by I spent the past weekend at the Gun Owners of America GOALS conference held in Knoxville, Tennessee. It was like the Gun Rights Policy Conference met a smaller NRA Annual Meeting with a little bit of the SHOT Show thrown in for spice. I will have more on it in a separate post.
I met a lot of people in Knoxville including a reporter who had covered parts of the jury portion of the New York trial of the NRA. As we all know when the complaint was filed in August 2020, New York Attorney General Tish James asked the court to dissolve the NRA for its transgressions against New York’s Non-Profit Corporation Law.
However, Judge Cohen found that dissolution was not warranted in his decision of March 2, 2022. He said, in essence, the transgressions of the NRA’s leaders were not those of its members and that the Attorney General had failed to separate the two. In his order he noted, “dissolving the NRA could impinge, at least indirectly, on the free speech and assembly rights of its millions of members.” He did, of course, let most of the remaining complaint to proceed to conclusion.
This reporter told me that it was his impression that the attorneys in the New York Charities Bureau running the actual prosecution – not Tish James – actually seemed relieved that dissolution was taken off the table. Without the specter of a “corporate death penalty” hanging over the heads of both parties, the NYAG’s attorneys could now get down to the business of proving their case to the jury that the NRA had failed to adequately administer charitable assets, had allowed retaliation against whistleblowers, had submitted false filings, and had permitted related party transactions. Obviously, they did a fairly good job of it.
This goes to show that the whims of politicians can clash with the interests of government professionals trying to do their job to the best of their ability. While many will claim the trial was political – and parts of it including the demand for dissolution certainly were – the remainder of the trial dealt with the more mundane task of proving an abuse of fiduciary duties and grifting by certain executives.
