NRA infighting reveals CEO used $440,000 in donor money for fancy suits, luxury travel

More evidence has emerged that the conservative movement is flooded with grifters and frauds from the top down. Whether it is a president who had to pay a $25 million settlement for defrauding veterans, moms, and the elderly in scam real estate courses or a North Carolina congressional candidate who hired a “consultant” to collect ballots and make them disappear, it seems there is plenty of grift and fraud to go around in the Republican Party. 

Enter Wayne LaPierre, National Rifle Association CEO. In late April, NRA executives gathered for their annual convention, where Republican politicians routinely appear to pander to their gun-loving base, and something unusual happened—the NRA CEO and the NRA president, Oliver North, publicly exposed a growing rift between them, complete with accusations of extortion and fraud. Before it was even over, North had been forced to resign.

LaPierre accused North of trying to extort him, saying that North had pressured him to resign, threatening to release damaging financial information about LaPierre if he didn’t. The backdrop for all of this is a shrinking number of donations to the gun rights organization, which is reportedly on shaky ground financially. Mike Spies of The Trace reported on the organization’s financial woes and about just how far it has strayed from its founding mission.

LaPierre is right that the NRA is troubled; in recent years, it has run annual deficits of as much as $40 million. It is not unusual for nonprofits to ask prospective donors to help forestall disaster. What is unusual is the extent to which such warnings have become the central activity of the NRA. Even as the association has reduced spending on its avowed core mission — gun education, safety, and training — to less than 10 percent of its total budget, it has substantially increased its spending on messaging. The NRA is now mainly a media company, promoting a lifestyle built around loving guns and hating anyone who might take them away.

It’s even more curious it had such a huge spending increase during the 2016 election, most of it going to help elect Donald Trump. In fact, the NRA spent doubled what it had spent in the previous presidential election in 2012.

The National Rifle Association’s overall spending surged by more than $100 million in 2016, surpassing any previous annual NRA spending totals on record, according to an audit obtained by the Center for Responsive Politics.

But not all of it was spent to elect Trump. Turns out, Wayne LaPierre was living that good, good life as well. In fact, The Wall Street Journal reports that LaPierre billed the NRA’s ad agency, Ackerman McQueen, a whopping $440,000 for wardrobe and travel. A shocking $200,000 of that was for fancy suits! The NRA went on to reimburse Ackerman McQueen for all of it, plus another $450,000 for another big-spending NRA executive.

Ackerman McQueen separately sent another letter requesting backup records for about $450,000 in expenses it paid for related to travel by Tyler Schropp, the NRA’s top fundraising official, one person familiar with the matter said.

Those expenses included stays at luxury hotels, including Meadowood in California’s Napa Valley. As a fundraiser, Mr. Schropp must entertain wealthy donors.

Now the NRA is suing Ackerman McQueen, which billed it $40 million in 2017, and it is getting ugly. 

Despite a decades long relationship, the NRA sued its ad firm last month for allegedly failing to provide records to justify its bills. Ackerman McQueen has called the suit frivolous and inaccurate.

Days after the lawsuit was filed, Ackerman McQueen sent Mr. LaPierre the letter, copied to others, saying it wasn’t able to provide records to the NRA justifying the more than $240,000 spent on Mr. LaPierre’s travel costs without documentation from him, the people said.

So the NRA is suing because it wants details on expenses submitted by its own CEO. 

Do you think the deer hunters in Missouri knew their donations would be funding Wayne LaPierre’s taste for high-end luxury travel all over Europe and the Bahamas? About which he apparently submitted only limited information? Do the hunting enthusiasts in the West appreciate their dollars being used to buy $200,000’s worth of Italian designer suits for one executive? You’d think a man who earns between $1.4 million and $5 million per year (depending on bonus payouts) would be able to afford his own suits. These kind of expenditures are going to be hard to justify to the shrinking number of NRA members. 

Civil court isn’t the only court NRA executives could soon find themselves in. During the week of the NRA convention in late April, New York Attorney General Leticia James announced that she had opened an investigation into the NRA’s tax-exempt status. The New York Times has a list of some of the things James is looking at in her investigation.

There are a number of potential issues that could arise in Ms. James’s inquiry. Earlier this year, The New York Times reported that the N.R.A.’s affiliated charity, the N.R.A. Foundation, had transferred more than $100 million since 2012 to the N.R.A., and that it also lent the N.R.A. $5 million in 2017. Donations to the N.R.A. Foundation are tax-deductible, while those to the N.R.A. are not, and the transfers concerned some tax experts.

The Times also reported that the N.R.A. had paid $18 million since 2010 to a company that produces “Under Wild Skies,” a hunting show on NRATV. Tyler Schropp, the N.R.A.’s advancement director, had a stake in the production company until at least 2017; nonprofit rules require a cautious approach for transactions that benefit key executives.

The Wall Street Journal has reported on multiple transactions benefiting firms with ties to N.R.A. officials, while The New Yorker further scrutinized internal conflicts within the organization.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens to its fundraising now. Either way, the NRA appears to be struggling, financially and legally. Thoughts and prayers, assholes.