NRA leaders are acting like they’re about to get hit with criminal charges

| 11:55 pm EST January 31, 2019
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When public figures are trying to fend off worsening scandals, they nearly always start by trying to minimize it from a public relations angle. First they’ll deny the entire thing. Then, as evidence begins surfacing that proves there’s something to the scandal, they’ll try a partial denial in which they only cop to the least-ugly parts of it. Throughout the process, the primary goal is always to look innocent in the public eye – until a point arrives at which that’s no longer the goal. That just happened with the NRA.

As the Trump-Russia scandal has gradually revealed the extent to which the NRA was financially and personally aligned with the Kremlin during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the NRA has always tried to downplay its role. The goal, of course, has been to convince the public that it wasn’t involved at all. But emails have become public which prove that the NRA was in fact conspiring with the Kremlin during the election. Suddenly its tune has changed.

Now that the New York Times is revealing the incriminating emails, the NRA now has a far bigger problem: criminal charges. Someone in the NRA is going down for this, and everyone in the NRA must think it’s going to happen very soon, because they’re doing what you do just before the charges come down. They’re throwing any pretense of public relations to the wind, in favor of trying to insulate themselves legally.

For instance, now that it’s clear there will be criminal repercussions for the NRA’s trip to Moscow during the 2016 election cycle, NRA executive Wayne LaPierre is suddenly claiming that he was opposed to the trip. This makes him look like an idiot and a liar in the court of public opinion, as no one is going to believe that with all his power and influence within the NRA, he tried and failed to stop his own underlings from taking the trip.

But it’s not the court of public opinion that will decide which NRA folks end up going to prison in the Trump-Russia scandal. That’ll be decided by a jury, which will have to determine whether an NRA leader like Wayne LaPierre deserves any faint reasonable doubt when he claims that he was trying to stop his own group’s treason antics. If he’s falling back to a last ditch criminal defense already, he must think the NRA indictments are coming very soon – and that there’s one with his name on it.