that quickly became public. New documents reviewed by The New York Times show that the effort against him was even wider in scope, drawing in three outside law firms working for the N.R.A. and at least one in-house attorney. A wave of embarrassing leaks showed that Mr. LaPierre billed a contractor hundreds of thousands of dollars for bespoke suits and foreign travel, as well as some of his wife’s makeup costs.
Then this month, two mass shootings galvanized the gun control movement and prompted President Trump to float the possibility of expanded background checks, which is anathema to the gun lobby.
But Mr. LaPierre, who has run the N.R.A. since 1991, has so far survived all of the internal challenges. And he has continued to successfully advance his group’s uncompromising agenda. This week he appeared to personally persuade Mr. Trump to resist significant measures sought by Democrats and gun control advocates.
Now Mr. LaPierre is continuing to purge opponents. On Thursday, the N.R.A. dismissed its longtime outside counsel, Charles J. Cooper, the chairman of the Washington law firm Cooper & Kirk, people with knowledge of the decision said. A second outside counsel and a top in-house counsel resigned. The departures come after an internal inquiry showed that the lawyers were involved in an effort to undermine Mr. LaPierre.
The N.R.A. is also considering halting payments to its former second in command, Christopher Cox, who left in June but is still on the payroll, said the people, who insisted on anonymity to discuss internal matters.
The N.R.A.’s apparent success in fending off stricter gun regulations represents an important show of strength for Mr. LaPierre after months of damaging turmoil. And it shows that even in a diminished state, the group wields vast influence over the Republican Party, and particularly President Trump, after spending more than $30 million to help get him elected.
Charles J. Cooper, a longtime outside counsel to the N.R.A., in 2013.CreditStephen Crowley/The New York Times
N.R.A. officials have said the rebellion was sparked by Mr. LaPierre’s decision to pursue an internal audit of contractors. The infighting became public in April, when Oliver North departed as the group’s president after seeking his own financial review and being accused by Mr. LaPierre of trying to extort him. Mr. Trump urged the group to “stop the internal fighting, & get back to GREATNESS — FAST!”
Previous reporting by The Times and others has chronicled the internal tumult around Mr. North’s departure. But the new documents show a deeper level of coordination than was previously known in the effort against Mr. LaPierre, with extensive discussions between Mr. North’s allies and the N.R.A.’s own outside counsels. Mr. Cooper and other lawyers exchanged emails urging leaks and countermeasures that would undermine Mr. LaPierre’s strategy. At one point in April Mr. Cooper wrote another lawyer in frustration, saying, “No one on our side will leak.”
The documents also show how Mr. LaPierre scrambled to shore up his standing, reaching out to board members for support. And handwritten notes taken by an aide to Mr. LaPierre, scrawled on a yellow legal pad, detailed what the N.R.A. says were threats made by Mr. North to force Mr. LaPierre to resign. There would be revelations about “sexual offenses” by one of Mr. LaPierre’s colleagues, about spending on “Wayne/clothing” and luxury travel. Mr. North sought the “immediate resignation of Wayne,” the notes said, adding, “Window is short.”
Mr. Cooper, in a statement on Thursday, said, “Throughout the over three decades in which I have represented the N.R.A., I have adhered to the highest standards of professionalism.” He added that he owed an “ethical duty of loyalty to the N.R.A. itself” and not to “any individual officers or directors.”
Michael Volkov, an outside counsel who resigned Thursday, declined to comment, as did Brendan Sullivan, a lawyer for Mr. North.
In legal filings, Mr. North’s lawyers have said that suggestions he took part in a coup attempt against Mr. LaPierre are “fictitious,” and that he had legitimate concerns about “potential financial misconduct” and was thwarted by Mr. LaPierre’s “total dictatorial control.”
Mr. LaPierre said in a statement that he was disturbed “that the N.R.A.’s supposed ‘friends’” engaged in what he called a “scheme to harm our Association,” and said Mr. North “abused the trust” of the gun group.
A spokeswoman for Mr. Cox referred to an earlier statement, when he said allegations that he was complicit in a coup attempt against Mr. LaPierre were “offensive and patently false.”
Mr. LaPierre, 69, evolved from a wonky and introverted lobbyist to become the unyielding face of the gun rights movement in America. Married without children, he has made the N.R.A. his life’s work, framing it as a civil rights issue, and has been reluctant to step aside. But the leaks have taken a toll: Even Fox News, a reliable sanctuary, attacked him this week, with a host describing him as “an odious little grifter.”
