The National Rifle Association has been
one of the most powerful, if not the most powerful,
lobbying groups in America.
The NRA is very powerful,
not just because it has a lot of money,
but because it has a lot of sway
with single issue pro-gun voters.
It says that it has about five million members
committed to gun ownership and the Second Amendment.
We're all just wanting to exercise
our Second Amendment rights to protect ourselves,
protect our property.
I love the NRA.
I love the Second Amendment.
They've mobilized the single issue voter on this topic,
up and down the entire ballot.
And they've successfully done that for years.
There's a shooting, there's a shooting!
Gun violence in America. Yes.
We need more guns.
But at the peak of its power,
the NRA finds itself besieged by scandals
and legal challenges that threaten its very existence.
Executives of the NRA are accused of
looting the powerful gun rights groups
to the tune of millions of dollars.
Gun owners across America should be horrified
by what I saw inside of the NRA.
An unchecked corporation with too much power.
It's fighting against attorneys general
in New York, in Washington DC.
It's fighting a legal battle
against its former advertising agency.
It's spending millions and millions
of dollars on legal bills.
There was a vicious civil war
between Wayne LaPierre and Oliver North.
And it was very dramatic, and very expensive.
It has had large-scale layoffs.
And it does seem that the NRA is having a lot of trouble.
While trouble does not necessarily
mean their ultimate demise, there is no doubt
that in recent years, the NRA shot itself in the foot.
The NRA wasn't always all-powerful,
or even political for that matter.
The NRA was formed in 1871 by two former Union soldiers.
Many people in the North just didn't know how to use guns.
And so the NRA's mission was to train people how to use guns
in the event there's another war.
It remained a non-controversial
gun safety organization for over a hundred years.
Its earliest foray into politics can be traced back to
the National Firearms Act in 1934.
This major piece of gun control legislation
was actually supported by the NRA.
Something the NRA of today would consider heresy.
It would take another five decades for the humble nonprofit
to transform into a pro-gun lobby group
and ardent opponent of gun regulations it is today.
So the NRA became a little more political
starting in the 1970s, and really ramped up
its political efforts throughout the '80s and '90s.
Pushing back on any efforts by states or Congress
to restrict gun rights through background checks
or waiting periods before guns could be purchased.
From my cold dead hands!
The NRA raises its money from membership fees
and donations from wealthy individuals
and gun manufacturers.
But it isn't just one simple
nonprofit organization anymore.
Along with its political transformation came a multitude
of offshoot foundations for varying purposes.
Well, what we call the NRA is really
a number of different organizations.
It has a political spending arm
and it has a charitable foundation.
The organizations have to keep separate books,
but they don't have to operate
fully independently of one another.
And indeed, they're all basically run by Wayne LaPierre,
the head of the NRA.
Wayne LaPierre is basically a walking,
talking iteration of the National Rifle Association.
He's not a avid shooter himself, but nonetheless
he's been a very effective lobbyist for gun rights,
and been a very effective spokesperson for the NRA.
We're never gonna stop fighting for your right,
and folks just like you all over America,
to have the right to defend themselves.
Newtown 911, what's the location
of your emergency? Sandy Hook School,
I think there's somebody's shooting in here.
LaPierre became somewhat of
a household name in 2012, when he offered a defensive
and seemingly tone-deaf response
to the school massacre at Sandy Hook.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun
is a good guy with a gun.
The NRA stop killing our children.
The NRA does best when it's under attack.
The NRA has blood on its hands!
During the Obama administration,
you had a spate of tragic mass killings in the United States
and this put the gun world on the defensive.
USA, USA, USA!
When people feel that their access or their ability
to obtain and keep guns is threatened,
that's when they support the National Rifle Association.
And indeed, it was boom time
for both NRA membership enrollment and gun sales in America.
Under the leadership of LaPierre, the NRA was credited
for defeating President Obama's legislative agenda
for stronger gun regulations in his second term.
All in all, this was a pretty shameful day for Washington.
And of course, the NRA was
an early backer of the Trump campaign.
The Second Amendment is so important.
They're not gonna take your guns away, folks.
They're not gonna take the guns away, not gonna do it.
The NRA went to great pains to get Donald Trump elected.
