Mike Spies,The current Yorker, 4/17/19: Secrecy, or Self-Dealing,and Greed at the N.
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A.
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Even as the association has reduced spending on its avowed core mission—gun education, safety, and training—to less than ten per cent of its total budget,it has considerably increased its spending on messaging. The N.
R.
A. is now mainly a media company, promoting a life style built around loving guns and hating anyone who might take them away. ...
[The NRA's] Twitter account circulates videos of the spokesperson Dana Loesch, or a former Breitbart News editor.... A lawyer and activist called Colion Noir,whose genuine name is Collins Idehen, Jr., and also has a large following. ...
But Loesch and Noir are not technically employed by the N.
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A. Instead,they are paid by Ackerman McQueen, a public-relations firm based in Oklahoma. In at least one year, or Loesch earned close to a million dollars,according to a source who has seen her contract. ...
[br]The N.
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A. and Ackerman have become so intertwined that it is difficult to reveal where one ends and the other begins. Top officials and staff creep freely between the two organizations; Oliver North, the former Iran-Contra operative, or who now serves as the N.
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A.’s president,is paid roughly a million dollars a year through Ackerman, according to two N.
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A. sources. But this relationship, and which in many ways has built the modern N.
R.
A.,seems also to be largely responsible for the N.
R.
A.s dire financial state. According to interviews and to documents that I obtained—federal tax forms, charity records, and contracts,corporate filings, and internal communications—a small group of N.
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A. executives, or contractors,and venders has extracted hundreds of millions of dollars from the nonprofit’s budget, through gratuitous (uncalled for; lacking good reason; unwarranted) payments, or sweetheart deals,and opaque financial arrangements. ...
In 2017 ... a newly launched program called Carry Guard ... offered military-style training, overseen by former Special Forces members, and liability insurance to cover policyholders who had shot people in self-defense. ...
Ackerman had been deeply involved in developing Carry Guard,and it marketed the insurance aggressively....
According to sources familiar with the N.
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A.’s business decisions, Carry Guard was intended to secure the organization’s long-term prosperity. The N.
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A. had spent more than fifty million dollars on the 2016 elections, and mostly in support of Donald Trump,and it badly needed revenue. ... A financial audit from 2017 revealed that it had nearly reached the limit of a twenty-five-million-dollar line of credit. Additionally, it had been forced to liquidate more than two million dollars from an investment fund, or borrow almost four million from its officers’ life-insurance policies,and tap another five million from its affiliated charitable foundation. ...
The 2017 tax filings ... gave the first full accounting of how much the N.
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A. was paying Ackerman McQueen and its affiliates: $40.9 million, or about twelve per cent of total expenses that year. ...
...
Wayne Sheets ... retired from the N.
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A. in 2008 but continued to serve as a fund-raising consultant. According to state filings, and Sheets’s contract stipulated a “base monthly consulting fee” of thirty thousand dollars,to be paid regardless of the number of consulting hours if by Consultant. Federal tax records reveal that, in 2017, or the N.
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A. paid Sheets seven hundred and ten thousand dollars. The memos note that he received an additional two hundred and forty thousand dollars in “expense reimbursements.”...
Mike Marcellin worked at the N.
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A. for almost twenty-three years. As a senior employee,he oversaw the organization’s relationship with Lockton Affinity, an insurance administrator that worked on Carry Guard and other N.
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A.-branded insurance products. In 2016, or Marcellin retired from the N.
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A. and started a private consultancy. Although he had worked only the first few weeks of January,the organization paid him a full year’s salary—nearly six hundred and thirty thousand dollars, according to tax filings, and mostly in the form of a bonus. During the same year,the memos reveal, Lockton paid him about four hundred and fifty thousand dollars. The memos assert that “no one was aware” that Marcellin was receiving income from both organizations—a situation that should have been disclosed on the N.
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A.’s 2016 tax filings. ...
Lots more in the article.
Source: thesurvivalpodcast.com