NEW YORK — Today, Everytown for Gun Safety responded to the release of a Senate Finance Committee minority staff report, “The NRA and Russia: How a Tax-Exempt Organization Became a Foreign Asset.” The report, initiated at the request of Senate Finance Committee Ranking Member Ron Wyden (D-OR), was an 18-month investigation into the NRA’s relationship with Russia and potential violations of U.S. tax and sanctions laws.
“This is a damning summary of the lengths to which NRA insiders were willing to go in order to enrich themselves,” said John Feinblatt, president of Everytown for Gun Safety. “Despite the NRA’s repeated claims that the 2015 delegation trip was unsanctioned, we now have ample evidence that this was an official NRA trip — in part planned by and paid for by the NRA — that appears to have been designed primarily to personally benefit the NRA insiders who went on it.”
“The IRS must fully investigate these findings, along with other evidence of reported self-dealing by NRA executives and insiders, in order to determine whether the NRA must lose its tax-exempt status,” added Nick Suplina, Everytown’s managing director for law and policy.
The report concludes that the “use of [the] NRA’s tax-exempt funds and resources in this manner raise concerns about the use of tax-exempt resources for a non-exempt purpose, private inurement… and prohibited excess benefit transactions.” To that end, in April 2019, Everytown filed a complaint about the NRA’s tax-exempt status with the IRS, and called for federal and state investigations into the NRA’s operation as a tax-exempt organization.
