NRA Board Member Slams Leadership in Letter Calling for Immediate Change Amid Corruption Suit
Owen “Buz” Mills, owner of the Gunsite Academy in Arizona and longtime NRA board member, wrote to his colleagues on Wednesday decrying the state of the organization and plans to keep people he views as responsible for its decline in place. In the letter obtained by The Reload, he told the Board it needed to change how it governs the group because of the numerous admissions of wrongdoing by its top officials in the New York corruption case that began last week.
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Mills has heard similar rumors.
“There appears to be an effort to anoint Cotton EVP,” he told The Reload.
In his letter, Mills slammed the idea. He said Cotton should not be EVP, and the NRA should use a more formal hiring process before deciding on its next leader.
“The selected leadership wants a special election to install the enabler and facilitator of all the previous chicanery,” he wrote. “None other than our duly selected President, he is the man more responsible than any other for permitting our selected leadership to rampantly run roughshod over our membership and benefactors. As the chair of the Audit Committee for many years, Charles Cotton was responsible for holding our employees accountable and ensuring their conduct beyond reproach. Our chair and ‘moral compass’ approved every single act of malfeasance brought to the committee for decades, multiple acts approved retroactively, months and years after the fact.”
He accused Cotton, who he labeled “the facilitator,” of providing LaPierre, who he labeled “the miscreant,” with a special bonus to cover the nearly million dollars that LaPierre was forced to refund to the NRA for private flights and other expenses the organization classified as “excess benefits.”
“When restitution was mandated, a bonus was awarded the miscreants including enough money to pay the restitution,” Mills wrote. “This bonus also included enough for the miscreant to have the cash to pay the taxes on his misappropriation. Talk about rewarding bad behavior!! Again, I emphasize, it was not miscreant’s money, and it was not the facilitator’s money! It was the MONEY OF OUR MEMBERS and the MONEY provided by the BENEVOLENCE OF OUR DONORS.”
“There is something deeply wrong when you continually permit and encourage this serial abuse,” he said.
