Opinion
The second week of testimony in the New York trial of NRA, CEO Wayne LaPierre, Secretary and General Counsel John Frazer, and former Treasurer Woody Phillips wrapped up on Friday, January 19, 2024, and things are not looking good for the defendants. A fourth former executive, LaPierre’s former deputy Josh Powell, pled guilty days before the trial began.
Also, just days before the trial, LaPierre announced his resignation, effective at the end of January 2024, at an NRA Board of Directors meeting. Many spectators and even some participants have missed the delayed effect. He’s still technically in charge and, presumably, still having his legal bills covered by NRA members’ money.
In his resignation announcement, LaPierre said he was stepping down for health reasons. He is reported to be suffering from the debilitating effects of chronic Lyme Disease, a tick-borne bacterial infection that can cause a variety of serious health problems. Having struggled with Lyme Disease myself and had people close to me affected by the chronic form of the infection, I won’t join in the chorus that has suggested the whole thing is some ruse on LaPierre’s part.
Lapierre’s Brain Is Shrinking!?
LaPierre has been in the courtroom every day during the two weeks of the trial. Still, his attorney has now submitted doctors’ notes asking the court for special accommodations for LaPierre during his upcoming testimony. The lawyer, supported by the doctors’ notes, says that, along with headaches, vision problems, and fatigue, LaPierre is also suffering from cognitive issues related to the loss of cerebral mass. In other words, he’s saying LaPierre’s brain is shrinking, impacting his ability to think clearly and remember things. Because of this, the attorney is asking that the judge allow LaPierre and his lawyers to call timeouts during his upcoming testimony, possibly breaking it up over several days rather than trying to grind through one or two days of uninterrupted time on the stand.
The judge seems willing to accommodate LaPierre’s physical limitations and allow other witnesses to be called when and if LaPierre is incapacitated. This raises another important question about who’s running the NRA and why LaPierre remains officially in charge.
According to the letters from his doctors, LaPierre’s health has been in decline for several years.
His current condition was reported to NRA President Charles Cotton on January 3, 2024, two days before LaPierre announced his pending resignation. So why is LaPierre still holding the Executive Vice Presidency of the NRA?
If LaPierre is unable to testify for several hours consecutively due to his illness, and considering he is attending the trial in New York instead of being at his office at NRA headquarters, why didn’t he resign immediately on January 5? This was when the NRA Board was meeting, and they could have appointed a temporary replacement then rather than waiting for a month.
The NRA Bylaws say that in the case of a vacancy in the office of Executive Vice President, the Executive Director of General Operations is to fill the position until the Board meets to name a suitable replacement. LaPierre unceremoniously fired Joe DeBergalis, the ED of General Operations, shortly before Christmas, replacing him with Andrew Arulanandam. Arulanandam has been LaPierre’s top PR flack and spokesperson for several years. While his face is familiar to some members and the media, it would be a stretch to suggest he is qualified to run General Operations, and he’s certainly not qualified to be the CEO of the NRA.
It’s Day 11 of the NRA trial in NYC. We open the day with more Wayne LaPierre health lore.
LaPierre’s lawyers have asked for vague accomodations for his chronic lyme disease, which causes him fatigue and other symptoms.
Last night, the AG asked for specifics: pic.twitter.com/LyH7l1fuK9
— Erik Uebelacker (@Uebey) January 23, 2024
During his testimony on Thursday and Friday, former Executive Director of NRA-ILA Chris Cox voiced a similar sentiment. Cox suggested that LaPierre demonstrated poor judgment in hiring, pointing to Josh Powell and Andrew Arulanandam as examples. Powell was LaPierre’s deputy who oversaw the collapse of the NRA’s controversial CarryGuard program and has already pled guilty in the New York trial. Arulanandam, who first worked under Cox in ILA before being moved over to NRA HQ by LaPierre, did not impress Cox while he was at ILA. Cox warned LaPierre that Arulanandam had “terrible” political judgment and was “lazy in core competencies.”
LaPierre ignored Cox’s warnings and kept Arulanandam on, promoting him to higher positions, eventually setting him up to take over as EVP and CEO upon LaPierre’s resignation.
This has laid the table for a bit of a battle within the NRA Board of Directors. It has been reported that Tom King, who has been one of LaPierre’s chief supporters on the Board and a close ally of NRA President Charles Cotton, has been calling fellow Directors to urge them to support a move to put Cotton in the EVP position.
