NRA Feeling the Pinch

A[Maryland]Farmer;5698827 said:

Am I reading correctly that the NRA spent 350 grand in the Virginia State election? Compared to AnyTown's 2.5 million?

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Engine4 said:

Aw geez......

According to this report, old Wayne-o got a big ole pay raise.

https://nypost.com/2019/11/16/nra-gives-chief-wayne-lapierre-57-pay-raise-amid-calls-to-step-down/

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W2D said:

Why does the NRA need 76 people on the board of directors?


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Mag Dump said:

I got home last night and in the mail was a solicitation to upgrade to Benefactor Life (I am Patron Life at the moment).

I made up a label stating my position and mailed the letter back just now. I printed of a bunch of these labels and will use them on future mailed solicitations as needed.

(I redacted the photo for interweb security but not the original document.)

I'm sure it doesn't matter but it made me feel better.

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W2D said:

Why “We are legion”?


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How an internal power struggle, a New York State investigation and accusations of fraud and betrayal on all sides have left the longtime leader of the gun-rights organization reeling.
-By Danny Hakim

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Wayne LaPierre was sitting in a chair with his hands over his ears, looking straight down. “It was horribly painful,” he said of the nearly two years of investigations, intrigue and infighting that have roiled the National Rifle Association, which he has led since 1991. Now, a once-invincible organization, and its chief, are girding for a legal reckoning. “I mean,” LaPierre said, looking up, “it’s the most painful period of my life.”

His office at the N.R.A.’s headquarters, an unremarkable concrete-and-glass warren in the Virginia suburbs just outside Washington, was largely empty. His desk was bare, the only sign of work life two stacks of yellow legal pads perched on nearby windowsills. He does not use computers. LaPierre has long been the public face of the N.R.A., but he hasn’t sat for an in-depth interview in years. The notable increase in mass shootings, more than two dozen this summer alone, many of them involving the semiautomatic rifles the N.R.A. has championed, has made him defensive. “All these horrible tragedies — after every one, Wayne would be the guy going out there in the media,” he said, referring to himself in the third person. “From Columbine to — you name it — to the Navy Yard to Aurora to Sandy Hook. Every one of them, I was the guy — Parkland — I was the guy out there in the media.” The N.R.A. was “so miscast by the media,” he insisted, he saw little reason to engage reporters. “You just didn’t get a fair shot anymore.”

In person, LaPierre can seem like an absent-minded academic, his hands in motion, his thoughts wandering. (“The joke is that the only way you can have eye contact with Wayne is to lie down on the floor while he’s talking,” one person who worked for the organization told me.) Within the N.R.A., and contrary to his public persona, LaPierre has often been seen as a suit who doesn’t know his way around guns. He is aware of the slight, and tries to compensate. He shot wildlife more than once on the N.R.A.-sponsored TV show “Under Wild Skies” he said, because “one of the raps on me is I wasn’t going hunting enough.” In our three-hour on-the-record conversation in late October, he was occasionally evasive, often startlingly direct and always acutely, sometimes painfully self-aware. At one point, after a lengthy historical digression, he pulled himself up short: “I know I’m just filibustering,” he said. “Do you want me to stop?”

LaPierre has faced many political battles over the course of his long career at the top of the N.R.A., but the personal stakes have never been higher than they have been in the last year. His organization sued Ackerman McQueen, its longtime advertising and public relations firm, which long safeguarded the N.R.A.’s secrets, accusing the firm of overbilling and fraud. He — perhaps temporarily — held off an internal campaign to oust him. And since April, the New York State attorney general, Letitia James, has been conducting a civil investigation of the N.R.A., which is chartered in New York. Now, veterans of the attorney general’s office and some within the N.R.A.’s inner circle believe James will weigh whether to seek a criminal referral related to LaPierre’s use of nonprofit funds for personal expenses.

LaPierre is increasingly vulnerable. Ackerman McQueen, which spent years building up his implacable image, has been taking it back apart in recent court filings. The company described him as an awkward former “Democratic legislative aide,” ill suited to lead “what many describe as a strident advocacy group,” who “knows little about guns or how to actually use them” and obtained multiple Vietnam-era deferments. LaPierre created “a veritable black hole for unchecked spending,” required Ackerman to pay a retainer to a travel agent used by his family and regarded member money as his “personal piggy bank.” Ackerman also noted, pointedly, that LaPierre has a “preoccupation with possible criminal charges.”

