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NRA had to spend $100 million for legal battles: Leaked tape

Wednesday, 22 April 2020 1:09 AM [ Last Update: Wednesday, 22 April 2020 1:10 AM ]

The United States National Rifle Association (NRA) had to spend $100 million for its legal battles, a leaked tape has revealed.

"The cost that we bore was probably about a hundred-million-dollar hit in lost revenue and real cost to this association in 2018 and 2019," NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre is heard saying in the tape recorded by a source in the room and released by NPR. "I mean, that's huge.”

LaPierre also complains about ongoing investigations by the attorneys general of Washington, DC, and New York, blasting “the power of weaponized government.”

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"What we did in order to survive and adjust is we took in 2019 and 2020 ... about $80 million in real costs out of the NRA budget," he says in the recording. "I mean, we kind of reframed this entire association. We took it down to the studs.”

There were, meanwhile, calls for an apology from the NRA, namely by Ron Carter, the vice president of the gun-rights organization Save the Second.

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”The repeated statement from LaPierre about the $100 million cost to the NRA should have come with an apology for having manifested the situation," Carter told NPR. "The lack of accountability is troubling for many members."

The NRA, which is supported by President Donald Trump, has been locked into protracted and costly legal battles with longtime public relations firms and has lost eight board members since last year.

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