I'm officially announcing the NRA's endorsement
of Donald Trump for president.
And they were able to amass very large
sums of money for Donald Trump, $30 million.
And about $54 million for the entire election.
And they were very successful.
The election of Donald Trump in November, 2016,
seemed to signal that the NRA was at the peak of its power.
High on its own success,
the NRA ventured to launch NRATV,
an ambitious online media network dedicated
not only to gun culture, but to the culture wars in general,
Satan hates everything good about America.
So does Kaepernick.
Men were made to create.
They were made to conquer.
Much of NRATV was filled with right wing screeds
against immigration, against journalists,
against fake news, against liberals.
Not all Muslims are radicalized,
but all radicalized terrorists are Muslims.
But NRATV turned out
to be a resounding failure.
I never would have imagined
these little neat pockets and hidden closures.
Not that many people were watching it.
And it was very expensive for the NRA to produce.
The answer to the question, what the is NRATV,
is it's just a vessel to sell America guns.
That's pretty much it.
NRATV was a bad business decision for the NRA.
It costs the NRA something like $40 million
and got very, very few viewers.
The failure of NRATV eventually
came back to haunt them and ultimately led to
the first real signs of trouble for the foundation.
I see it, it was the white hoods
and the burning train tracks.
Okay, fine, fair point.
Now I should warn you,
this is where things get complicated.
The NRA's troubles really began in October of 2017,
when New York State launched an investigation
into an insurance product called Carry Guard.
And it turned out the NRA didn't have the right permits
under New York insurance law to be selling this insurance.
And that would cause the NRA to hire a new lawyer,
a fellow by the name of William Brewer.
He warned that the NRA was likely to be further investigated
by the State of New York.
Brewer suggested that the NRA conduct
a full-scale internal audit to ensure
their books were in order, a large part of which
involved tracking the enormous expenditures
incurred by their longtime PR agency, Ackerman McQueen.
Among other PR services rendered
during their decades-long relationship,
Ackerman McQueen billed $40 million for the NRATV project.
This included a large undisclosed salary
to then NRA president Oliver North,
theoretically an unpaid position,
for his appearances on NRATV.
I spent my life with those who relish a good, fair fight.
He was making a salary of apparently
over a million dollars a year.
And the NRA said, we need to review that contract.
But it's really only the tip of the iceberg.
It turns out that the NRA
and Ackerman McQueen had profound disagreements.
Ackerman McQueen responded by detailing to the public
that Wayne LaPierre and other people
who were at the head of the NRA were taking advantage of
the NRA's charitable status, using it for personal expenses.
Such as expensive travel to the Bahamas,
shopping trips in Beverly Hills,
where Wayne LaPierre would spend
hundreds of thousands of dollars.
And it even came out that Wayne LaPierre
had a secret $17 million golden parachute contract.
Oliver North had been pressing the NRA's board
to investigate the NRA's expenditures,
including with Ackerman McQueen,
and even the NRA's law firm.
In April of 2019, the NRA filed a lawsuit
against Ackerman McQueen for over-billing
and lack of transparency, just days before
The New Yorker dropped a bombshell report,
alleging corruption on a staggering scale.
With a particular focus on the questionable relationship
between Ackerman McQueen and the NRA.
So the New York attorney general alleges that the NRA
was using Ackerman McQueen's expenses
to enrich its leadership through improper spending.
The New Yorker article quoted
a former IRS official in charge of overseeing
tax exempt organizations as saying that
the NRA had a litany of red flags
that were "just extraordinary."
Ackerman McQueen and Oliver North
have not responded to requests for comment.
And in court filings, Ackerman McQueen
has denied the NRA allegations.
Thank you so much.
All this acrimony made for
a tense annual NRA meeting, the following week.
Oliver North threatened Wayne LaPierre.
Said he would disclose information
about his incredible spending
with the NRA's money on personal expenses
if Wayne LaPierre didn't step down
from leadership of the organization.
LaPierre quickly retaliated and accused North
and Ackerman McQueen of trying to carry out a coup.
Oliver North brought his issue to the board.
But when the board meeting ended,
Wayne LaPierre was still there.
And Oliver North was out as president.
And indeed, in the months to come,
Wayne LaPierre would purge virtually
all of the Ackerman McQueen supporters,
including Chris Cox, the head of the NRA's
legislative arm and lobbying arm.