LaPierre, who accused Ackerman of a “smear campaign of lies,” would turn 70 shortly after our interview. Sitting in his office overlooking Virginia woodlands, he acknowledged a sense of mortality. His father, he said, found out he had Alzheimer’s at 75. But no matter how much time he had left, he said, he would spend it doing what he always did: fighting for the N.R.A. — not just against Democratic regulators looking to destroy his organization from without, but also now against the treacherous former allies seeking to do the same from within. “If I lose every friend,” he said, “I’m prepared to do it.”

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LaPierre came on board in 1978. He grew up mostly in Roanoke, Va., where his father was a General Electric accountant, attended Siena College in upstate New York, interned in the State Legislature and worked toward a doctorate in political science and government at Boston College before departing to delve into electoral politics. He helped a Democratic grocery-store owner named Vic Thomas run, successfully, for the Virginia Legislature. Working for Thomas, a stalwart N.R.A. ally, led LaPierre to a job lobbying for the N.R.A.

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LaPierre said he had no aspirations to lead the organization, and when the job opened up in 1991, he tried to enlist Representative John Dingell of Michigan, a prominent Democratic N.R.A. supporter, who demurred. LaPierre took the job. “I never set out for any of it to happen,” he said. “This identity that I end up getting — it just kind of happened.”

After the 1993 A.T.F. raid of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Tex., rhetoric hardened. As we talked in his office, LaPierre brought up, unprompted, an episode from 1995, when a mailer bearing his name referred to A.T.F. agents as “jackbooted government thugs.” The incendiary rhetoric led some, including George H.W. Bush, to resign from the N.R.A. “Dingell actually said the quote,” LaPierre said; Dingell had referred to A.T.F. agents as “a jackbooted group of fascists” in a 1981 N.R.A. promotional film. LaPierre now distances himself from the sentiment. “I remember calling down, going, ‘We couldn’t possibly have a letter out there saying that A.T.F. were a bunch of jackbooted thugs, could we?’ ”

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Over the years, the N.R.A. had become more nonprofit in theory than in practice. Revenue passed $350 million last year, with some prodigious donors continuing into the afterlife (a foundation set up by Robert Petersen, who published Tiger Beat and Guns & Ammo magazines, has contributed at least $56 million since his death in 2007). Much of the money goes to the usual gun-safety programs and political contributions, but there is more and more to go around. In 2017, eight N.R.A. executives outearned the head of the American Red Cross, another tax-exempt organization, and one with 10 times the revenue, according to a previous analysis by The New York Times.

LaPierre’s compensation rose from less than $200,000 a year in the mid-1990s to more than $2.2 million in 2018. Oversight has been complicated by paydays to the 76-member board: $270,000 to one for consulting; $40,000 to another for speeches; $64,000 to the guitarist Ted Nugent, mostly for advertising on a reality-TV show; and $476,000 to buy vintage firearms from the actor Tom Selleck, adding to the N.R.A.’s considerable collection. Senior staff cashed in, too. Tyler Schropp, a fund-raising executive, long had a stake in a production company paid millions by the N.R.A. to produce “Under Wild Skies,” while Michael Marcellin, who handled licensing deals, was paid $535,000 two years after leaving the organization. There was plenty of money for the candidates as well. When Donald Trump emerged as a presidential front-runner in 2016, the N.R.A. spent $30 million to help him get elected, much of it on attack ads warning that Hillary Clinton would “leave you defenseless.”

In 2017, Trump told N.R.A. members at their annual convention, “I will never, ever let you down.” But success brought a new challenge. Democratic presidents created fear that the government was coming for members’ guns, and fear was good for business. LaPierre even referred to the election’s aftermath as the “Trump slump,” Ackerman claimed in a filing. LaPierre said he did not use that particular phrase, but acknowledged that Trump’s victory created fund-raising challenges. “Whenever there’s a pro-Second Amendment presidency,” he said, “it’s more difficult to raise money. Because so much of it is the air, the energy, the atmosphere and the threat to people’s rights.”

