The independent Senate candidate’s changing positions and dubious honesty make him the Charlie Crist of Utah.
The independent Senate candidate’s changing positions and dubious honesty make him the Charlie Crist of Utah.
E van McMullin was a 40-year-old former Mormon missionary, CIA officer, investment banker, and congressional staffer, entirely unknown to the public, when he was recruited in 2016 to offer Republican voters an outlet for a protest vote against Donald Trump. There was no pretense at the time that McMullin was prepared for the presidency or expected to win it; he was selected by the people now behind the Lincoln Project and the Bulwark only after more experienced politicians such as Mitt Romney and public commentators such as David French (who was then writing for National Review) turned down the mission. At the time, McMullin’s task was simply to provide a placeholder for Republican and Republican-leaning voters who were mortified by the choices on offer and had, for the most part, already decided not to vote for Trump.
I and other conservative Republican voters pulled the lever for McMullin for president six years ago in order to send a message that our quarrel was not with Republican policy positions but with Trump’s unfitness for office. All McMullin had to do in order to be a vessel for that protest was to be more honorable than Trump or Hillary Clinton, more pro-life than Clinton, Gary Johnson, or Jill Stein, less apparently isolationist than Trump, Johnson, or Stein, and generally not raise any significant dissent from Republican positions on the issues. These were all low bars.
Pro-Life . . . Always?
At the time, McMullin warmed to the task. In a panel interview on Bret Baier’s show on Fox News, McMullin told George Will that he was committed to overturning Roe v. Wade, contrasting this with his willingness to “accept” the Supreme Court’s decision on same-sex marriage:
WILL: You say that as a Mormon you believe marriage is between a man and a woman. . . . But you say the court has spoken. You respect the court’s opinion, and we should move on. Does that not also apply [to] Roe v. Wade, which has been the law of the land for 43 years? And would you in appointing judges appoint judges who you think or ask would overturn Roe v. Wade?
MCMULLIN: Yes. It’s a good question and a fair question. But I see the issues differently. On the matter — on the issue of life, it’s life. So I actually would pursue appointment, court appointments that would overturn Roe v. Wade. So that’s my view. But I do believe on the issue of gay marriage that the American people have a certain positioning. The court has spoken. And, again, that’s not a matter of life. So I respect the decision and I do think it’s time to move on. But, on a matter of life, I remain committed to overturning Roe v. Wade.
McMullin amplified this line for his followers on Twitter, “On the issue of life, it’s LIFE, so I would pursue court appointments that would overturn Roe v. Wade.” As Nick Gillespie of Reason noted at the time, “McMullin is anti-abortion and said that he would work to overthrow Roe v. Wade and otherwise limit and ban the procedure.”
McMullin not only painted himself as deeply pro-life and anti-Roe during the 2016 campaign, he made it a centerpiece of his message. In August 2016, promoting his interview with Glenn Beck on Blaze Radio, he tweeted, “I’m the only conservative. I’m the only pro-life candidate in the race. I’m the only real gun owner.” He told Beck, in describing his overall philosophy, “I’m most interested in returning power to the states.” In October 2016, he told WBUR radio in Boston, “I would like to see Roe v. Wade overturned. I believe that how we treat life in this country is a true test of our humanity. I understand it’s a very polarizing issue, but I think we’ve got to respect life in this country, from conception to natural death.” He said repeatedly that he would put originalists on the Supreme Court.
Tweeting during the debates in October, he portrayed himself as standing to Trump’s right on abortion: Trump “only feigned to be pro-life when he decided to run for president. Previously, he supported late-term abortions. . . . Why can’t [Trump] actually say the words ‘I want Roe v Wade overturned?’ I’m the only pro-life candidate in the race.” He introduced an ad (since deleted from YouTube) with “I’m pro-life. That’s my faith. That’s my heart. And that’s how I’ll lead.”
