Give this a read I found it pretty interesting.
One of the highlights
Brewer, 67, does not have the typical profile of a lawyer for the NRA, one of President Trump’s staunchest allies. Campaign filings show that he has donated to numerous Democrats, including Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Beto O’Rourke.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/poli...e0a01e-a986-11e9-a3a6-ab670962db05_story.html
One of the highlights
Brewer, 67, does not have the typical profile of a lawyer for the NRA, one of President Trump’s staunchest allies. Campaign filings show that he has donated to numerous Democrats, including Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Beto O’Rourke.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/poli...e0a01e-a986-11e9-a3a6-ab670962db05_story.html
By Carol D. Leonnig and Tom Hamburger
September 18, 2019 at 4:13 PM EDT
When the National Rifle Association needed more legal firepower in New York state last year, the gun rights group brought aboard an unlikely lawyer: a Democrat who had no experience in Second Amendment litigation.
By this spring, William Brewer III had emerged as a top counselor to NRA chief executive Wayne LaPierre and a victor — for now, at least — in a civil war that he helped set in motion and that is ripping apart the powerful gun lobby.
The ugly public fight has led to an exodus of high-level officials and warring accusations of financial impropriety. At the center of the fray is Brewer, a brash lawyer who has drawn ethics complaints and has a reputation for escalating disputes into pricey legal battles.
Several NRA veterans accuse Brewer of instigating an almost Shakespearean feud to protect his bottom line and growing influence. According to internal board correspondence, his small law firm billed $24 million in fees in 13 months — leading top NRA board members to demand early this year that the organization stop paying until they could review the bills.
But LaPierre sided with Brewer, saying that the lawyer’s bills were appropriate and that he was bringing long-overdue scrutiny to the nonprofit group’s workings.
“The NRA has full confidence in Bill Brewer and his law firm,” LaPierre said in a statement. “The firm is creative, dedicated, and effective — and is helping to protect and advance the NRA’s interests in multiple venues.”
Brewer said he came under attack once he began examining lucrative financial deals inside the organization that he thought posed conflicts of interest. His firm said those complaining about its bills have a misinformed view of its work but declined to elaborate.
“Questions regarding our fees — which arose almost one year after we were hired — came only after people, who long supported our firm’s work, themselves came under scrutiny for their conduct,” Brewer said in a wide-ranging interview last week, sitting in his suite on the 59th floor of his Dallas office with soaring views of the city.
NRA money flowed to board members amid allegedly lavish spending by top officials and vendors
Today, after helping to jettison NRA president Oliver North, rival lawyers and other key NRA lieutenants, Brewer counsels LaPierre on some of the group’s most important decisions, including legal strategy, management and public relations, said multiple people familiar with his role.
Those who have been pushed out shared a common concern: that Brewer ran up excessive fees and then cemented his role by overstating claims about the organization’s legal jeopardy and the potential conflicts of his critics, according to the people and internal documents.
With Brewer’s backing, LaPierre this spring turned against Ackerman McQueen, the marketing firm that had been the NRA’s image maker for more than three decades — a company run by Brewer’s own father-in-law and brother-in-law.
“Mr. Brewer is orchestrating a purge of every person who disagrees with his flawed strategy,” Ackerman McQueen said in a statement.
Brewer rejected that. “The truth is, a handful of faithless fiduciaries tried to ‘purge’ the NRA of its elected leadership by extorting Wayne LaPierre,” he said. “They failed.”
Brewer, whose eponymous law firm also has an office in New York, has a history of confrontational and high-priced legal fights, according to former employees and lawyers who encountered him in cases and a review of thousands of pages of court records.
Ted Lyon, a personal injury lawyer in Dallas who has battled Brewer in the past, said he was shocked that Brewer had “convinced the NRA that he was some type of star litigator.”
In 2016, a Texas judge sanctioned Brewer, finding that he took actions that could have improperly tainted a jury pool. The court found Brewer’s attempts “to avoid responsibility and accountability for his conduct to be at the very least unpersuasive and at the worst in bad faith, unprofessional, and unethical,” the judge wrote.
Four lawyers’ associations filed a friend-of-the-court argument in August in favor of the punishment.
Citing the sanctity of the promise of a fair trial, the legal groups said they “can imagine nothing . . . more poisonous to this ancient ideal than William A. Brewer III’s behavior.”
Brewer, who has appealed, says his firm represents “our clients ethically but zealously.” He said he is disappointed that his peers have lined up against him.
But, he added, “it’s not the first time we’ve stood alone.”
