White House Says Nra Tainting Waco Hearings Gun Lobby Accused Of Subverting Investigation

The White House on Monday said the House hearings beginning Wednesday on the 1993 siege near Waco, Texas, in which 84 people died, were in danger of being “subverted” because the National Rifle Association has helped Republicans prepare for the hearings.

White House press secretary Michael McCurry was referring to news accounts that a Texas social worker with key information about the Waco controversy spoke at length with an NRA researcher because she thought the researcher worked for the committee.

Moreover, the Republican-controlled committee arranged for an engineering firm, paid $25,000 by the NRA, to conduct X-ray tests on 48 firearms pulled from the ashes of Waco to see whether they had been converted to illegal machine guns, as federal agents said. The Justice Department forbade the inspections.

McCurry said the Waco committee’s ability to expose the truth is “subverted when a very extreme organization, like the National Rifle Association, comes in and basically hijacks these hearings by paying for investigators, placing them right in the center of the fact-finding process.

“That would seem to jeopardize any sense that these hearings are going to be fair,” McCurry said. He added that “it is astonishing that the Republican majority in Congress would allow the NRA to purchase outside assistance from an organization that is using these hearings for its own agenda, quite clearly.”

The social worker, Joyce Sparks, had several conversations with a woman named Fran Haga. She said the woman told her she was “with the Waco hearing team, working on putting together the Waco hearings.” Sparks said Haga later acknowledged she was with the NRA.

Haga’s and her colleagues’ research went to the committee, which said the NRA is only one of many groups submitting information to it.

The NRA is a staunch opponent of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, whose actions at Waco will be scrutinized by the panel.

Sparks felt deceived, and her story has been circulated in Washington by Rep. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y. Monday Schumer asked that a bipartisan panel of Congress members be appointed to look into the NRA’s role in the hearings. The NRA said Schumer is using “diversionary tactics” to derail the hearings.