The ad, which is still up on Facebook, was devoted entirely to abortion and had McMullin and his running mate (political consultant Mindy Finn) looking voters in the eye and reassuring them: “For us, being pro-life isn’t a campaign slogan — it’s a solemn promise” and “We’re the only consistently, passionately, and firmly pro-life candidates in this race.” The closing tagline was “Pro-life. Always.” It specifically focused fire on Hillary Clinton for receiving support from Planned Parenthood, and on Trump for defending Planned Parenthood and refusing to answer whether he had ever given the organization money. Watch for yourself:
In the months after Trump’s victory, McMullin continued to portray himself as a pro-life conservative. He tweeted in February 2017, “I’m pro-life & support the 2nd Amendment.” In March 2017, he congratulated Neil Gorsuch on his Supreme Court nomination. As late as 2018, when he was turning against Brett Kavanaugh, McMullin claimed, “I support originalists.”
Abortion was far from the only area in which McMullin, in 2016, depicted himself as a conventional Republican. He told NPR, “I stand for limited government. . . . I am, I believe, truly the only conservative in this race.” He told Beck that he opposed federal involvement in education, that “my stimulus plan is getting the government out of the way of free enterprise,” and that “we absolutely just must defeat Islamist terrorism.” In his Fox interview, McMullin said that “we need to secure our border first and foremost” and even endorsed walling off parts of the border with Mexico — as Trump ended up doing: “In some places a wall is necessary, in other places a double wall is necessary. . . . I’m for whatever it takes to secure our border with Mexico.” To Beck, he said, “I do agree with Donald that we need to secure the border.” He argued that we should “flatten out” the tax code in accord with Paul Ryan’s proposals and keep Gitmo open. He said that Hillary Clinton was “absolutely dangerous . . . absolutely unacceptable and unfit for office.”
In his stump speech in Utah, he was introduced by a Utah state senator who emphasized that neither Trump nor Clinton was “moral and religious,” and McMullin cast himself as representing “a new conservative movement” and argued that his candidacy was “helping on the down-ballot situation” by drawing out dispirited Republicans to go vote — in a year when the most prominent down-ballot Republican in Utah was Mike Lee.
That was then. Today, of course, McMullin is running for the Senate as an independent against Lee, a stalwart pro-life Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee. To do so, McMullin needs the votes of Democrats and relies upon the financial backing of left-wing Resistance types around the country. So, he has since talked like a Democratic politician who wants credit for being “pro-life” but always votes the other way: wielding the “pro-life” label against Trump’s positions on immigration and other issues, talking about declining abortion rates and “common ground,” and growing suspiciously silent on questions such as Planned Parenthood funding and late-term abortion that he stressed in 2016.
When the Dobbs opinion leaked, McMullin put out a statement claiming to still be “a pro-life Utahn” but saying nothing about whether Roe should be overturned or what pro-life steps could or should be taken; all he could manage was to denounce “extremist laws” such as “total bans on abortion.” He then went on left-wing MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan’s show, where Hasan asked point-blank: “Just to be clear, you don’t support overturning Roe v. Wade anymore as you did in 2016? I’m just trying to get clarity.” McMullin, clearly uncomfortable and squirming, answered, “I — I do not — I do not think that that is the way for the country to move forward on this issue” and argued instead for promoting contraception and “less judgment and more compassion.” Hasan then asked for a “yes or no” about a vote on a national abortion ban, and McMullin said “no”:
Tonight, I pushed Senate candidate @EvanMcMullin, whose independent campaign against sitting GOP senator Mike Lee in Utah is being backed by the state's Democratic Party, on his anti-Roe views in 2016 versus his pro-Roe views in 2022.
Watch our exchange:pic.twitter.com/oAD8KqctNJ
— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) May 9, 2022
McMullin told the Salt Lake Tribune that he now supports federal legislation to limit state abortion laws: “He believes that states should have a role in shaping their own abortion policy, but that the federal government should step in to prevent states from going to ‘extremes.’ Among those extremes, he noted, were forcing children who were the victims of rape to carry pregnancies to term, preventing pregnant people from traveling to obtain an abortion and banning contraceptives.” McMullin can conceive of no actions he might take on abortion other than to use government power against pro-lifers.