Along with his duties as President, Cotton serves as the Chairman of the NRA’s Audit Committee, as I explained in a recent article, “Charles Cotton Must Never Be Allowed to Head the NRA!”. The Audit Committee is supposed to be the Association’s watchdog tasked with ensuring that the staff and vendors always operate within applicable laws and policies and conduct business in a manner that is above reproach. Cotton served as vice chair of the committee for several years and then switched places with then-chairman David Coy. Between the two of them, they have been Chair and Vice Chair for the past 20-plus years, and they continue in those positions now, even though they’ve been President and Vice President of the Board for the past three years. Cotton and Coy were supposed to keep the NRA on track and away from even a whisper of corruption.
They failed spectacularly in that assignment and were rewarded for their failure by being elected to the offices of President and Vice President.
The best way for the NRA Board to demonstrate that they’ve learned nothing at all from the scandals and corruption that have plagued the NRA for the past 20 years and been publicly known for the past five years would be to hand the EVP position to Charles Cotton.
The trial continues on Monday with video testimony from former NRA President Carolyn Meadows. Ms. Meadows has been excused from testifying in person – or even via live video link – due to her own health issues, so her video deposition is being played. It’s worth noting that Ms. Meadows’ health has been a limiting factor since she was first elected in 2019. She barely attended any Board meetings as President after she was elected, meaning that First Vice President Charles Cotton filled in for her for almost all of her two terms. He then served two terms as President himself, then orchestrated a Bylaws change to allow him to serve a third (effectively fifth) term as President.
In spite of her age and poor health concerns, Ms. Meadows has been nominated for reelection to the Board in the coming election…. She and another woman from Georgia were both added to the list of nominees after Phil Journey, Rocky Marshall, Dennis Fusaro, and I (Jeff Knox) were qualified by petition as nominees. Some speculate she and her friend were added to pad the field and make it even harder for any of the four reform candidates to be elected.
Ballots should be in the March issue of NRA magazines, which will hit mailboxes around mid-February, so please be sure to vote and encourage your NRA friends to vote. “Bullet voting,” i.e. voting for just the four Outsider Candidates for NRA Board, myself included, and no one else, gives us the best chance of winning seats, so please spread the word on that, too.
Read Related
- Charles Cotton Must Never Be Allowed to Head the NRA!
- NRA Board Bullet Voting, What is it? Why Do It
- 4 Outsider Reform Candidates Nominated by NRA Members, LFG!
About Jeff Knox:
Jeff Knox is a second-generation political activist and director of The Firearms Coalition. His father Neal Knox led many of the early gun rights battles for your right to keep and bear arms. Read Neal Knox – The Gun Rights War.
The Firearms Coalition is a loose-knit coalition of individual Second Amendment activists, clubs and civil rights organizations. Founded by Neal Knox in 1984, the organization provides support to grassroots activists in the form of education, analysis of current issues, and with a historical perspective of the gun rights movement. The Firearms Coalition has offices in Buckeye, Arizona, and Manassas, VA. Visit: www.FirearmsCoalition.org.
Joe Biden can’t even give a 2 sentence speech with his feeble minded brain, yet democrats want that moron for president. makes no sense to me… I worry about this more than the failed NRA problems.
The NRA board should be flushed down the toilet.
Colt: “The NRA board should be flushed down the toilet.”
Along with everybody that voted for Brandon the last time… and everyone pushing the senile old fool to run some more!
Add Trump to that senile old fool list. They all need to go.
Idiot
wa waah, Trump and Biden are both senile old authoritarian fools. Don’t like that? Too bad.
Wayne La Pierre, the NRA’s “Bernie Madoff”.
Josh Powell, the NRA’s “Sammy Gravano”
Charles Cotton, the NRA’s “Allen Dorfman”.
This script just writes itself. Alec Baldwin would be perfect in the lead role as Wayne La Pierre. It’s not much of a stretch for one POS to portray another POS.
Alec Baldwin is not the “Duke”
He thought he was John Wayne until he murdered someone and now realizes he can’t get away with it.
This case has really been an eye opener for many folks uninitiated in the judicial double standard we are afflicted with in this dark time in America. It also had me worried justice would not prevail, it still might not end properly, but the awakening of many by this “Cause Célèbre has done a good job of spreading the word to those folks who have eyes but refuse to see and ears but cannot hear.
I think the most likely, not the best, will be that Baldwin will cop a plea to some minor charge. Then, like OJ, civil trials will drain his finances. His elitest attitude will be hard to keep up when living in a rented apartment and eating at McDonalds.
