Wayne LaPierre of the National Rifle Association of America. Photo: Diego M. Radzinschi/ALM.

An already contentious legal war between the National Rifle Association and its recently estranged public relations firm Ackerman McQueen is getting messier, as lawyers head to three federal courts to challenge what it describes as "harassing" subpoenas issued by the NRA to the firm's current and former clients.

The NRA issued the subpoenas in conjunction with its lawsuit against the PR firm in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, in which the firm has also filed a counter complaint. On Friday, attorneys for Ackerman McQueen with several law firms, including Dorsey & White, filed motions in three different federal courts to quash the subpoenas sent to current and former clients.

The motions to quash are largely similar and were filed in the Eastern District of Virginia, the Western District of Texas and the Western District of Oklahoma. They all allege the NRA's attorneys have "served numerous third-party subpoenas to current and former clients of AMc around the country" with "the sole purpose to harass AMc's current and former clients, and disrupt their business relationships."

The motions, all filed Friday, say the subpoenas were issued to support NRA's allegation that many of the public relations firm's business relationships "were shut down because of their ineffectiveness, costliness, and Defendant's reluctance to provide specific performance data in accordance with its obligations."

Each motion was filed by attorneys from different law firms: Attorneys with Schertler and Onorato filed the motion against a subpoena to the American Clean Skies Foundation in the Eastern District of Virginia, while the Dorsey & White team, which is the handling the bulk of the firm's litigation, filed the motion in Western Texas.

R. Thompson "Tom" Cooper of the Oklahoma-based firm Roberson, Kolker, Cooper & Goeres filed the motion in Western Oklahoma.

Among the outside parties who received subpoenas are Six Flags, Remington Firearms, the Chickasaw Nation, the Oklahoma Department of Tourism and Recreation, and the Greater Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce, according to the filings.

Lawyers said two of the subpoenas—to the Oklahoma State University Foundation and Williams Energy Resources—were issued to groups that never had relationships with Ackerman McQueen and should be thrown out on those grounds alone.

For other companies, like Six Flags, the attorneys argue they have not been clients for several years and therefore any information collected would be irrelevant. The Six Flags motion says that relationship ended in 1999 or 2000.

The filings allege that the breadth of the subpoenas are overbroad, capturing the entirety of the firm's relationship with the clients. The attorneys argue that NRA's allegations of the firm's conduct start in 2015 and that the extended timeline places too big of a burden on the current and ex-clients.

"Apparently having no factual support for this damaging—and very public—allegation, the NRA has embarked on a blitzkrieg-scale effort to harass and intrude upon the business operations of AMc's current and former clients," the motion filed in Oklahoma reads.

NRA lead attorney William Brewer III of Brewer, Attorneys & Counselors, said in a statement that it "is no surprise that Ackerman McQueen seeks to limit the disclosure of evidence which reflects on the agency's conduct."

"Our client believes that a pattern of fraud and corruption existed within the agency," he said. "Naturally, the client believes that the discovery it is pursuing will further evidence the fraud at the agency."

The lawyers also invoke Brewer's relationship to the McQueen family—his brother-in-law is Revan McQueen, the company's current CEO—describing it as a "unique, albeit soap-opera-like, twist that militates in favor of quashing the subpoena."

"Through the issuance of the subpoena, the NRA seeks unrestricted access to decades of information about AMc's confidential business practices, including budgets, billing information, staffing, operations, and client communications, which would circumvent a protective order walling-off one of the NRA's lawyers from AMc's highly confidential information in the Virginia cases," the motion reads. "The dubious motives behind this overbroad subpoena create the very undue burden the law prohibits."

Brewer in a statement said the invocation of his private family affairs "in order to shift the focus from the agency's own conduct is shameless."

"The NRA believes Ackerman's attacks on the NRA and others are, themselves, an insight into what is now a twisted and dysfunctional organization," Brewer said.

The NRA had worked with Ackerman McQueen since the 1980s, but first sued the public relations firm last year, including accusations that it knowingly hid the poor performance of NRATV, the NRA's since-shuttered online channel.

The American Clean Skies Foundation was one of the only subpoenaed parties explicitly mentioned in the NRA's earlier filings in Texas federal court, alleging that Ackerman McQueen had set up a digital platform for the nonprofit that failed along the lines of NRATV.

This fight to toss out the subpoenas is one of a series of battles between the lawyers for each party. The NRA first sued Ackerman McQueen in 2019 in local court in Alexandria, Virginia, and filed a federal complaint later that year in the Northern District of Texas.

In both legal fights, the NRA alleges the PR firm breached its fiduciary duty and broke its services agreement with the gun group over an alleged extortion plot to oust NRA chief executive Wayne LaPierre, and its running of NRATV.

The NRA is also seeking documents still in the firm's possession. The motions filed Friday indicated that Ackerman McQueen is willing to hand over the documents "but also for which the NRA must first pay AMc to cover the expense of the return."

The NRA also filed a motion for sanctions against Ackerman McQueen in Texas federal court Jan. 22, claiming the firm refused to comply with deadlines to hand over documents.

"Given the level of obstruction committed by Defendants over multiple [of] their Responses; their frivolous dispute over the temporal scope of discovery, their continuous refusal to produce documents, and their constant refusal to meet-and-confer with Defendants, the NRA respectfully requests that the Court sanction Defendants and award the NRA attorney's fees and cost in connection with this motion," the motion reads.

The Ackerman McQueen motions filed Friday state that the NRA has served them more than 600 discovery requests between the Texas and Virginia cases.

Brian Mason, one of the Dorsey & White attorneys, declined to comment on the motion for sanctions. The team's formal response is expected to be filed Wednesday.

At least one other outside party has sought to kill a subpoena for its records in relation to the Texas lawsuit. Attorneys for DJ Investments, a company formed in a past effort to help buy LaPierre and his wife a house but then pulled out of the arrangement, claims it has nothing to do with the facts of the Texas case.

"In addition to imposing an undue burden and seeking documents that are not relevant to the claims and defenses alleged in this case," lawyers from the Dallas-based firm Johnston Tobey Baruch wrote, some of the requests "are also improper to the extent they seek privileged attorney-client communications between DJ Investments or WBB Investments and their attorneys."

The NRA argues the information is needed to respond to claims made by Ackerman McQueen about the firm. Senior U.S. District Judge A. Joe Fish of the Northern District of Texas, who is overseeing the case, has referred the motion to quash that subpoena to a magistrate judge.

One of the attorneys for DJ Investments, Randy Johnston, suggested the parties may be trying to make the legal fight as difficult as possible for each other.

"There's a big fight between the actual parties in this litigation, and neither of them are my client," Johnston said. "Leave this entity, this little-bitty entity that has nothing to do with it, out of it."