Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that New York investigators were looking closely at a $6 million Dallas, Texas mansion that the NRA considered buying for their head honcho, Wayne LaPierre, in 2018. Ackerman McQueen, the NRA’s former PR partner and now legal opponent, says that LaPierre came to them to ask for help in facilitating this move. McQueen says that LaPierre and his wife visited the property multiple times and were “preparing to put down $70,000 in earnest money to make an offer.” Ackerman says they were setting up an LLC for LaPierre so that his home buying would not become public.
The NRA denied any responsibility in the matter, pointing to their former partners and PR firm Ackerman McQueen as the real catalysts behind the idea. “Not a cent of NRA money was ultimately spent,” the NRA said. In the ongoing, ugly, and very entertaining legal and financial battle between the NRA and Ackerman McQueen, the NRA claimed that it was Ackerman McQueen executives who were the ones interested in purchasing the palatial property; and, according to the NRA, it was LaPierre himself who shut down the plan after discovering that NRA funds would be used.
On Monday, the WSJ reported that they had “obtained,” a copy of a $70,000 check the NRA had sent “to an obscure Delaware entity called WBB Investments LLC, which had been incorporated a week earlier.” This bit of evidence would support Ackerman McQueen’s story, while contradicting the NRA’s assertions.
The NRA replied via a spokesman, that “During the formative stages of an arrangement being driven by Ackerman McQueen, the NRA made a nominal payment to help facilitate the process for a real estate transaction that was supposedly being undertaken by Ackerman McQueen following the Parkland tragedy.” Hehe. That’s the worst explanation I’ve ever heard.
As the WSJ points out, either explanation is not a good look for the NRA or Wayne LaPierre as $70,000 is something the nonprofit’s board should be aware of and should have voted on. Of course, if the other story is true, the NRA’s grotesquely intimate financial relationship with Ackerman McQueen has just received more fuel. LaPierre has already weathered reports that the Second Amendment patriot billed the NRA over $400,000 for Italian suits and vacations.
The NRA has seen a handful of board members resign over the past two weeks, in some cases due to being “stonewalled,” and “rebuffed at every turn,” in their attempts at internal investigations of the financial machinations of LaPierre and others.