Audit Committee

I am sure new NRA President Charles Cotton would be pissed off to see himself represented by a trio of monkeys. However, given his performance as Chair of the NRA Board of Directors Audit Committee, it is wholly warranted.

This has become even clearer thanks to a report in the blog NRA In Danger. Several good, honest, and forthright NRA staffers sent a memo to the Audit Committee outlining “top concerns”. I’ll let NRA In Danger tell the story of how Mr. Cotton decided to neither hear nor see the problems.

A major event in the beginning of the controversy over internal corruption came when NRA Treasurer “Woody” Phillips left suddenly in 2017, and the inexplicable decision was made to hire an honest Treasurer, Craig Spray. Several employees who were deeply concerned about what was going on wrote a “Top Concerns” memo for the Audit Committee, which was presented at an emergency meeting in July, 2018. Note this is nearly a year before the scandals burst into the open (April-May 2019). The Committee’s response? Its chair, Charles Cotton, left the room before the memo was presented. Its Vice Chair, who then served as chair, never gave Cotton the memo (obviously he knew Cotton didn’t want to hear of it).(emphasis mine) The committee (which is entrusted by the board with keeping everything honest) made no mention of the event to the board. Officially, nothing happened that day in July.

Read the “top concerns” memo yourself. It was an exhibit filed by the New York Attorney General in the NRA’s abortive attempt at bankruptcy. Given Mr. Cotton’s behavior that day and many others since, I am somewhat surprised that the complaint asking for dissolution has not been amended to make him a co-defendant.