Rene Carlos Vos, an arms dealer in Alexandria, began hanging around the Washington headquarters of the National Rifle Association in the mid-1980s. The NRA’s staff was intrigued to see the garrulous, backslapping Vos in the group’s seventh-floor suite, home to its lobbying operation and the chief congressional lobbyist, Wayne LaPierre.
Vos and LaPierre struck those who saw them huddle together as an odd couple. Vos took to cowboy boots and neatly pressed western wear.
“He came off like something of a dandy and a hustler, glad-
handing with everybody,” recalled Johnny Aquilino, a former NRA communications director.
LaPierre, by contrast, was remote and quiet, a hand-wringer with an obsessive interest in the intricacies of the legislative process who wore wrinkled suits and carried sheaves of paper — the Congressional Record, vote counts, handwritten notes — around the organization’s 16th Street NW headquarters.
Politicians must be held accountable if their lies damage democracy, according to a former US federal...
A former Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission biologist who was fired in September over sharing...
The Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control has sent subpoenas to leftist Twitch streamer Hasan...
The FBI and U.S. Secret Service are responding to reports of gunfire near the White House...
