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Mike Spies covered the NRA for The Trace from June 2015 to June 2019. He is now a reporter at ProPublica.
Bang for the Buck
The organization’s leadership is focused on external threats, but the real crisis is of its own making.
Following reporting by The Trace, nine senators accuse the NRA of skirting rules against coordinating with political campaigns.
The National Rifle Association is continuing to funnel much of its spending on the 2018 midterm elections through an apparent shell company that, according to one campaign watchdog, is part of a scheme to skirt election laws. Read Next…
National Rifle Association
As the gun group confronts serious financial straits, it has entrusted its operations to Josh Powell, a failed mail-order mogul who attracted a mountain of lawsuits in his former career.
An election watchdog has accused the National Rifle Association of violating campaign finance laws for the second time in less than three months, following a Trace report on the gun group’s use of an apparent shell company to attack Montana…
The “Three Men and a Baby” star stepped down in the middle of his fifth term as an NRA director.
The gun group's first big ad buy of the 2018 cycle was made through a company that, according to an election watchdog, exists only to circumvent campaign finance laws.
What we do (and don’t) know about the group’s financial health.
Lockton, the insurance broker behind the NRA’s Carry Guard program, argued in a court filing that the organization’s “inflammatory marketing” made it an inevitable pariah.
The National Rifle Association typically portrays itself as an indomitable force. But an ongoing court case has the gun group taking inventory of its wounds. In a new legal filing, it contends that New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s campaign to…
On July 13, The Trace published an investigation into the National Rifle Association’s top election contractor, a mysterious firm called Starboard Strategic Inc. The article raised numerous questions about possible campaign finance violations committed by the gun group, and spurred…
The Campaign Legal Center, one of Washington’s top election spending watchdogs, filed a formal complaint Monday morning with the Federal Election Commission asserting that there is “reason to believe” that the National Rifle Association violated campaign finance laws in…
Since 2014, the gun rights group has paid more than $60 million to a little known contractor for ads in must-win political races. Did it break campaign finance laws in the process?
Robert Spitzer, a professor at the State University of New York and an authority on the gun group, parses the signals with The Trace’s Mike Spies.
The Gunfighters
In February, I published a long profile of Marion Hammer, the National Rifle Association’s Florida lobbyist, who over the last four decades has transformed the state into a laboratory for laws that have rolled back long-established restrictions on firearms and…
Over the weeks that followed the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, concerned residents of Florida, one of the most pro-gun states in the country, began to email their state representatives about the possibility of new…