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It was just after the massacre at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., that LaPierre decided the N.R.A. needed a new lawyer. While the N.R.A. had faced many legal troubles over the years, the February 2018 attack, in which a former student murdered 14 students and three staff members with a legally purchased AR-15-style rifle, had renewed widespread revulsion toward efforts to block gun-control measures. Corporations fled. United and Delta airlines, along with the car-rental giant Enterprise Holdings, stopped offering discounts to N.R.A. members, and the First National Bank of Omaha stopped offering an N.R.A.-branded Visa card. The N.R.A.’s aura of invincibility was fading, and New York regulators were already investigating Carry Guard, an N.R.A.-branded insurance plan for shooting incidents, which the organization had seen as a key new revenue source. The group was unsure how to proceed.

That March, an unexpected call came in to William A. Brewer III’s law office in Dallas. Steve Hart, then chairman of the Washington law firm Williams & Jensen and a longtime N.R.A. counsel, wanted to know if Brewer might be interested in representing the N.R.A. Brewer was a $1,400-an-hour, sharp-elbowed litigator — and a Democrat. He has supported Hillary Clinton and Beto O’Rourke and fought pro bono in Texas against efforts to disenfranchise Latino voters. But what might seem at first like an odd fit actually made some sense.

The N.R.A. had plenty of Republican legal talent, including Charles J. Cooper, chairman of the Washington firm Cooper & Kirk, who is representing John Bolton in the presidential impeachment proceedings. But New York was controlled by Democrats, the N.R.A. needed to widen its bench and Brewer was a known quantity. Born in Long Island, he had taken to the role of Texas character, bringing a patricianly bearing and a flair for drama. Hart had worked with him on a number of cases over the years, and Hart’s daughter once interned for Brewer’s firm.

There was one complicating factor, though — Brewer’s father-in-law was Angus McQueen, the longtime chief executive of Ackerman McQueen. The Oklahoma advertising firm was now so deeply intertwined in N.R.A. operations that the organization’s firebrand spokeswoman, Dana Loesch, actually worked for Ackerman, not the N.R.A. Brewer had a delicate relationship with his father-in-law, who was not much older than he was. McQueen’s daughter, Skye, was his fourth wife. Brewer told me he was sure his father-in-law “had some reservations. But we got married and he was there, and he paid for the wedding.”

A few weeks after the call, Brewer traveled to Fairfax, expecting to meet with some of LaPierre’s lieutenants so they could size him up. Instead, he was ushered into the office of the man himself. Brewer laid out his views. The situation was serious, he said. Gun-control advocates and blue-state politicians were working jointly to thwart the N.R.A.’s ability to operate. “They believe that you guys are ripe to be taken,” he recalled telling LaPierre. A thorough self-audit and an aggressive legal response were required.

LaPierre was noncommittal, and Brewer had his own reservations. But a few days later, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, citing the Parkland shooting, directed the New York State Department of Financial Services to press banks and insurers, which it regulates, to review their relationships with the N.R.A. and “consider whether such ties harm their corporate reputations.” The D.F.S. has significant leverage, and was effectively discouraging banks and insurers from doing business with the N.R.A. In LaPierre’s view, it was a direct attack. “All of a sudden, this ghost ship, the Department of Financial Services of New York State, pulls up beside us and fires every cannon they have,” he said, estimating the state had in 2019 already cost the N.R.A. as much as $20 million in lost revenue from Carry Guard, and another $20 million in legal fees.

Brewer decided to take the case. Whatever he felt about the N.R.A., he said, he saw a principle at stake. Government investigators should not target political enemies. “People were not only crossing the lines that are appropriately drawn by our Constitution,” he said, “they were aggressively determined to blur, cross, obliterate those lines. And you know what? If they could do it to those guys, they could do it to me. They could do it to all of us.” In this view, at least, Brewer was completely in sync with LaPierre. “I think everybody in the country ought to be on our side,” LaPierre told me. “Because if we don’t prevail, in my opinion, the United States is not the United States anymore.”

Rasputin-like figure, whispering in LaPierre’s ear and billing the N.R.A. into oblivion, but he moved forward. He filed a First Amendment case that accused New York of blacklisting the organization simply for expressing its views. He also got the green light from LaPierre to undertake a broad internal audit. That summer, James, by then a leading candidate to become New York’s next attorney general, vowed to investigate the N.R.A.’s nonprofit compliance, alarming the organization’s lawyers. After she was elected, Hart warned, in an internal memo that I was able to review, that she was interested “in pursuing a dissolution case” — essentially prosecuting the N.R.A. out of existence — and even contemplated reincorporating the organization in Texas, Tennessee or Delaware.

