This article was published in partnership with ProPublica and The Trace.

In 2018, accountants for the National Rifle Association began cataloguing for its board of directors questionable financial arrangements that had led to millions of dollars in payments to a group of the organization’s top executives and consultants. The N.R.A. was experiencing cash-flow problems, and the accountants were trying to address what they believed to be serious financial mismanagement.

For a year and a half, the N.R.A. has employed an outside counsel, William A. Brewer III, who represents the organization in high-profile legal disputes and is also deeply involved in its internal decision-making. The accountants believed that the financial dealings they had found could jeopardize the organization’s nonprofit standing with regulators. Yet, according to a former senior official in the N.R.A.’s treasurer’s office, Brewer tried to thwart their efforts to draw attention to the problematic payments.

The former senior employee, Emily Cummins, who worked for twelve years in the N.R.A.’s treasurer’s office, quietly resigned, in November, as the group’s internal strife escalated. Cummins, in a written statement that began circulating this month among N.R.A. leaders, including at least one board member, alleges that Brewer obstructed the work of N.R.A. accountants and vastly exacerbated the organization’s financial woes as he charged it hefty legal fees. Cummins confirmed that she had produced the statement, which was obtained by ProPublica, but declined to provide any additional comments. Brewer’s firm said its work was justified and of the highest quality.

The statement lays out a list of allegations regarding Brewer’s legal work and his treatment of N.R.A. staff as questions surfaced about his law firm’s billings, which totalled twenty-four million dollars in a thirteen month period. In the first quarter of 2019, Brewer’s firm charged over ninety-seven thousand dollars per day, according to internal N.R.A. documents posted anonymously online.

Cummins accuses Brewer of trying to intimidate, deceive, and silence N.R.A. staff who were processing his bills while growing increasingly troubled by the organization’s mismanagement, exorbitant spending, and questionable deals involving conflicts of interest. Former colleagues of Brewer’s, as well as written correspondence obtained by ProPublica, broadly supported her claims.

Cummins writes in her statement that Brewer “intimidated NRA staff and threatened our professional livelihoods.” She alleges that he used pressure tactics with staffers “to keep them acquiescent,” compiling what she called “burn books” filled with personal information that he could use against individuals.

“I witnessed what appeared to be unrealistic and duplicative billing from Bill Brewer,” Cummins writes. “I witnessed that Bill Brewer himself created a 2018 cash flow crunch by interfering with accounts payable to prioritize paying himself immediately versus other NRA vendors that had been providing goods or services for months without payment, also jeopardizing the NRA’s biweekly staff payroll.”

In a lengthy response to Cummins’s account, Brewer’s law firm, Brewer, Attorneys & Counselors, and the N.R.A. defended Brewer’s work and called his legal fees standard. The firm pointed to an N.R.A. e-mail that it said Cummins wrote in August, 2018, praising the firm. “They are good lawyers and seem to be good people as well,” it said.

Svetlana M. Eisenberg, a Brewer partner, told ProPublica that “the notion that our research team compiles opposition research, or ‘burn books,’ regarding clients or their employees is simply not true.”

Craig Spray, the N.R.A.’s chief financial officer, said that the N.R.A. is “current on all its vendor payments.”

Brewer has been a central behind-the-scenes force in the internal struggle that broke out between the N.R.A.’s top executive, Wayne LaPierre, and its ousted president, Oliver North. LaPierre has entrusted the future of the organization to Brewer and, in a statement this week, said that the organization has “full confidence in Bill Brewer and his law firm.”

As the gun group has fractured, Brewer’s firm has been a key player in a series of expensive lawsuits against former business partners, government officials, and North, in certain cases seeking damages worth tens of millions of dollars.

For the past three decades, the N.R.A. has been one of the most influential special-interest groups in the country. Without an infusion of cash, and a return to relative stability, it could find itself on the sidelines of the 2020 election, a dramatic difference from 2016. Campaign finance records show that that year the organization spent more than thirty million dollars to help elect Donald Trump, more than any other special-interest group.

Internal N.R.A. documents previously obtained by The Trace and The New Yorker described expenses and questionable transactions and business arrangements involving the organization’s top executives, favored venders, and consultants. Through Brewer, the N.R.A. said that it had “serious concerns about the accuracy” of the reporting, but would not comment on “privileged communications or personnel matters.” Attorneys general in New York and Washington, D.C., have opened inquiries into whether the N.R.A. violated its charitable status by providing excessive financial benefits to its executives and supporters. The D.C. attorney general’s office declined to comment on its inquiry beyond an initial statement, and the New York office did not respond to requests for comment.

Earlier this month, four N.R.A. board members publicly called for an “independent review of the millions of dollars in payments to Brewer, Attorneys & Counselors for legal fees.” But other N.R.A. senior officials continue to defend the group. Carolyn Meadows, the N.R.A.’s president, told ProPublica, “I have never worked with an outside law firm that is more on call, attentive, and positively in tune to the needs of their client.” Charles Cotton, the N.R.A.’s first vice-president and the chairman of the audit committee, added that Cummins’s allegations “reflect a misinformed view of the Brewer firm, its billings, and its advocacy for the N.R.A.”

Brewer’s N.R.A. legal strategy suffered a setback in May, in a First Amendment case against a New York State financial regulator. A judge ruled that the N.R.A. could collect no damages from defendants in their official capacities, even if it prevailed.

Brewer’s firm has offices in Dallas and New York and has represented celebrities such as 50 Cent and major corporations such as 3M, which ultimately settled an environmental suit for eight hundred and fifty million dollars, in 2018. Starting in the mid-nineteen-eighties, Brewer gained a reputation for pioneering unusually aggressive legal tactics that could yield successful outcomes for corporate clients.

But these tactics caused others to question the firm’s conduct. In 1998, the Dallas Observer ran a lengthy story on Brewer that described his firm, then called Bickel & Brewer, as “a pariah within the local legal community, accused of pushing the ethical envelope, running up the costs of litigation, and destroying the gentility of the Dallas Bar.” Brewer, a native New Yorker, characterized his firm’s approach to litigation at the time as “zealous advocacy,” marketing his practice to potential clients as “New York-quality.”

“Bill’s representation of the N.R.A. is a classic example of ‘servicing the client to death,’ ” Hal Marshall, a former Bickel & Brewer partner, told ProPublica. “We tried to leave no stone unturned in our cases, and it often yielded great results. On the other hand, the bills were hefty.”

In 2016, Brewer was fined a hundred and seventy-seven thousand dollars for attempting to influence potential jurors and witnesses in a Texas case. He denied any impropriety and has appealed the ruling, which the Texas Supreme Court will hear arguments on soon. In 2018, a judge found that Brewer had failed to disclose the Texas fine in an N.R.A. suit against an insurance broker in Virginia. After the omission was reported by The Trace, the judge threw Brewer off the case.