In the aftermath of the shootings in El Paso and Dayton, Ohio, this month, Mr. LaPierre reverted to a familiar N.R.A. playbook: The group focused on issues like mental health rather than guns themselves. Mr. LaPierre lobbied Mr. Trump behind the scenes, including in a 30-minute phone call Tuesday after which Mr. Trump also referred to the shootings as “a mental problem” and accused Democrats of wanting to “give up the Second Amendment.”
Still, Mr. LaPierre’s influence will continue to be tested. The Republican-controlled Senate remains a reliable ally in fighting off new restrictions. But the gun control movement has begun to catch up, with well-funded backers like Michael R. Bloomberg, and in the 2018 midterm election cycle, gun control groups outspent the N.R.A.
The rebellion inside the organization was ultimately about money and power. And it featured a high-stakes tussle between Mr. LaPierre and Mr. North — an icon of the right who was involved in one of the most notorious political scandals of the 1980s — for control of one of the country’s most influential, and incendiary, lobbying groups.
At the center of the revolt was the group’s advertising firm, Ackerman McQueen, which had advised the organization for decades.
Portraits of Wayne LaPierre, left, Christopher Cox, center, and Oliver North, displayed during the N.R.A. annual meeting in April. CreditBryan Woolston/Reuters
Both Mr. LaPierre and Mr. North had financial ties to Ackerman. Mr. LaPierre was billing the firm for hundreds of thousands of dollars in expenses, while Mr. North had a contract worth millions of dollars to appear on an online documentary series.
New documents show how a dispute over the N.R.A.’s access to Ackerman’s financial records escalated tensions between Mr. LaPierre and Mr. North. Though the gun group’s presidency is ceremonial, Mr. North began requesting documents related to an internal inquiry into Ackerman. In February, Mr. LaPierre essentially told Mr. North to stay in his lane. In a previously undisclosed letter he wrote, “Because you are an employee of Ackerman McQueen, and have a conflict of interest, I request again that you kindly cease and desist from any further involvement.”
Dividing lines took shape as Ackerman and Mr. North aligned with Mr. Cooper and other outside counsels. By early April, Mr. LaPierre was moving to consolidate support. Another prominent outside N.R.A. lawyer, J. Steven Hart, warned Mr. Cooper and others in an email that “Wayne is making calls to board members at a rapid pace,” adding that Mr. North should do the same.
On April 12, the N.R.A. sued Ackerman, saying it had concealed details about its spending. Many insiders were caught off guard. After an Ackerman attorney sent the lawsuit to Mr. Cooper, he responded, “OMG.”
Allies of Ackerman hatched countermoves, including a plan to create a committee to investigate the group’s finances and expose Mr. LaPierre’s billing practices.
The documents reviewed by The Times also show the extent to which a second rivalry was brewing, between Mr. Cooper and William A. Brewer III, a Democrat whom Mr. LaPierre had hired a year earlier. Mr. Brewer ascended quickly and began getting all of the significant legal work, including several congressional and state inquiries.
Mr. North has said that Mr. Brewer’s bills were “draining N.R.A. cash at mind-boggling speed.” But Mr. Cooper is also expensive, charging $1,350 an hour, compared with $1,400 for Mr. Brewer, people with knowledge of the billing said.
Before proposing the special committee, Mr. North called a close aide to Mr. LaPierre, urging her to tell her boss that he needed to resign. If he did not, Mr. North warned that damaging information would be released about Mr. LaPierre’s spending. If he did, Mr. North would help arrange an “excellent retirement” package, according to the aide’s handwritten notes. A second N.R.A. official also overheard the call.
Oliver North departed as the group’s president after a bitter internal battle with Mr. LaPierre. CreditAlex Wong/Getty Images
Mr. LaPierre refused to resign, viewing the call as an extortion attempt. Later that day, the aide emailed Mr. North with a blunt response.
“This note confirms that he will not endorse you for another term as N.R.A. president,” she told him.
With the board lining up behind Mr. LaPierre, the effort to remove him quickly stalled. In a text message later that evening, David Lehman, Mr. Cox’s in-house counsel, wrote to Mr. Cooper: “You should call Ollie this evening. Things have turned.”
“Turned how?” Mr. Cooper replied.
“Badly,” Mr. Lehman wrote.
Two days later, on April 26, with the group’s annual convention underway in Indianapolis, Mr. Cox texted Mr. Cooper, all but conceding failure in the effort to weaken Mr. LaPierre. “I fear we are not changing the tides,” he wrote.
The next day, The Times reported that Letitia James, the New York attorney general, had opened an investigation into the N.R.A.’s tax-exempt status.