LaPierre said he was advised that a safe-harbor provision in New York law gave nonprofits leeway to correct potential violations, and Brewer began looking at anything that might attract the attention of a regulator. (Tax experts I spoke with said such provisions are limited in scope.) Brewer’s firm requested documents from employees and vendors, including Ackerman. But emails sent in April, May and July to one of Ackerman’s outside lawyers did not produce all the documents sought. McQueen saw Brewer’s audit as needlessly invasive. “ ‘You’re never going to look at anything,’ ” LaPierre recalled being told by McQueen. “ ‘The A.G. has no power over us here in Oklahoma, Wayne. You are out of your mind.’ ” In a statement, Ackerman said that any claim that it “hid facts from the N.R.A. is simply false.”

Ackerman McQueen had clients ranging from an Oklahoma health care company to the Chickasaw Nation, but the N.R.A. was its most visible, directing as much as $40 million a year to Ackerman and its affiliates. Angus McQueen had for years served as LaPierre’s principal image-maker, and his company advised him on making over his wardrobe and wrote many of his fiery speeches. LaPierre called him “one of the most creative people that I’ve ever met in my life.” In the early days of the relationship, McQueen worked to soften the N.R.A.’s rough edges. “We’re advertising people, we’re optimists,” McQueen, who died at 74 in July after a struggle with lung cancer, once said in a speech. “Our work fills the spaces that distract the eye from tragedy.”

In recent years, however, that work became increasingly dark, promoting the N.R.A. as the last defense against a threatening world. The apocalyptic promotional effort reached its apotheosis with NRATV, an online streaming service that evolved beyond gun rights into a sort of paranoid-lifestyle channel. Live production was expensive, and more N.R.A. dollars began to flow through Ackerman McQueen.

Ackerman lawyers, in court filings, called NRATV “LaPierre’s brainchild,” and said he “routinely urged” the company to “give him ‘more gasoline,’ ” seeking more “notoriety for the N.R.A.” LaPierre, for his part, told me that the relationship “started to go wrong when they” — McQueen — “started NRATV.” While he was initially supportive, he said he and other N.R.A. officials found some content disturbing. In a court filing, the N.R.A. complained that it had spent millions of dollars on a network “viewed as a dystopian cultural rant that deterred membership growth.”

The N.R.A. says that NRATV’s budget grew from an initial $12 million a year to more than $20 million. “It got to a point where in 2017, I’m starting to look at our ad budget,” LaPierre said, “and I’m starting to really question, ‘How many people are watching this?’ ” The answer, according to an independent analysis by comScore, was: not many.

As N.R.A. money was funding NRATV, LaPierre was charging many of his expenses through Ackerman — charges that were then reimbursed by the N.R.A., an unusual arrangement that has attracted the attention of investigators. In a single May 2004 outing to the Zegna boutique in Beverly Hills, LaPierre dropped nearly $40,000, using a credit card billed through Ackerman and reimbursed by the N.R.A., among nearly $275,000 worth of Zegna purchases through 2017.

“I mean, you could make me look bad and smear me with it,” LaPierre said of the purchases. “But I don’t think there was anything improper about it, given the fact that I was the face of the brand.” What’s more, he said, Ackerman was “advising me to do it. They recommended I do it; they set up the billing.”

LaPierre also billed more than $250,000 in travel through Ackerman for trips to, among other places, the Bahamas, Palm Beach, Reno and Italy’s Lake Como. During a 2014 European trip to film at the Italian gun maker Beretta, he took a side trip to a Four Seasons in Budapest. Was it for N.R.A. business? He met with officials at “the firearms museum there,” he said, and “talked about a trade of whatever,” without offering more detail. Nonetheless, he said he had only used Ackerman McQueen’s credit card because his own cards had been hacked.

Ackerman now says in court filings that “several millions of dollars annually” in expenses for N.R.A. officials were run through the company, adding that LaPierre “made false representations” about expenses used “for his own personal benefit.” After the 2018 Parkland shooting, the N.R.A. even explored having Ackerman purchase LaPierre a $6 million mansion in a Dallas-area gated community. Ackerman said it was LaPierre’s idea. LaPierre said “it was their idea, and I killed it.” (“Wayne LaPierre continues to blame others for his own actions,” Ackerman said in a statement. “No one forced Mr. LaPierre to walk into a Beverly Hills Zegna store and buy a quarter-million dollars of clothing he personally did not pay for.”)

