Bob Barr elect­ed to lead NRA

For­mer Geor­gia Rep. Bob Barr was elect­ed on Mon­day to head the Nation­al Rifle Asso­ci­a­tion as the belea­guered gun-rights group strug­gles to find foot­ing after its top lead­ers were found liable in Feb­ru­ary for engag­ing in finan­cial mis­con­duct and cor­rup­tion. 
Barr beat out Owen Mills, who has been crit­i­cal of the NRA’s lead­er­ship, Stephen Gutows­ki, founder of the Reload, report­ed.

FILE – For­mer Geor­gia Rep. Bob Barr takes part in a debate titled “Does Secu­ri­ty Trump Free­dom?”, Fri­day, Feb. 19, 2010, dur­ing the Con­ser­v­a­tive Polit­i­cal Action Con­fer­ence in Wash­ing­ton. (AP Photo/Cliff Owen)

Barr, who worked for the CIA and Depart­ment of Jus­tice before becom­ing a con­gress­man, received 37 votes, while Mills got 30. 

Barr was first elect­ed to the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives in 1994, rep­re­sent­ing Georgia’s 7th Con­gres­sion­al Dis­trict. 
It will be up to him to turn around the NRA’s for­tunes after a Man­hat­tan jury found the orga­ni­za­tion and for­mer CEO Wayne LaPierre engaged in cor­rupt prac­tices. Jurors agreed LaPierre had “vio­lat­ed his statu­to­ry oblig­a­tion to dis­charge the duties of his posi­tion in good faith” and that his actions cost the orga­ni­za­tion $5.4 mil­lion.  
“The NRA is lit­tle more than a shell of itself after hem­or­rhag­ing hun­dreds of mil­lions in legal fees,” Joshua Pow­ell, a for­mer top NRA offi­cial who set­tled with the state before the sev­en-week civ­il show­down, told the New York Times.
The NRA was the most pow­er­ful gun rights group in the nation for decades but lost hun­dreds of thou­sands of me …