What about his once-ferocious criticism of ties to Planned Parenthood? Even aside from accepting the wholehearted support of the Democratic Party for his candidacy, McMullin’s own bottom line at this point relies heavily on big Planned Parenthood supporters. You have to follow the money trail. A significant source of his income — $359,996 in 2021 in his most recent financial disclosure — comes from McMullin Finn LLC, a consulting firm he and Finn co-founded. McMullin Finn, in turn, derives significant income from management fees for the Stand Up Republic Foundation, previously Stand Up Ideas Inc., McMullin’s nonprofit. In 2017, for example, Stand Up Ideas paid $222,305 to McMullin Finn LLC and $45,000 to McMullin directly. In 2018, it paid $374,000 to McMullin Finn.
Who funds Stand Up Republic? A major donor is the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, to the tune of $250,000 in 2018 and $125,000 in 2019. The foundation is a proud financier of abortion: “The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation has a long and proud history of supporting women’s ability to plan whether and when to have children. When the foundation was launched nearly 50 years ago, one of its very first grantees was a reproductive health and rights organization. Today, the foundation’s commitment to ensuring that family planning and abortion services are available to all women remains one of its most enduring philanthropic commitments, and is expressed through grantmaking both at home and around the world.” The foundation touts $165 million in grants in international abortion work between 2014 and 2020, and lists $1 million to Planned Parenthood in 2005, $500,000 to International Planned Parenthood Federation in 2010, and $39,000 to the National Abortion Federation in 2000 as exemplary donations on its website. It loudly denounced Dobbs.
A second major financial backer to McMullin’s nonprofit is the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, which gave $474,000 in 2017 and another $23,106 in 2018. After Dobbs, the Silicon Valley Community Foundation put out a statement saying that the “philanthropic sector should prioritize organizations that support reproductive justice and women’s rights,” commending the California legislature for “pledging millions of dollars to expand abortion access in California,” promising that it would “continue to invest in organizations . . . whose programs address access to reproductive health care and justice and gender equity,” and recommending its own donors to give to Planned Parenthood Mar Monte, Access Reproductive Justice, Abortion Care Network, URGE (Unite for Reproductive & Gender Equity), and National Women’s Law Center. The Silicon Valley Community Foundation gave Planned Parenthood Federation of America Inc. $1,314,251 in 2017. It has been a major donor to the NARAL Pro-Choice America Foundation, the Center for Reproductive Rights, International Planned Parenthood Federation, National Network of Abortion Funds, Access Women’s Health Justice, and numerous state and local Planned Parenthood affiliates.
With financial backers like that, no wonder McMullin lost his voice on overturning Roe.
It’s not just abortion. Instead of emphasizing his commitment to originalism, McMullin now says that he is “concerned about the politicization of the Judiciary and the Supreme Court. It’s threatening the rule of law and basic rights like voting. We need to move past the old partisan litmus tests and support judges who 1) are qualified and 2) will impartially uphold the law.” He backs the Democrats’ power grab in the Senate: “I support filibuster reform. I think the threshold for overcoming it should be lowered and that Senators should be required to speak on the floor for the length of their filibuster. We cannot allow the filibuster to prevent the protection of essential rights like voting.” McMullin blasted Lee for opposing new federal gun legislation: “The gun bill is historic, bipartisan legislation that’s supported by a majority of Americans. Not only did Mike Lee vote against it — he actively tried to sabotage it.” By 2018, McMullin was deriding “the silly wall” on the border. He even enthused about Joe Biden’s inaugural address.
He’s also flip-flopped on federal involvement in education and come out against conservatives on education, again via the Salt Lake Tribune: “The federal government also has a role to play in getting money to underfunded schools, he said. McMullin, who has described himself as a conservative, also dismissed right-wing claims attacking ‘critical race theory’ in schools, saying people are being misled by ‘extremist conspiracism’ about school curriculum and ‘it’s creating problems for everyone.’” He’s now for “investing in renewable energy,” and when asked how he would cut spending, he highlighted “by ‘avoiding unnecessary wars’ and helping Medicare to lower health care costs by enabling it to negotiate prescription prices and other health care reforms.” Politico noted that McMullin said he “would probably have supported Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson plus bipartisan bills on infrastructure, gun safety and microchips.”