By Aug. 8, 2018, with relations breaking down and pressure building in New York, the N.R.A. sent a letter to Ackerman seeking specific records, including expenses billed to the N.R.A. Stephen M. Ryan, an outside attorney for Ackerman, wrote in a letter that Ackerman’s production of records had been exhaustive. Some of the requested documentation did not currently exist, he wrote, and any documents it produced could become fodder for regulators. He warned that the House of Representatives could change hands in the midterms. “N.R.A. may wish to proceed with caution in creating paper trails,” he wrote.

When the N.R.A.’s 2017 tax filings were released last year, they showed a nearly-tapped-out $25 million line of credit, backed in part by the deed to its Fairfax headquarters, and that the N.R.A. borrowed against insurance policies taken out on executives. Gun-control groups like Everytown for Gun Safety and Giffords were ascendant, amid outrage about mass shootings, and they outspent the N.R.A. in midterm elections.

In September 2018, a federal judge in Virginia kicked Brewer off an N.R.A. case there, berating him for failing to disclose that he had been sanctioned in 2016 for conducting what was seen as a push poll of potential jurors in a Texas product-liability case. Brewer is appealing the Texas ruling and has called the poll legitimate public-opinion research. Both the Texas Trial Lawyers Association and the Texas Association of Defense Counsel were among those who filed a joint amicus brief against Brewer. “It’s very unusual that a defense bar and a plaintiffs’ bar agree on an issue so much that they file a consolidated brief,” said Brian Lauten, lead attorney on the amicus brief. “The conduct of Bill Brewer directly threatens that constitutional right to a fair and impartial jury.”

Despite the setback, Brewer’s firm was charging $1 million to $2 million a month, stunning the N.R.A.’s other, increasingly marginalized lawyers. Some said a boutique firm didn’t have enough manpower to justify such bills. N.R.A. officials countered that the firm was not just suing New York, dealing with James’s office and juggling civil litigation, but also dealing with multiple congressional investigations of the N.R.A.’s relationship to Butina and Russia. Seeking to break the impasse, Brewer called Angus McQueen. In his recollection of the conversation, his father-in-law brusquely dismissed his request for help in getting information from another Ackerman executive, instead telling him something he already knew: “She’s in Dallas,” he said.

Ackerman, in a statement, said McQueen “would never waste his time or energy ‘offending’ Brewer.” Regardless, it was the last conversation Brewer would have with his father-in-law.

The N.R.A. had another problem. Earlier in 2018, Pete Brownell, the organization’s president, unexpectedly announced that he would not seek a second term. Christopher Cox, the N.R.A.’s top lobbyist and heir apparent, also wanted out. His house had been splashed with fake blood twice, and there was a protest outside his wife’s interior-design business. LaPierre said he talked Cox out of resigning, but Brownell he couldn’t keep.

“I think it was actually Angus that suggested Ollie North,” LaPierre said. McQueen had been trying to recruit the late-career Fox News personality, long past his Iran-contra scandal days, to do an NRATV show. Maybe he could be president as well? To LaPierre, it seemed like a good fit: “I considered him a friend, to tell you the truth.” The hope was that North, a retired Marine lieutenant colonel, would play the kind of role the actor Charlton Heston once had, as a charismatic fund-raiser and figurehead. But North appeared to have other ideas. While the N.R.A.’s presidency was traditionally unpaid, North negotiated an NRATV salary package above $2 million — paid by Ackerman and reimbursed by the N.R.A.

It was unusual for a nonprofit director to earn millions from an outside contractor, the kind of move that could raise questions for investigators. Shortly after North got the job, one concerned employee wrote a memo warning that “using a vendor to provide compensation to an N.R.A. officer, director or high-level employee does not work to hide disclosure of the compensation.” Brewer claimed that Ackerman refused to show him North’s contract for months. Ackerman and North said LaPierre helped negotiate it. LaPierre said, “I didn’t negotiate the contract, in fact, I wasn’t in the meeting,” but he did allow that he “had a basic understanding of some of the points.”

