The National Rifle Association looked to be at the peak of its already outsized influence with the election of Donald Trump in 2016. The hard-right gun advocacy group had poured more than $50 million into Trump’s campaign, together with the election bids of a handful of influential GOP senators, and was poised to secure a whole new wishlist of legislative givebacks. Meanwhile, NRA flaks would continue to ply vigilante fables of sacred Second Amendment freedoms to a newly mobilized base of Trump supporters. The heat-packing gospel peddled by the NRA was so influential that the gun lobby even launched its own streaming TV network.
 
But the NRA’s heady vision of permanent cultural revolution on high now appears to be on the brink of dissolution—possibly with the organization itself. On Thursday Letitia James, New York’s attorney general, announced she was filing suit to revoke the New York-based lobby’s charter as a charitable organization on grounds of alleged fraud and self-dealing. As The New Republic contributor Adam Winkler explains, the group’s Trumpian ascent came crashing down for an all too familiar Trumpian reason: rampant grifting in the name of militant conservative advocacy.
 
The trouble began in 2017 when New York State officials launched a probe into an NRA-sponsored insurance operation called “Carry Guard,” which offered coverage for gun owners facing legal proceedings in which they claimed they had fired their weapons in self-defense. An anti-NRA organization called Everytown for Gun Safety alerted New York regulators that the gun lobby appeared to be offering insurance plans without proper licensing.

Out of that fairly wonky complaint, all sorts of trouble ensued. Wayne Pierre, the NRA’s high-rolling chief executive officer, did what high-rolling CEOs everywhere do: He hired an expensive power lawyer to defend the group’s interests. Only this lawyer—longtime Democratic donor William Brewer—began auditing the group’s general expenditures and found several mammoth holes in the NRA budget, such as a $40 million annual outlay to Ackerman McQueen, the group’s longtime advertising contractor. NRA president Oliver North—yes, that Oliver North—tried to stage a board ouster of LaPierre. (Lest you think this was some sort of reformist crusade within this rancid moneyed world, North himself was reportedly under contract with Ackerman for a couple of million, ostensibly for his hosting duties at NRA TV.) LaPierre survived the coup attempt, but in the process, a raft of truly appalling financial irregularities were leaked:
 
Not only was LaPierre taking a $2.1 million salary, enormous for the head of a nonprofit—the NRA is a tax-exempt 501(c)(4) social welfare organization—but he was also spending hundreds of thousands of dollars at the luxury retailer Zegna. Meanwhile, the group was also so low on cash that it had to borrow repeatedly from its 501(c)(3), the NRA Foundation, often with questionable accounting. Numerous employees and members of the board were receiving big paydays; one director was paid $270,000 for consulting, one $40,000 for writing speeches, and another, actor Tom Selleck, nearly half a million dollars for vintage guns from his collection.... After reviewing reports of these transactions, Marc Owens, the former director of the Exempt Organizations Division of the Internal Revenue Service, which oversees nonprofits, said they indicate “a tremendous range of what appears to be the misuse of assets for the benefit of certain vendors and people in control.” 
 
You don’t say. Sure enough, these embarrassing disclosures attracted the attention of another New York State regulator, the Charities Bureau (best known for its yeoman work in ensuring the breakup of the similarly corrupt and self-dealing Donald J. Trump Foundation). In addition to determining whether the NRA is in violation of state charity law, the bureau is looking into charges that—I hope you’re sitting down—the gun lobby may have misdirected funds into the 2016 election campaign. These are the charges that prompted James’s announcement that the state of New York wants to consign the gun lobby to the same charitable graveyard where the Donald J. Trump Foundation is now interred. If that indeed transpires, we’d like to propose this as an epitaph: Have gun, will grift.

—Chris Lehmann, editor