The Shoe Finally Drops on the NRA and the Outcome is Far From Certain - The Truth About Guns
"When
allegations of corruption, unchecked spending and self-dealing at the NRA finally broke into the open last year following the virtual street fight at the Indianapolis convention, we called the situation exactly what it has turned out to be; an existential threat to the organization.
The situation was that serious because, due to
inertia, inattention, negligence, or a mixture of the above, the
NRA operated under a New York state charter.
That gave the elected officials of one of the most anti-gun states in the country control over the fate of the Association.
Then the whole mess spilled out for all to see with the fight between the NRA and Ackerman McQueen, the resulting
revelations of spending on clothes, travel, apartments, and more.
It became clear that
most of the NRA’s scores of board members had no input or oversight over that spending.
A few board members tried to exercise the oversight the Association needed; people like Pete Brownell, Tim Knight, Esther Schneider, Allen West and a few others pushed Wayne LaPierre for information and a say in the Association’s operations.
You know,
the functions board members are supposed to actually perform.
All who dared to challenge the NRA’s top management were frozen out or exiled in a Stalin-like purge.
...The
NRA handed New York Attorney General Letitia James a pistol and stood right in front her. Yesterday, she pulled the trigger.
How can she do that?
Well, as the New Yorker noted last April, under the state’s non-profit laws,
board members have a fiduciary duty to the membership…one that few if any of them actually seemed able to or interested in performing.
James Fishman, a co-author of “New York Nonprofit Law and Practice: With Tax Analysis,” a leading text on nonprofit law, told me,
“There is no such thing as a director who doesn’t direct. You’re responsible to make yourself aware of what’s going on. If the board doesn’t know, they’ve breached their duty of care, which is against the law in New York,” where the N.R.A. is chartered. According to [Marc] Owens, the former I.R.S. official, New York State “could sanction board members, remove board members, disband the board, or
close down the organization entirely.”
And here we are.
....James had obviously coordinated her lawsuit with
District of Columbia Attorney General Karl Racine.
Through a miraculous feat of coincidence, Racine, another bitter enemy of the NRA, filed his own lawsuit yesterday, too.
Racine had been investigating a separate entity, the NRA Foundation which was chartered in…
wait for it…Washington, D.C.
...So yes, the lawsuits and their timing — heading into the fall election for which the
NRA had just pledged to spend “tens of millions” in the Trump reelection effort — were transparent political attacks aimed at both Trump and the nation’s most prominent supporter of gun rights.
But that doesn’t mean that what’s being alleged by James (or Racine) in her lawsuit isn’t true.
...News of the assaults on the NRA from New York and D.C.
could serve to motivate the Association’s members and gun owners in general, as if they need any more motivation than a choice between the status quo and a guy who’s promised to make Beto O’Rourke his gun control czar.
...Stay tuned."
Must read it all!!!
They did it!