As Brewer demanded to review North’s contract, North began to ask questions about Brewer. In late February, he asked LaPierre and the N.R.A.’s general counsel for Brewer’s invoices but was rebuffed. In March, under pressure from North, the N.R.A. had another outside law firm, Morgan Lewis, review the organization’s relationship with Brewer. The firm found that Brewer’s “billing rates and monthly retainer, while high, are not unheard-of in the context of high-stakes corporate litigation.” North wanted yet another firm to review billing in more depth, but LaPierre thought it was a setup. “I can see a railroad when it’s right in front of me,” LaPierre told me.

North and two other board officials next wrote directly to Brewer, asking him to turn over supporting materials to establish that he wasn’t exceeding his mandate, an unusual incursion by an N.R.A. president into N.R.A. operations. The following Monday, LaPierre sent Brewer a memo asking him to disregard North’s letter. “I apologize for the confusion that this letter has created,” he wrote, adding, “Please keep up the good work, and disregard this and any similar missives.”

Three days later, LaPierre wrote another memo, this time to North and another official, arguing that “as a highly compensated full-time employee of Ackerman McQueen, Col. North must desist — immediately — from efforts to burden or obstruct the N.R.A.’s engagement of outside counsel on matters pertaining to Ackerman,” adding, “enough is enough.” LaPierre told me he would “give Ollie these letters and go, ‘Colonel, I know you’re gonna get mad at me for this.’ Honestly, that’s exactly what I said. But I said: ‘I’m giving you this because it’s in your best interest. I’m giving you good advice. You’ve got to stop doing this. You have a conflict of interest.’ ”

“He just wouldn’t back off,” LaPierre said. “I mean, it was literally, weekly, weekly, weekly, like this, waterboarding of me.” He said North would implore him to “fire the Brewer firm, fire the Brewer firm,” and he would reply: “I’m not going to fire the Brewer firm. They’re doing a good job.” North would say, “Well, their bills are outrageous,” LaPierre recalled, and he would reply: “I don’t think their bills are outrageous. They’ve got a massive scope of work.” The whole process was wearing him down, he said. “It was just this never-ending waterboarding.”

Allies of North told me that he was not seeking to get Brewer fired and merely wanted an independent review of his bills. In a recent radio interview, North himself noted, “If you’re not going to do things right, don’t hire a Marine.” (North declined to comment for this story.)

On April 12, the N.R.A. sued Ackerman, opening internal fissures. Hart, the N.R.A. lawyer who initially approached Brewer, was incredulous. “Let loose the dogs of war,” he emailed an N.R.A. executive. “Brewer just picked a fight with the folks with all the dirt on expenses for the last 30 years.” The move, he wrote, was “too dumb for even a TV reality show.”

But the risks went in both directions. In email traffic unearthed in court filings, an employee of another Ackerman client wrote that press reports were already making it look as if Ackerman was billing the N.R.A. for “employees that may have been working on our accounts,” adding, “I bet Ackerman is in trouble on this one.”

Soon after, Hart wrote to Cooper, one of the other N.R.A. lawyers, about “the potential release of 38 years of expense reimbursements relating to senior N.R.A. executive activities,” adding that “theoretically, I am getting a preview today so we understand the full risks.” He was fired by the N.R.A. hours later. (Cooper and Hart also declined to comment for this story.)

It could be argued that the lawyers were trying to avert disaster, but they were viewed with suspicion by Brewer. Days later, Cooper emailed Hart, writing that Brewer “is kicking our side’s ass because no one on our side will leak AckMc’s info.” Cooper, who was later dismissed when many of his emails and other documents came to light, has said he “adhered to the highest standards of professionalism” and owed an “ethical duty of loyalty to the N.R.A. itself,” not to “individual officers or directors.”

North was also taking action. In letters to N.R.A. officials, he said “allegations of financial improprieties could threaten our nonprofit status,” while Brewer’s bills “are draining N.R.A. cash at mind-boggling speed,” calling it an “existential threat.”

The rancor came to a head on the eve of the N.R.A.’s April convention. As LaPierre later related the incident to the board, North told one of LaPierre’s aides in a phone call that Ackerman would release damaging information, including LaPierre’s clothing and travel records, if he didn’t resign immediately. “Window is short,” North said, according to the aide’s scribbled notes, which I obtained earlier this year. (North said in court filings that LaPierre mischaracterized the call, and that he himself did not “seek the removal of LaPierre.”)