“This is a debacle,” Mr. Hart, who had just been dismissed by the N.R.A., wrote in an email to Mr. Cooper. “Is Brewer a moron or a Manchurian candidate?”
Mr. Cooper replied by saying of Mr. Brewer: “He is kicking our side’s ass because no one on our side will leak AckMc’s info.”
The unraveling of lawyers, guns and money coincides with the departures of half a dozen board members in recent weeks. But Mr. LaPierre remains center stage, as polarizing as ever.
“Donald Trump and Wayne LaPierre are made for each other,” said Peter Ambler, executive director of Giffords, the gun control group started by former Representative Gabrielle Giffords. He called them “mirror images” engulfed in “allegations of corruption and mismanagement.”
But Todd Rathner, a member of the N.R.A.’s board, said, “Wayne is leading and proving that he has the political juice to get the job done.”
New York Times columnist David Brooks and Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capehart join Amna Nawaz to discuss the week’s political news, including whether there will be real momentum in Congress to enact stronger gun legislation, how President Trump conducted himself visiting shooting victims in El Paso and Dayton and what white supremacy means for our American national identity.
The president cannot be absolved of responsibility for inciting the hatreds that led to El Paso.
Connor Betts, the alleged Dayton shooter, had left-wing political views, believed in socialism, supported Elizabeth Warren’s candidacy, and regularly inveighed on Twitter against various personages on the right (including, it turns out, me). This has some conservatives fuming that liberal media is conveniently ignoring the progressive ideology of one shooter while obsessing over the far-right ideology of another — Patrick Crusius, who posted an anti-immigrant manifesto shortly before police say he murdered 22 people at a Walmart in El Paso.
Sorry, but the comparison doesn’t wash. It’s idiotic.
What happened in Ohio was a mass shooting in the mold of the Las Vegas massacre: victims at random, motives unknown. What happened in Texas was racist terrorism in the mold of Oslo, Charleston, Pittsburgh, Christchurch and Poway.
The former attack vaguely implicates the “dark psychic force” that Marianne Williamson spoke of in last week’s Democratic debates. The latter directly implicates the immigrant-bashing xenophobic right led by Donald Trump.
This needs to be said not because it isn’t obvious, but because too many conservatives have tried to deny the obvious
The president cannot be absolved of responsibility for inciting the hatreds that led to El Paso.
. It’s not about ideology, they say: It’s a mental-health issue. But that’s precisely the kind of evasive reasoning many of those conservatives mockedin 2016, when the mental state and sexual orientation of Orlando nightclub shooter Omar Mateen was raised by some media voices to suggest that his attack had not really been an act of Islamist terrorism.
Alternatively, conservatives have cited the decline of civil society, the effects of the de-institutionalization of the mentally ill, the paucity of prayer and the ubiquity of violent video games — in sum, the breakdown of “the culture” — as explanations for mass shootings. This is the right-wing equivalent of the left’s idea that poverty and climate change are at the root of terrorism: causes so general that they explain everything, hence nothing. Why not also blame Friedrich Nietzsche and the death of God?
Get real: The right’s attempt to downplay the specifically ideological context of the El Paso massacre is a transparently self-serving attempt to absolve the president of moral responsibility for his demagogic rhetoric. This, too, shouldn’t wash. The president is guilty, in a broad sense, of a form of incitement.
No, Trump did not specifically incite anyone to violence, as characters like Yasir Arafat once did. (“To Jerusalem we march, martyrs by the millions!”) He will not, as Palestinian leaders still do, offer financial rewards to the families of terrorists. His scripted condemnation on Monday of white supremacy was, at least, a condemnation.
But incitement takes many forms. In June 2018, Trump tweeted the following: “Democrats are the problem. They don’t care about crime and want illegal immigrants, no matter how bad they may be, to pour into and infest our Country, like MS-13. They can’t win on their terrible policies, so they view them as potential voters!”
The tweet (noted by my colleague Frank Bruni in a recent column) is significant precisely because it is almost forgotten. It does not even rank in a top 10 list of Trumpian outrages. And yet it’s all there:
The imputation of bad faith to his political opponents.
The conspiracy theory about “potential voters.”
The sneaking conflation of illegal immigrants with violent gang members.
And the language of infestation. In the early 1990s, Hutu propagandists in Rwanda spoke of the Tutsi as “cockroaches.” The word served as a preamble to the 1994 genocide in which over half a million people died. In today’s America, the dissemination of the idea, via the bully pulpit of the presidency, that we are not merely being strained or challenged by illegal immigrants, but invaded and infested, predicated the slaughter in El Paso.
