# David Keene **David Arthur Keene** (May 20, 1945 – March 8, 2026) ran the [[American Conservative Union]] — and therefore the [[Conservative Political Action Conference]] — for twenty-seven years, from 1984 to 2011, then moved directly to the presidency of the [[NRA]] (2011–2013). Holding both of the movement's great membership-and-convention machines in succession, his career is the clearest single bridge between Goldwater-era [[Movement Conservatism]] and the institutions that later carried the Trump coalition. He died of pancreatic cancer in a Baltimore hospital at 80. He matters to this vault for three reasons: he built CPAC into the mass event that [[Matt Schlapp]] later turned into a Trump stage; he was the sitting NRA president when [[Alexander Torshin]] and [[Maria Butina]] worked their way into the NRA; and in his last years he publicly asked how CPAC had come to what it became. > [!note] Who runs CPAC now > Keene has not run CPAC since February 2011. The chain of ACU chairmen is **Keene (1984–2011) → [[Al Cárdenas]] (2011–2014) → [[Matt Schlapp]] (2014–present)**. The Boston Globe obituary dates Keene's chairmanship from 1982; Wikipedia and contemporaneous 2011 reporting (TPM) say 1984, which this page follows. ## Early career - Born in Rockford, Illinois; raised in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, in a union household — his father was a machinist and union organizer, his mother president of a UAW women's auxiliary (Boston Globe). He handed out literature for John F. Kennedy in 1960 before a high-school librarian put Hayek in his hands. - University of Wisconsin (political science); J.D., University of Wisconsin Law School, 1970. Founded a [[Young Americans for Freedom]] chapter and rose to YAF national chairman — the youth organization [[William F. Buckley Jr.]] helped found in 1960. - 1969: lost a Wisconsin State Senate special election by less than one percent, with [[Richard Nixon]]'s endorsement — his only run for office. - Political assistant to Vice President [[Spiro Agnew]]; executive assistant to Sen. [[James L. Buckley]] of New York. - 1976: southern regional coordinator for [[Ronald Reagan]]'s challenge to Gerald Ford. 1980: national political director for [[George H.W. Bush]]'s presidential campaign. Later advised [[Bob Dole]] (1988, 1996) and [[Mitt Romney]] (2012). ## ACU and CPAC (1984–2011) Under Keene, CPAC grew from a gathering of a few hundred into an event drawing more than 10,000 (Boston Globe). [[Grover Norquist]]'s National Review tribute says Keene "made it a point not to be on stage" so younger conservatives could be launched from it. Two moments from the end of his tenure foreshadow everything after it: - **February 2011 — Trump's debut.** [[Donald Trump]] addressed CPAC in 2011, the speech the Globe calls his first big political speech. Keene stepped down the day before that conference opened; the ACU board elected [[Al Cárdenas]] without opposition (TPM, 2011-02-09). - **The GOProud fight.** Keene let a group of gay Republicans (GOProud) participate; the [[Heritage Foundation]], [[Liberty University]] and Sen. [[Jim DeMint]] boycotted. The movement's tolerance for internal dissent was already the live question. **The embezzlement.** In June 2011 Keene's ex-wife, Diana Hubbard Carr, the ACU's administrative director who kept its books, pleaded guilty to mail fraud for diverting ACU funds from January 2006 through June 2009; court documents put the amount between $120,000 and $400,000 (DOJ E.D. Va.; WJLA). Keene was not accused of wrongdoing. **Lobbying.** While at the Carmen Group in 2006–2007 he represented the governments of Nigeria and Algeria (Wikipedia). ## NRA president (2011–2013) Keene served the NRA's customary two one-year terms. He was president during the [[Sandy Hook Shooting]] in December 2012, appearing alongside [[Wayne LaPierre]] in the response that blamed video games and the news media, and later wrote that he "worked tirelessly to keep the U.S. from adopting Obama gun control legislation in 2013" (Boston Globe). See [[NRA Political Machine]]. ## The Torshin and Butina channel Keene was the senior American figure the [[Russia-NRA Connection]] was built through. The facts below come from on-camera speech and from a Senate Judiciary Committee letter; they show cultivation and access, **not** any finding that Keene knew he was dealing with an intelligence