There is a reason why I and so many other 2016 McMullin voters now openly regret choosing him as a vehicle for our protest votes. He has not kept faith with us; he has not acted honorably. He is simply another opportunist who turned his 15 minutes of fame into a gravy train.
Spy vs. Spy
Much of McMullin’s public profile is a pose, aimed at the sensibilities of centrist voters while ducking discussion of tough issues. He blasts “special interests” without mentioning that his own firm engages in extensive lobbying (Stand Up Ideas spent, per its financial disclosures, over $400,000 on lobbying in 2018-19), and is more than happy to take donations from lobbyists. It is fitting that his 2021 financial-disclosure report listed ownership of two residences — one in Washington, D.C., and one in Alexandria, Va. — but none in Utah. Even his much-touted CIA work has been called into question. In 2016, Ali Watkins of BuzzFeed reported:
Since McMullin announced his candidacy in August, some current and former intelligence officials have engaged in half-hearted gossip about who, exactly, McMullin is, and where his decade with the agency took him. . . . That McMullin (who went by David during his time at the CIA) has publicly said so much about his agency career is, in and of itself, an oddity. . . . Three former counterterrorism officers who served in the same regions during the same timeframes said they had never heard of McMullin, and questioned why such a standout case officer hadn’t been on their radar during their own service in the region.
“His career as he professes it to be just doesn’t make it any sense,” said John Kiriakou, a CIA counterterrorism officer turned whistleblower who worked in the same regions during the same time frame as McMullin. “I was chief of counterterrorism operations in Pakistan, and then I was the chief of the counterterror group in the [Osama] bin Laden unit . . . and I have never heard of this guy.”
To be fair, Kiriakou was working with Gary Johnson’s campaign at the time. But McMullin doesn’t seem to even claim to have the fluency in Arabic or other local languages needed to have been the sort of recruiter of terrorist turncoats he claims himself to have been.
As with so many things in the intelligence world, it is impossible for outsiders to know the truth of what McMullin actually did in government service, but he has been an enthusiast of the wildest and worst of the intelligence community’s efforts to take down Trump as well as the pundit world’s most hysterical efforts to play at counterintelligence. When Jonathan Chait claimed that Trump had been a Russian asset since 1987, McMullin wrote that Chait’s piece was “the best summary and assessment of publicly known facts regarding the nature of President Trump’s relationship with Moscow so far. Sometimes things simply are what they seem.” McMullin described the Putin–Trump relationship as one that “bears hallmarks of an intel officer’s relationship with an asset,” and claimed that there was “little other explanation for Trump’s unwavering subservience to Putin” other than that “Trump had been compromised by Moscow.” Nothing of the sort has ever surfaced. While Trump had business interests in Russia and some shady people in his 2016 campaign circles, his actual administration policies were hardly favorable to Putin, and Trump’s bromance with the Russian leader is much more sanely explained by defects in Trump’s personality rather than spy-novel fantasies. McMullin ought to have known better.
On the now-discredited Steele dossier, McMullin claimed that “Steele [was] a trusted source,” and that the Justice Department had provided “evidence from multiple independent sources that confirmed information in the ‘Steele dossier.’” He wrote that “Chris Steele and Ivanka Trump were pals. So much for the claim that Steele’s work was driven by anti-Trump bias rather than the truth.” So much for that?
McMullin, at this writing, has 516,251 Twitter followers, a substantial online presence for a man who won 732,409 votes out of 137 million cast six years ago. But running as a spoiler is one thing; running to win is another. Even in 2016, his 243,690 votes in Utah were less than half of Trump’s haul of 515,231 votes or the 760,241 cast for Mike Lee. In 2020, 865,140 voters in Utah backed Trump, who won the state by 20 points.
As we’ve seen in past Senate elections — think of Greg Orman in Kansas — the trouble with posturing as a centrist is that you need to lock down one party’s base, especially when it’s the smaller party in the state. McMullin can’t and won’t do anything to break with Utah Democrats on anything they really care about. But doing so means throwing overboard his own previously stated convictions, even ones that he once claimed to be heartfelt commitments. At some point, voters notice. Every time McMullin opens his mouth, he sounds more like Utah’s Charlie Crist.