Deposition Of John Frazer

The deposition of John Frazer, NRA General Counsel and Secretary, is online. Major notes:

P. 21, 24, $200,000 in business suits for LaPierre was not an excess benefit, it was a business expenditure at the request of the PR agency Ackerman McQueen. (Note that it is still unclear whether A-M billed the suits to NRA, but this sounds like that).

P. 48. Millie Hallow, Wayne’s “right hand woman” and convicted embezzler, billed NRA for her son’s wedding. The bills were sent through a “vendor,” Paul Erickson (who was convicted of fraud in other matters, and doesn’t seem to have been a vendor for any other purposes). It sounds like, if you knew someone high enough in HQ, you could send a bill for anything and get it paid.

P. 51. Hallow had had her NRA American Express Card taken away for earlier abuses.

P. 54-55. Treasurer Woody Phillips also had an NRA Amex card. His spending on it has never been investigated. (He took the Fifth 60+ times in testimony in the bankruptcy trial).

P. 165-67. Hallow “diverted” $41,000 in funds, but he doesn’t remember any discipline for it.

P. 194 ff. Stanton McKenzie, owner of three NRA vendors, who gave LaPierre a week on his yacht in the Carribean, much discussion of him. A subcontractor of one of his companies was separately paid by NRA (dividing up the amounts being paid so as to lessen them standing out).

P. 234 ff. Marcellin, an NRA official who was handling contracts with Lockton-Affinity, at the same time was negotiating an employment contract with that company.

P. 242-243. There were vendor contracts kept secret even from NRA’s contract management people, though this has been ended.

P. 281 ff. Brewer billed NRA $900,000 for work related to its bankruptcy (even though Brewer wasn’t its attorney in the Bankruptcy Court). Frazer refuses to answer whether the Brewer firm did any work on the case.

P. 295-297. LaPierre’s employment contract was negotiated between LaPierre’s attorney and the Brewer firm (supposedly representing NRA).

P. 303-304. Frazer, the NRA’s General Counsel, had no idea that the employment contract authorized LaPierre to file for the NRA bankruptcy.

In the end: nobody in NRA HQ knows what is going on, except maybe the crooks and the Brewer law firm. A highly-placed staffer can tell an outsider to pay tens of thousands for her son’s wedding and bill it to NRA, and the bill gets paid. People can misuse their company credit cards and face no sanction if caught, other than “pay it back.” An attorney can be paid nearly a million for a case where he didn’t appear, and the general counsel just doesn’t want to talk about that. A treasurer can take the Fifth about his doings, and nobody wants to go back and investigate his spending. People managing certain contracts are told they cannot even see the contracts. MAJOR legal decisions (filing for bankruptcy is certainly that) are made by outside attorneys, without the General Counsel even being informed.

The only rule seems to be: if you have the power, loot at will.