Evan McMullin, the “independent” Senate candidate from Utah, is the same charlatan who made a weird 2016 run for the White House.
Now he is amply confirming that the doubts raised about him back then were correct. Running against the solidly constitutional-conservative incumbent, Republican Mike Lee, McMullin this month shamelessly tried to monetize the anniversary of 9/11 by overselling his work in the CIA.
Before delving into the tawdriness of McMullin cashing in on his CIA service and 2016 campaign, it’s worth reading Dan McLaughlin’s brutally accurate takedown of McMullin at National Review Online, which portrayed him as a “shape-shifting” phony. McMullin has now fudged his prior positions and/or abandoned conservatism entirely on abortion, guns, the Supreme Court, a border wall, critical race theory, and healthcare.
Despite supposedly being an astute intelligence analyst, McMullin has embraced the outlandish claim that former President Donald Trump is an intelligence asset of Russia and has been since 1987 — four years before the Soviet Union collapsed.
It’s one thing to blast Trump for admiring Russian President Vladimir Putin or being too generous toward him with compliments. It is quite another to say he was a Soviet collaborationist. McMullin’s conspiracy theorism raises questions about his mental fitness to serve in elected office.
McMullin has raked in hundreds of thousands of dollars by consulting and lobbying since his 2016 race. He has also advertised using his onetime job as an analyst for the CIA. Earlier this month, he was at it again.
“Following 9/11,” read his email fundraising solicitation on Sept. 12, “Evan served in the CIA in the most dangerous place on Earth because it was the best way he knew how to defend American democracy.”
Then, deliberately likening his opponent Lee to foreign tyrants, he wrote that “as an undercover CIA officer, Evan watched firsthand … [and] saw the chilling effects of extremism and the terror it wrought on people simply trying to live their lives.”
Therefore, oh, targeted sucker, won’t you please “chip in $25” or even “chip in $250” or “a monthly recurring donation” so McMullin can “defend democracy” from evildoers such as Lee?
There is some dispute about the CIA service that McMullin so regularly holds up as a political prop. Several people with whom he worked vouch for him, but several others who served in the same region as McMullin said they had “never heard” of him or that “his career as he professes it to be just doesn’t make any sense.”
Either way, McMullin claimed to be conservative during that 2016 run. By 2017, he was already supporting liberal Ralph Northam for governor of Virginia while attacking establishment-conservative Ed Gillespie, the Republican nominee, for “peddl[ing] fear and white nationalism.” McMullin supported an assistant attorney general who refused orders to do her job. He accused Republicans of “bigotry” merely for opposing a left-wing version of how to fix the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program legislatively. And more liberalism — lots of it. All signs suggest that the man was never being straightforward or honest about who he was or what he believed.
Meanwhile, his “I was CIA” fundraising appeal includes the bold assertion that Lee was putting “special interests above American democracy” — at the exact same time McMullin himself accepts direct donations from top lobbyists, including those whose firms represent top pharmaceutical, tobacco, oil, and health-insurance companies, among others.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with accepting such donations, but the hypocrisy of doing so while accusing one’s opponent of “special interest” ties is just over-the-top stupid.
McMullin is running as an independent, but with the full support of the Utah Democratic Party. A man who is everything all at once is, at his core, nothing.
Who even knows what this person really believes? But he certainly does not belong in the Senate.
