It was a crazy week, with fake-elector lawyers fishing for divorcee sexytime secrets in Fulton County, Georgia; a malacca from Queens losing a whole lot of gabagool; and also nine mass shootings, including the one at the Kansas City parade. There’s been at least two mass shootings since then, can you believe it? Yes, yes, you can, because it’s now a daily part of American life, in no small part thanks to long-hanging right-wing hemorrhoid Wayne LaPierre, CEO and executive VP of the National Rifle Association (NRA) from 1991 until just last month.
So maybe it’s a little shard of happy news that the New York attorney general’s fraud and misconduct lawsuit against the NRA, LaPierre, and compañeros CFO Wilson “Woody” “False Fiduciary” Phillips and general counsel John Frazer finally went to a jury with a whimper on Friday. The suit has been chugging along for four years, and accuses them of bilking donors to their “charity,” spending their marks’ hard-earned rubles on things like private jets for vacations to the Bahamas and Lake Como, and fashionable menswear from the Beverly Hills boutique Zenga, instead of helping poor homeless guns find a warm lap to snuggle in.
Wayne and friends are accused of setting themselves up in an entire situation with their longtime PR firm, Ackerman McQueen, wherein the NRA paid them millions of dollars to produce products like NRATV, which did not cost millions of dollars to produce, because it was just Dana Loesch warning us from her living room laptop that the trains on Thomas the Tank Engine were a harbinger of an impending race war. Also, the NRA billed Ackerman McQueen for lots of vague expenses, in an opaque and Byzantine kind of way. And then, a big chunk of funds went to NRA lawyer Bill Brewer III, who happened to be the son-in-law of the owner of Ackerman, and saw big billing opportunities in the mess.
The self-dealing was embrokening the charity, puzzling its recently hired president and spokesmodel Oliver North, who was smarter than he looked and blew apart the monkeyshines, becoming alarmed enough in 2018 to squeal, “holy mackerel, none of this stuff was done properly!” and sputter, “I’m the guy who’s out there raising money, right, and I’m getting challenged by various people as I go around, well, whiskey tango fox trot, why is—why is this costing so much?!”
North’s first clue that hinkiness was afoot might have been that his own contract was to get paid $2 million by AckMcQuack so he could get health insurance, even though his job title was NRA president, and no one at the NRA seemed to think this was a conflict of interest.
Anyway, North spoke up, the NRA sued North, Ackerman and the NRA sued each other, membership plummeted, the NRA tried to file for bankruptcy in Texas, they were denied, and here we are.
Wayne may be retired now, but Wayne is the NRA, and the NRA is Wayne. He’s been there in some form since 1977, and was a visionary. That vision was a fever dream of utter terror, with every American man, woman and child needing to be strapped at all times to shoot their way out of the imminent threats in the closet, under the bed, or at Starbucks.
Maybe his fear was because Wayne himself was a softy, a bad shot, a man in wingtips who was terrified of public speaking and of his wife Susan, a guy with “the backbone of a chocolate eclair,” according to a board member. He was so pliant and hospitable that he didn’t mind Russian honeypot Maria Butina and banker Alexandr Torshin hanging out at events to meet politicians, and overlooked a large part of the NRA board traveling with the Russians to Moscow, to meet with VIPs on the US sanctions list.
So will there finally be some consequences for Wayne for all this death and unpatriotism? Probably not really. A judge already did away with the possibility of dissolution, because NRA lawyers know how to ask for things nicely, unlike certain Alina Habbas. It’s not a criminal trial, so nobody’s going to jail. It’s just money, and any of the proceeds from LaPierre et al. will go back to the NRA, so that Wayne’s hand-picked replacement, Andrew Arulanandam, can make it up to the Card Carrying Chads and Karens that they bilked out of monthly dues.
The only satisfaction here maybe is the possibility of seeing LaPierre shamed a bit more. He was already forced in January to retire “for his health” after one of his inside boys, Joshua L. Powell, wrote a tell-all book about the corruption, greed and paranoia inside the NRA, called Inside the NRA: A Tell-All Account of Corruption, Greed, and Paranoia, which exposed that LaPierre was greedy and paranoid, and endorsed — gasp— background checks! Then Powell flipped and settled his charges with the AG for $100,000, and Wayne finally read the room.
And so now at 74, Wayne is forced to step back, retire to an ice-cream shop in New England (seriously, that’s what he always told people he wanted to do), maybe pay some bit of money back to his old shop, and let his hand-picked successor run the grift mill. It’s a hard-knock life.
In the meantime, disgusted gun-humpers have found no other lack of 2A “charities” to fund. The NRA has spawned a bunch of knockoffs, and the guns are not going away any time soon.
But, at this point, we’ll take whatever meager consequences.
When Oliver North is the hero of the story, the story is pretty fucked up.
I'm sure Wayne's Little Shop of Ice Cream Horrors will be a big hit with both the food and service being of the highest caliber.
Welcome to Sundae Bloody Sundae!