MANHATTAN (CN) — When New York Attorney General Letitia James first brought her lawsuit against the National Rifle Association in 2020, her goal was to dissolve the polarizing nonprofit.
Four years and two trials later, the NRA is still kicking, but it’s badly wounded. A New York judge quashed James’ original aim to disband the organization, but the dirty laundry aired over the course of these legal proceedings cost the NRA dearly.
It paid in members, trust and more than $100 million to its legal firm Brewer, Attorneys & Counselors.
“It’s been devastating financially and devastating in the area of trust and reputation,” NRA board member Jeff Knox told Courthouse News.
It was an unusual process. The first trial began in January, when the state sought to prove that the NRA failed to stop its leaders from spending donor funds on gaudy personal expenses. A Manhattan jury ultimately found that the group’s longtime frontman Wayne LaPierre misspent more than $5 million on designer suits, private flights and luxury trips, while NRA leadership violated state whistleblower law to cover it up.
The verdict prompted a bench trial — “Phase Two,” as it was called — where New York Supreme Court Justice Joel Cohen was to determine injunctive relief. That trial ended last week, somewhat anticlimactically.
Cohen denied the attorney general’s ask for a court-appointed monitor to take control of the NRA’s finances, ruling that such a step should be “a last resort, not the first.” Instead of ruling on specific relief right from the bench, he urged the parties to reconvene and discuss new steps to prevent the NRA from falling back into its old ways.
The judge did agree to a 10-year ban on LaPierre’s NRA employment. It’s not the lifetime ban the state sought, but in the case of LaPierre, a 74-year-old man who claims to be battling numerous health conditions, it’s not far off.
The NRA took a victory lap after both trials, pinning the misconduct on errant bad actors like LaPierre, but without explicitly denouncing him in press releases and statements. The group holds that it was already engaged in course correction to address its compliance issues before the trial began, which the state contends the NRA only did under the threat of the lawsuit.
LaPierre notably resigned on the eve of trial in January, citing health reasons. But the attorney general and several board members saw it as a last-minute effort for the NRA to show the court that it’s cleaning up its act, which the NRA denies.
“Wayne announced he was stepping down from the NRA for health reasons in early January, and he did so at the end of January,” NRA president Bob Barr said in a statement to Courthouse News. “Although we appreciate his long and productive association with the NRA, and as the NRA has known for some time, our future does not include Mr. LaPierre.”
Still, Knox believes that there’s a chunk of NRA leadership that is hesitant to let LaPierre’s legacy go. A freshly elected board member who had been sounding the alarm on LaPierre’s spending well before the attorney general sued, Knox said that the lawsuit helped open the door for members like him to challenge the old guard.
In many ways, it also left the NRA as divided as ever.
“What it boils down to is loyalty to Wayne over loyalty to the association and our members,” Knox said. “It’s stunning to me that so many members of the board just can’t get past that and still see me as the problem for pointing out that the emperor had no clothes.”
Even the NRA can’t deny the damage the lawsuit has done to the organization. The nonprofit’s own experts acknowledged that the attorney general’s legal action caused donations to start drying up. Some members say they smelled blood even before that, when the state started probing around the NRA’s finances in anticipation of the lawsuit.
“People started seeing the grifting of LaPierre and the cronyism, the waste,” said NRA lifetime member John Richardson. “Annual members are not renewing, because they saw the dirty laundry being revealed.”
Headlines of LaPierre’s $250,000 collection of suits, for example, were hard for some to stomach. And while LaPierre is now sidelined for the foreseeable future, many of the same names are still calling the shots.
Former NRA president Charles Cotton is still on the group’s audit committee, a move that both Knox and Richardson see as one that could impede progress towards a more transparent future. Similarly, Barr is considered to be a LaPierre loyalist.
But the NRA’s leadership today is still largely different from how it was four years ago. Judge Cohen said he was encouraged by the leadership from LaPierre’s successor Doug Hamlin and the group’s new compliance chief Robert Mensinger. Knox and other whistleblowers were overwhelmingly elected to the board earlier this year on a platform centered on reform.
Steps like this, Knox believes, convinced Judge Cohen to deny the attorney general’s monitor bid.
The NRA’s future remains unclear, though. Historically, nonprofits in its position haven’t fared well after these long-fought legal battles, according to Pace University law professor James Fishman.
“I think it is very difficult for the nonprofit to recover from a lawsuit by the attorney general,” Fishman said. “These charities become either shadows of themselves or much less relevant.”
With the loss of its biggest fundraiser in LaPierre, the trust of many of its members and more than $100 million in legal expenses, Fishman said this is more than a possibility for the NRA.
It’s not a given, however. The NRA has something that most organizations don’t: rampant political partisanship. As the most prolific gun rights group in the country, the NRA consistently has the cultural backing of the Republican Party, and Fishman believes that could be enough to save them.
“I think they can come back,” he said.
According to the NRA, this case has been about politics from the very start. It holds that Attorney General James, a Democrat, campaigned on a vow to kneecap the NRA’s political advocacy by any means necessary.
“If her goal was to deter the NRA from its mission, she did not succeed,” NRA counsel William Brewer III told Courthouse News in a statement.
Knox sees things a bit differently. He agrees that James’ aim was political, but added that it was LaPierre that gave her the opportunity to pursue the NRA like she did.
“Wayne LaPierre and company opened the door for her by engaging in improper behavior, which allowed her to succeed at that goal,” Knox said. “She’s the biggest winner in all this.”
Lawyers for the NRA and the attorney general will meet next week to negotiate injunctive relief, guided by suggestions from Judge Cohen. On the table are changes to the NRA’s audit committee, retaining an external compliance consultant and shrinking the overall size of the NRA board.
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