Later that day, LaPierre said Cox — the top lobbyist whom LaPierre had only months earlier talked out of quitting — summoned him to his room at the convention center. “ ‘Wayne, you know, you gotta resign, man,’ ” LaPierre said he was told. “ ‘They’re going to smear you nationwide. It’s going to be horrible.’ ”

LaPierre said he learned Cox had been aware of the efforts against him, and he felt betrayed. “I had always supported him,” he said. “To tell you the truth, I did not know the extent to which he was wrapped up in this whole conspiracy, extortion campaign at that time. I mean, he was my friend.”

Cox has denied that he sought to oust LaPierre, calling the claim “offensive and patently false.” North, for his part, lost the support of LaPierre and the board. He was effectively dismissed later that month. “This is a debacle,” Hart emailed Cooper. “Is Brewer a moron or a Manchurian candidate?”

In August, attorneys from James’s office met with North at the Washington offices of Williams & Connolly, home to Brendan Sullivan, who was by North’s side during the Iran-contra hearings more than three decades earlier. This time, James was seeking documents concerning “financial impropriety, mismanagement, misuse or waste of assets, governance failures or other wrongdoing,” according to her office’s subpoena to North. James had come to see him as a key cooperating witness, a once-unthinkable development.

By then, months of leaks had provided plenty of fodder for investigators. James, a Brooklynite who worked her way through Howard University’s law school and served as New York City’s public advocate, has been on the N.R.A.’s radar since she emerged as front-runner last year and declared that the N.R.A. was a “terrorist organization.” When I asked Brewer about the claim, he said it was like “a third-world dictatorship.”

“It seemed unprofessional and inappropriate for someone who is a candidate for that type of high office to prejudge any private citizen with no facts, no evidence,” he said. “You target your enemies and then you figure out a way to use the power that you have to destroy them. That’s not right.” James’s office, in a statement, responded: “We won’t be intimidated by the N.R.A.’s bully tactics, whether in the press or in the courtroom.”

Earlier this month, James’s office sent the N.R.A. a new subpoena, seeking records related to political donations, tax compliance, payments to board members and to the N.R.A. Foundation, an affiliated charity that diverted $36 million to the N.R.A. last year. The foundation’s move raised red flags among tax experts I spoke with, since donations to it are tax deductible, while donations to the N.R.A., which is not a charity, are not deductible. The foundation is also being investigated by Karl Racine, the attorney general of the District of Columbia, where it is chartered.

I asked LaPierre if he worried about his own criminal exposure. “I actually don’t,” he said, citing the safe-harbor provision. He called Brewer’s work “the largest forensic audit that’s ever been done on the association” to “see if there was anything we needed to self-correct.” Tax experts I spoke with, however, noted that such provisions did not generally apply to personal expenses, and in any case would need to have been addressed before James opened the inquiry. The investigation is being led by the charities bureau of the attorney general’s office, which oversees all nonprofits. Such investigations are typically civil procedures, but the office can refer criminal findings to another agency, or be granted criminal jurisdiction by the governor.

“If the expenses incurred by Mr. LaPierre were not legitimate business expenses of the N.R.A., and if he conspired with others within or outside the N.R.A. to incur those expenses in a way that would conceal them, then criminal charges could not only be brought against Mr. LaPierre, but also the others who were involved in the scheme,” said Sean Delany, a former chief of the charities bureau. Daniel Kurtz, another former charities-bureau chief, said the N.R.A. would have to establish that such transactions were “fair, reasonable and in the corporation’s best interest,” adding, “They can assert that, but it’s preposterous.” Kurtz did see some hurdles for a criminal case, based on what was known, because LaPierre was not said to have diverted money directly into his own pocket. But the attorney general can go to court and seek to restructure an organization’s board, oust its management, recoup misspent funds or even pressure it to dissolve.

“Everybody knows we were singled out,” LaPierre said. “Everybody knows that it’s politics.” Whatever the fate of the N.R.A., he has held on far longer than many thought he could. In his spartan office, he seemed weary. After many long years spent building one of the most powerful organizations in Washington, he had found himself isolated and embattled. “Somebody asked me in a deposition how you feel about all of it,” he recalled, briefly looking up once more. “I said I feel sad.”

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