It’s worth noting that the Walmart massacre is, as far as I know, the first large scale anti-Hispanic terrorist attack in the United States in living memory. On current trend, it will surely not be the last or the worst. The language of infestation inevitably suggests the “solution” of extermination. As for the cliché that sensible people are supposed to take Trump seriously but not literally, it looks like Patrick Crusius didn’t get that memo.
The main task for Democrats over the next 15 months won’t be to convince America that they need yet another health care re-invention, or that the economy is a mess, or that the system is rigged, or that the right response to Trump’s immigration demagoguery is an open border. It’s that the president is
The white supremacist terrorists and the white supremacist policymakers share the same mission.
Be warned: There is nothing soothing and uplifting in this column. I will not somberly mourn and point to our better angel and American resilience. This is not that kind of column.
I have a warning to deliver, a truth to tell, and it is as unsettling as it is obvious.
First, let’s start with the carnage that has unfolded over the last few days.
On July 28, a 19-year-old white man named Santino William Leganopened fire at a garlic festival in Gilroy, Calif., killing three people and injuring 13 others before taking his own life.
As the Daily Beast reported, just before the shooting Legan “posted a picture with a caption that told followers to read a 19th-century, proto-fascist book.” As the site explained:
“The book, which is repeatedly recommended alongside works by Hitler and other fascists on forums like 8chan, is full of anti-Semitic, sexist and white supremacist ideology. The book glorifies ‘Aryan’ men, condemns intermarriage between races, and defends violence based on bogus eugenicist tropes.”
As The New York Times reported, “Nineteen minutes before the first 911 call” about the shooting at the Walmart, “a hate-filled, anti-immigrant manifesto appeared online.” CNN reports that authorities are investigating the racist screed which “police believe” was posted by Crusius.
The manifesto is heavily anti-immigrant and anti-Hispanic. It’s riddled with the fear of white “displacement” and fear that changing demographics will favor Democrats and turn America into “a one party-state.”
Are these shootings a gun control issue? Of course. We have too many guns, and too many high-capacity guns. We sell guns first designed for soldiers to civilians. We don’t do enough to keep guns out of the hands of people who shouldn’t have them and we do next to nothing to track guns once they are sold.
Is this stochastic terrorism at play in which rhetoric by some incites action by others? Possibly. There is no doubt that Trump and Republicans are making poisonous anti-immigrant rhetoric part of their platforms.
But, I think laying all the blame at their feet is too convenient and simplistic.
I think a better way to look at it is to understand that white nationalist terrorists — young and rash — and white nationalist policymakers — older and more methodical — live on parallel planes, both aiming in the same direction, both with the same goal: To maintain and ensure white dominance and white supremacy.
The policymakers believe they can accomplish with legislation in the legal system what the terrorists are trying to underscore with lead. In the minds of the policymakers, border walls, anti-immigrant laws, voter suppression and packing the courts are more prudent and permanent than bodies in the streets. But, try telling that to a young white terrorist who distrusts everyone in Washington.
As the writer of the El Paso manifesto points out, “The Republican Party is also terrible.” The writer goes on to explain:
“Many factions within the Republican Party are pro-corporation. Pro-corporation = pro-immigration. But some factions within the Republican Party don’t prioritize corporations over our future. So the Democrats are nearly unanimous with their support of immigration while the Republicans are divided over it. At least with Republicans, the process of mass immigration and citizenship can be greatly reduced.”
This is a reason these groups are often at odds. The white nationalist policymakers are annoyed and even incensed by the terrorists because they believe they besmirch the mission.
They are angry at immigrants because their numbers are ascendant — through both immigration and higher birthrates — and, those immigrants threaten an even more accelerated displacement of white people from a numerical majority.
They are angry at white liberals for courting the demise of white supremacy. They are angry at white liberal white women in particular for championing a woman’s right to choose and for not having more babies.
They are angry at black people for even existing.
It is not lost on me that this summer is the 100th anniversary of the “Red Summer,” when violent anti-black white supremacists rioted in cities across the country, killing many, just as the Great Migration — the mass migration of millions of black people mostly from the rural South to the urban North — was getting underway. Violence is the way the white terrorists respond to demographic shifts and demographic threat.
It’s not simply a matter of whether Trump’s rhetoric, or that of any other politician, led these shooters to do what they did. Maybe. It is also about recognizing that all of these people are on the same team and share the same mission and eat from the same philosophical trough. It’s just that their methods differ. The white supremacist terrorists and the white supremacist policymakers are bound at the hip.