And before long, LaPierre was standing alone.
But for LaPierre, it was a Pyrrhic victory.
So the internal fight was over,
but it had the effect of triggering what became
the New York attorney general's lawsuit against the NRA.
Enter Letitia James, the new sheriff in town.
So Letitia James is a Democrat.
And she was elected back in 2018 to become
New York's top law enforcement officer.
James ran on a platform of challenging Donald Trump.
But she was also highly critical of the NRA,
which she accused of being a terrorist organization.
A claim that the NRA claims is defamatory and false.
But it was the revelations that came out of
the Ackerman McQueen lawsuit that really
provided her a basis to go after the NRA.
So Attorney General James rolled up her sleeves
and dug in, obtaining sworn testimony from key players,
including Oliver North.
And reviewing thousands of pages of documents,
many of which the NRA attempted to withhold from her.
Especially when it came to any information pertaining to
their relationship with Ackerman McQueen.
But eventually James had seen enough.
It's clear that the NRA has been failing to carry out
its stated mission for many, many years.
And instead has operated as a breeding ground for greed,
abuse, and brazen illegality.
The NRA has denied New York's allegations,
calling the lawsuit a baseless
political attack on the organization.
Around the same time that New York filed its lawsuit,
the District of Columbia attorney general, Karl Racine,
also a Democrat, filed a separate lawsuit against the NRA
and the NRA foundation, accusing the foundation of allowing
charitable funds to be used for improper purposes.
On October 19th, 2020,
the NRA filed a response to the New York
attorney general's lawsuit asking to have
the case dismissed, calling it the capstone of
a partisan election interference project.
It's anyone's guess when the judge
will respond to the NRA's request.
And this really is just the beginning of the case.
What we do know is that the NRA
has been hemorrhaging money on fees to combat
ongoing legal battles on every imaginable front.
Part of the NRA's financial situation
comes from incredible legal fees.
William Brewer and his law firm have been charging
the NRA more than $1.3 million a month.
A filing by Ackerman claims that Brewer's law firm
has collected $54 million in the two years
of representing the NRA.
In a leaked audio recording, LaPierre told
surviving board members that the NRA
is in serious financial trouble.
The cost that we bore was probably about
a hundred million dollar hit in lost revenue
in 2018 and 2019.
That was back in January, 2020,
before the filings in New York State and DC.
Not to mention the layoffs it's had to do
after the Coronavirus outbreak.
So they can only expect to keep spending a lot more.
To add insult to injury, recently ousted Joshua Powell
has released a tell-all book with firsthand accounts
of alleged misconduct across the board.
It is an abomination of members' money
that what's gone on over the past 30 years.
It's to the tune of hundreds of millions
of dollars in wastage.
The allegations make you seem like
part of the problem though.
I understand that.
He's blaming his own misdeeds in many ways
as just part of the culture of the NRA.
And indeed it does appear increasingly likely
that there was a culture at the NRA
where leadership basically treated the organization
like a personal piggy bank.
The NRA rejected Powell's allegations.
So right now, the NRA is in full defense mode.
This means that millions of dollars that the NRA
would normally spend on lobbying and donations
is being spent instead on law firms and legal fees.
Just at a time when they're fighting for their survival.
There's no ending to this story yet.
And it's far too soon for the NRA's enemies
to do a victory lap.
LaPierre is working hard to paint himself
and the organization as the victim
of vicious partisan attacks.
If they think they're getting our guns,
I'm just telling 'em, 1776 is gonna kick off again!
The NRA is using these existential threats
to gin up support and raise the money needed
to dig itself out of dire straits,
beat all the cases against it,
and come out stronger than ever.
Although the attorney general has sought
to dissolve the NRA, that does seem like
an unlikely ultimate outcome from this.
I think it is very possible that the NRA will be hit with
significant fines and be forced to remove
certain members of the board, like Wayne LaPierre.
Regardless of the outcome,
there's a universal lesson to be learned here,
as old as time itself.
The NRA's downfall seems likely
to come from its own hubris.
One of the dangers of being the most powerful
political organization in America
is you feel that no one can beat you.
But New York attorney general Letitia James
has got something to say about that.