At the NRA, a Battle Between the Old Guard and the New

NEW YORK — The National Rifle Association’s new CEO, Doug Hamlin, was elected only in mid-May, but he is already confronting a monumental obstacle.

The threat does not come from a gun control group or any pending left-wing legislation. Rather, one of his biggest challenges is the president of the NRA’s board, former Rep. Bob Barr of Georgia, who was also elected in May.

Dissent between the two surfaced during a trial this month in Manhattan, in which the NRA was trying to persuade a New York judge not to appoint a monitor to oversee the embattled gun rights organization and its finances.

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But the association’s top two leaders have not put forward a unified front, underscoring the management disarray that persists after more than a half-decade of corruption scandals and leadership turmoil.

The NRA was founded as a nonprofit in New York more than 150 years ago, giving the state special authority over the group; Letitia James, the state attorney general, sued in 2020 amid headlines about lavish spending by Wayne LaPierre, the group’s former longtime leader, and other executives.

Revenue and membership plummeted, and the NRA’s role as a political powerhouse in the Republican Party has diminished.

LaPierre resigned in January, on the eve of the first phase of a two-part civil trial. In February, he was found liable for misspending $5.4 million of the association’s money after revelations that he had splurged on superyacht junkets, charter flights, vacations in the Bahamas and nearly $275,000 in suits from a boutique in Beverly Hills, California.

The NRA’s lawyers have asserted that the group has greatly reformed its corporate governance practices. In recent years, they say, the association has fired vendors and insiders deemed problematic, implemented mandatory compliance training and annual risk assessments, and ended consulting arrangements with board members.

But the NRA’s new leaders appear to be moving in opposite directions. The clash comes down to a battle between the old guard and the new.

Barr is a longtime board member who described himself in his testimony as a friend of LaPierre’s. He also said he thought that LaPierre had acted in good faith.

Hamlin, by contrast, previously ran the NRA’s publications division and was among a group of insider candidates, mostly for open board seats, who billed themselves as reformers and were not LaPierre loyalists. Hamlin testified that he and other like-minded candidates ran because they had lost faith in NRA leadership, including LaPierre and Barr, and thought the group had lost the trust of its members.

“My frustration was due to a lot of various factors that had been building over many years,” he said.

The two leaders, who gave back-to-back testimony in New York Supreme Court this month, have many areas of disagreement.

Hamlin wants to reclaim control over decisions about litigation strategy. Barr and his predecessor, Charles Cotton, who remains a highly influential figure on the board, prefer to keep the board in charge of legal matters. The NRA has paid its lead law firm — Brewer, Attorneys & Counselors — $182 million since 2018, according to trial testimony. In a statement, the board’s litigation committee noted that the money was used for a wide variety of legal work and included roughly $50 million for expenses and payments to third-party experts.

Hamlin also opposes a plan to relocate the NRA to Texas, seeing it as a waste of resources that would destabilize the staff. LaPierre had pushed the plan, backed by Cotton and Barr. James’ office has portrayed it as an attempt to circumvent New York’s authority to regulate the organization.

In his testimony, Cotton said the NRA was already shopping for a replacement for Hamlin. To that end, he and Barr have kept in place a search committee to find a new candidate, even though the CEO is elected annually and Hamlin was just elected and could run again, as LaPierre did for decades.

The revelation led the presiding judge, Justice Joel M. Cohen, to ask during the trial why the search committee was still up and running: “Hasn’t there been an election already?”

Cotton, another LaPierre ally, explained that he wanted “some high-powered person to take it over.” His stance appeared to be news to Hamlin, who was not even aware there was a search committee until recently.

The testimony took place during a second phase of the civil trial that began this month. The first phase was decided by a jury in February, but Cohen will rule in the second phase. In addition to deciding about a financial monitor, Cohen will decide whether to bar LaPierre from a future role with the NRA.

In a statement for this story, Hamlin said: “Debate and differences of opinion are hallmarks of a healthy organization. At the end of the day, NRA leaders are united on what matters most: practicing good governance, preserving our independence and defending freedom.”

He added that although he had “total confidence in the financial controls” that have been put in place, “I’m not happy with the financial situation in 2024, the proposed move to Texas and the cuts that have been made to subsidize this trial.”

A number of Cohen’s questions showed that he was trying to determine if the NRA really was committed to governance reform. At one point, he noted that many members of the NRA’s audit committee had been in place throughout the scandals.

“Can you appreciate why some might think it questionable?” he asked a witness named Bill Bachenberg, who was elected first vice president of the board in May. Although Bachenberg ran on the same ostensibly reformist slate as Hamlin, he has been a board member for many years and in his testimony was supportive of Barr and Cotton.

Still, he insisted to the judge: “It’s a new NRA: NRA 2.0.”

The association has added a chief compliance officer, Robert Mensinger, who testified last week that the NRA had compliance controls in place, but he said previous leaders of the organization circumvented those controls.

Cohen pushed back.

“How does the board not find out?” he asked. “Isn’t that a question that is worth exploring?”

“My understanding is that it was concealed to them,” said Mensinger, who opposed the attorney general’s proposal to impose a third-party monitor, saying it would send a message that the organization’s efforts had been ineffective and would make it harder to retain and recruit employees.

But expert witnesses presented by the attorney general’s office were skeptical. Among other things, there were questions about the wisdom of making the job held by Mensinger one that is elected by the board.

Daniel Roach, an expert witness in corporate compliance and a longtime member of the NRA, testified that the annual election could make the chief compliance officer “worried about navigating the political climate more than making sure that the organization is doing the right thing.”

Even within the NRA, not all board members are convinced the group is on the right path. Phillip Journey, a dissident board member who had sought to intervene in the case, said the board’s leadership “keep preaching that all of this is the New York attorney general’s fault,” adding, “they can’t seem to accept responsibility for anything they do.”

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