Many or most of the videos of Baldwin “practicing” his draw stroke reveal that he always has his finger on the trigger, squeezed. The videos are hard to find now but were available two years ago. I think that when you drop the hammer on a SAA revolver with the trigger depressed results in a ND.
I think that was how I had to fire my Mattel Fanner 50.
Oh hell no! Trump will become president and SNL will hire him back in a heartbeat and pay him twice what they paid before.
He is working on his hillary defense. “I don’t recall!”
Don’t give some ambitious screenplay writer ideas. Baldwin, obstreperous personality aside, is a gifted actor. You know, his political views would never allow a fair portrayal of any gun rights advocate.
I agree 100% Jeff
Every time I read one of Mr. Knox’ smart and passionate articles, I want to run out and rejoin the NRA in order to support this man. The NRA and its members need Mr. Knox on the BOD if the NRA is to continue as a reformed organization.
“Yet He’s Still In Charge of NRA! …Why?”
Q: Why do dogs lick themselves?
A: Because they can.
Regarding leading question – if we accept dementia joe as toddler-in-chief, what makes you think NRA members are so much more rational than the rest of the nation?
Probably the fact that most people who own and like guns are republicans and not the left that has no common sense or logic. PEE PEE Le Pew arranged it so he was protected from being kicked out. I doubt they would elect someone like him or accept someone like him again if given the choice. Everyone on that board needs to go.
His resignation will be effective in 9 days:
https://home.nra.org/statements/nra-evp-wayne-lapierre-announces-resignation-from-nra/
Gotta pack that golden parachute, ya know!
$17 million divided by $10,000 in a pack of hundreds = 1,700 bundles of joy weighing 375 pounds and occupying more than 10 cubic feet. Yeah, that parachute will take more than a couple minutes to pack and more than one trip to carry. I’ve no idea how to calculate that in blood diamonds for someone who has sucked the lifeblood out of the NRA.
can you spell Brewer…..
LaPierre is a criminal who stole the money of NRA members for decades! He and his accomplices are no more than an organized crime family. I don’t give a damn about his health issues, LaPierre and his cohorts belong in prison and owe restitution to NRA members, current and former.
When he says “I don’t recall” he now has an excuse? curious
For the past several years every new revelation about the NRA has tended to confirm my thoughts that it is/was essentially a sham organization devoted to fraudulently obtaining members’ money and spending it like drunken sailors for the benefit of their executive staff. I can’t remember the last time I heard anything about the NRA stepping up and fighting FOR some form of 2-A protection. Or, actually fighting FOR gun rights. Here in North Carolina they have been on the wrong side of legislation regarding carry permits and Constitutional carry. Yet, they have been quick to step up and take… Read more »
“Yet, they have been quick to step up and take credit for accomplishments by GRNC, SAF, CCRKBA and other actual rights groups.”
Who else does that? Why the ATF of course. And the Feds like to add one of these disclaimers, “This investigation is a testament to the longstanding collaboration with our local, state and federal partners!”
While you are absolutely correct regarding the ATF, no one would ever mistake the ATF for a gun rights group. Heck, they are a barely legal organization if one uses the broadest definition of “legal.” The NRA professes to be a gun rights group, but I think they also suffer from that “barely legal” problem.
The NRA never has been a true “Gun rights organization”. It was founded with the goal of promoting marksmanship, and only got into sort of defending gun ownership out of necessity. At some point, they realized that a pretense of staunchly defending gun rights was a moneymaker! But, don’t do too good a job or your cash cow will wither and possibly die. This got worse and worse as ever more corrupt people took over. Admittedly NRA has over the years accomplished much good, but at what cost?
So are Trump’s and Biden’s brain and yet folk still are hell bent on voting one of them in again to run the USA. That is just the way it seems to be in a country where you can vote regardless of what makes good sense or not.
Biden yes , Trump no . Watch his speach after winning Iowa and tell us that again . The man is sharp as a tack and apparently that scares you .
Yes siree, and that is the same song and dance the Pedocrats have been saying about Bidepends for the past four years. Unfortunately, some just won’t believe their eyes even as age runs it’s natural course and no one is exempt. It is delusion and dangerous to think otherwise. And it is prudent and pragmatic to accept the truth, move on, and elect someone with a demonstrated history of effect governance versus yakety, yak, yak that Trump is given to.
I hope that you are right!!!