Commission, LaPierre said that he would replace Ackerman with the Mercury Group, a communications firm in Washington, D.C. According to the affidavit, though, an inquiry by board members “revealed that Mercury Group, Inc. was a wholly owned subsidiary of Ackerman McQueen.”
If you want to read more: https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-...eed-at-the-nra or https://www.thetrace.org/features/nr...erman-mcqueen/
The article is kind of like the neighbor you hate because he's so smug showing you pictures and proof that you wife is fooling around.
Last edited by 26 Inf; 04-22-19 at 01:47.
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