An unusual choice
Brewer, 67, does not have the typical profile of a lawyer for the NRA, one of President Trump’s staunchest allies. Campaign filings show that he has donated to numerous Democrats, including Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Beto O’Rourke.
But in March 2018, the NRA was dealing with a challenge by New York state officials to its Carry Guard insurance, which provides coverage to firearms owners who shoot someone and claim self-defense. The state Financial Services Department found that the NRA had illegally marketed what critics call “murder insurance.” Insurers, facing millions in state fines, demand that the organization cover the penalty.
The NRA wanted a lawyer with ties to New York Democrats. Steve Hart, the NRA board’s lawyer, enlisted Brewer, according to people familiar with his involvement. Hart did not respond to a request for comment.
When New York officials warned financial institutions and insurers that a relationship with the NRA could harm their corporate reputations and jeopardize public safety, Brewer urged the NRA to sue the state, arguing that state officials were targeting an advocacy group whose views differed from their own.
From there, Brewer pressed to take on other matters, said people familiar with internal discussions. That included the organization’s response to a broader threat: At the time, Letitia James, the leading candidate to become the New York state attorney general, was campaigning on a pledge to investigate the NRA’s nonprofit status amid reports of financial irregularities.
Brewer said he recommended to LaPierre that he prepare by auditing the group’s spending and vendor contracts, including those of Ackerman McQueen, its largest. For 38 years, the Oklahoma City-based advertising agency had served as a powerful adjunct to the NRA, promoting the group’s combative, no-compromise stance on gun rights.
The inquiry put him on a collision course with his father-in-law, Angus McQueen, who founded the firm. McQueen — a larger-than-life figure like Brewer, and of his generation— died in July. Brewer said he did not view the matter as a conflict of interest.
Brewer said people within the NRA began raising questions about Ackerman’s billing and its hiring of the group’s officials, such as North. North had a multimillion-dollar contract to host a series produced by the firm, documents show.
A lawyer for North declined to comment.
The McQueens grew suspicious of Brewer’s questions and worried that he sought to take over some of the firm’s public relations business, according to people familiar with their views.
In a statement, Ackerman McQueen accused Brewer of “pursuing a personal vendetta against his own family and their business.” The firm said it has cooperated with every audit requested by the NRA and never overcharged the group, adding that LaPierre approved all expenses.
The company alleges that Brewer went after Ackerman McQueen “to serve as a distraction from the failure of NRA executives and its board to properly fulfill its oversight duties.”
Current NRA officials rejected that, saying the audit was part of a move to increase oversight. Brewer’s firm said that the focus on Ackerman was not personal and that the agency stonewalled requests for information. And the firm dismissed as absurd the idea that it was trying to steal the public relations business.
“The NRA pursued documents from several major vendors, not just Ackerman. But Ackerman, singularly, resisted,” Sarah Rogers, a partner in the Brewer firm, said in a statement.
The audit set off a bitter legal fight, fracturing the alliance between the NRA and its longtime marketing agency. It also exposed lavish spending by LaPierre that flowed through Ackerman McQueen, such as hundreds of thousands of dollars in charges at a Beverly Hills clothing boutique and on foreign travel, invoices show. The NRA has defended the expenditures as necessary.
NRA chief sought purchase of $6 million mansion in wake of Parkland shooting
'Rambo tactics'
Brewer in his downtown Dallas office in June 2016. (Shane Kislack)
Brewer first made a splash in Dallas legal circles in the 1980s, when he co-founded a boutique litigation firm that offered big salaries and imported the brash tactics of Brewer’s native New York to Texas.
Bickel & Brewer’s hardball methods drew criticism from the traditional Texas bar.
Depositions were drawn out for days, as Brewer’s clients claimed they couldn’t say for certain what their names were, where they were born or what they owned, records show. Judges complained about overly combative practices that seemed aimed at wearing down the court and opposing counsel.
Fellow lawyers called them “Rambo tactics” — a term Brewer embraced.
“We don’t believe we should earn our living from being nice to other lawyers,” Brewer told the Texas Lawyer in a 1988 article that described his firm as the poster child for “scorched-earth” litigation.
With Brewer and other lawyers deploying such maneuvers, the state bar sought to rein them in, and in 1989, the Texas Supreme Court adopted a new code threatening to penalize lawyers “who perceive that they are retained to win at all costs without regard to fundamental principles of justice.”
Friends say Brewer ruffled feathers because he challenged Texas’s insular legal industry.
He “would do all that was within the bounds of ethics to advance the cause of his client — and the cause of justice,” said John Sexton, a former president of New York University and dean of its law school.
Some clients, too, praised Brewer’s approach.
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