Matthew Chapman
January 29, 2024
Wayne LaPierre speaking at the 2018 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland. (Gage Skidmore/Flickr)
Disgraced outgoing NRA president Wayne LaPierre is taking the fall at the organization's civil corruption trial, "The Trace" senior staff writer Mike Spies told CNN on Monday.
"What stood out from LaPierre's testimony today?" asked anchor Jake Tapper.
"What stood out was he's in some respects falling on the sword, there's no question anymore about whether or not he had done the wrong thing," said Spies. "He's basically openly saying that the arrangements that he entered into prior to 2018 specifically, hiding payments through the NRA's longtime PR firm, are going on these fancy vacations to his vendors' yacht or the Taj Mahal, and those kinds of places, that was clearly the wrong thing to do and he should have been disclosing it to the board all along."
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"But also, at the same time, it wasn't done in bad faith. He just sort of made a mistake and didn't know better and embarked on a course correction as they kept referring to it in 2018 and now, according to him, the slate has more or less been wiped clean and they are on solid footing," he added.
"Remind us what is at stake in this larger corruption case for the NRA?" Tapper pressed him.
"In some ways, the major thing that was at stake was whether or not Wayne was going to stay in power, but he voluntarily stepped down before the proceedings began," said Spies. "So now it's really a matter of whether or not he and several other defendants who are also going to have to really like to pay up, at the end of the proceedings, and how much money, in fact, they owe to the organization."
LaPierre's doctors told the court that he couldn't testify in the trial all day long because his brain is shrinking, a court filing last week said.
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