operation. Butina pleaded guilty in December 2018 to acting as an unregistered Russian agent; Keene was never charged with anything. - **2011** — Keene was reportedly introduced to [[Alexander Torshin]] (Sen. [[Dianne Feinstein]]'s letter to Keene, 2018-01-25). Torshin attended NRA annual meetings in 2011 and 2012; in April 2012 he posted a photo with Keene at the St. Louis convention, captioned as being with the NRA president (Mother Jones). - **November 2013, Moscow** — as sitting NRA president, Keene spoke at the annual meeting of Butina's group The Right to Bear Arms, introduced by Butina. On video: "over the course of the last three years, I've hosted your senator, Alexander Torshin, at the National Rifle Association annual meetings … There are no people that are more alike than Americans and Russians. And we need to work together." Around the same trip he enlisted [[John Bolton]], then on the NRA's international affairs subcommittee, to record a video that the group used to lobby the Russian legislature (Mother Jones). - **2014** — Butina reportedly attended the NRA annual meeting as Keene's guest (Feinstein letter). - **December 2015** — Keene was a confirmed participant in the NRA delegation to Moscow, alongside Milwaukee County Sheriff [[David Clarke]], [[Pete Brownell]], Joe Gregory and others; Butina's group helped pay for it. Sens. Wyden, Blumenthal, Warren and Whitehouse wrote to all seven confirmed participants in July 2018. - **January 2018** — the Senate Judiciary Committee asked him for documents and an interview about Torshin and Butina. > [!important] Why the title matters > The vault previously described Keene as a "former NRA president" in the 2011–2013 window. He was the **sitting** president. Torshin was hosted at NRA meetings by the organization's head, and Butina's Moscow group got the NRA president on its stage — which is what made the relationship valuable to the Russians in the first place. ## Washington Times and later positions After the NRA, Keene was opinion editor and then a columnist at the [[Washington Times]], and wrote a weekly column for *The Hill*. His late politics were more mixed than his résumé suggests: - **Civil-liberties conservative.** Opposed parts of the [[USA PATRIOT Act]] alongside the [[ACLU]]; co-founded the American Freedom Agenda (2007) and co-chaired the Constitution Project's Liberty and Security committee, defending habeas corpus for detainees. Norquist dates his work with the ACLU from [[Buckley v. Valeo]] onward. - **Criminal-justice reform.** A founding member of Right On Crime and an advocate of ending mandatory minimums, a position shaped by his own son's ten-year prison sentence; he worked with the ACLU on reforming the Prison Litigation Reform Act. - **Trump loyalist on personnel.** Generally supported Trump and defended second-term appointees, calling [[Kash Patel]] "the one man who might be able to investigate how the once-vaunted FBI has been weaponized" (Boston Globe). - **Critic of what CPAC became.** In 2024 he criticized [[Jack Posobiec]]'s CPAC speech and [[Steve Bannon]]'s reaction to it: "I wondered, listening to this nonsense, how it has come to this." - **2016 book:** *Shall Not Be Infringed: The New Assaults on Your Second Amendment* (Skyhorse). - **June 2021:** delivered a commencement speech to 3,044 empty chairs at a staged Las Vegas "graduation" — a stunt by Change the Ref, the gun-safety group founded by parents of a Parkland victim, later released as an anti-gun video. ## Analytical note Keene's career compresses the whole arc that the [[American Conservative Union]] page describes. He was a fusionist institution-builder — YAF, Buckley, Reagan, Bush — whose two great institutions, CPAC and the NRA, each became an entry point for something he did not build: CPAC for Trump (who debuted there the week Keene left), and the NRA for a Russian influence operation (which courted him by name). His late-life lament about CPAC is the movement-conservative account of that arc; this vault's account is that he left the doors open. ## See Also - [[American Conservative Union]] · [[Conservative Political Action Conference]] · [[CPAC Hungary]] - [[Matt Schlapp]] · [[Al Cárdenas]] - [[NRA]] · [[NRA Political Machine]] · [[Wayne LaPierre]] - [[Russia-NRA Connection]] · [[Alexander Torshin]] · [[Maria Butina]] - [[Young Americans for Freedom]] · [[Movement Conservatism]]