Evan McMullin
David Evan McMullin is an American politician and former Central Intelligence Agency officer. He ran unsuccessfully in both the 2022 United States Senate election and the 2016 United States presidential election, both as an independent.
His 2022 run made headlines throughout the United States. “McMullin and some of Utah’s top Democrats convinced the Utah Democratic Party to drop its own candidate to back his independent run at Lee — an unprecedented move in Utah politics, perhaps anywhere. McMullin has gone hard after Lee, especially on his role in former President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.”[1]
In a Deseret News article, reporter Dennis Romboy noted that “in 2016, a white nationalist supporter of Donald Trump launched a robocall smear campaign against independent presidential candidate Evan McMullin, attacking his status as an unmarried man. ‘Evan is over 40 years old and is not married and doesn’t even have a girlfriend,’ the ad targeting about 200,000 Utah residents said, among other things.”[2]
McMullin said that “he was aware that people in Utah wondered why he was not married given the importance his church, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, places on marriage.” Working as an operations officer with the CIA for 11 years going undercover made it difficult for him to date. He went “long periods of time when not even his parents knew where or who he was.” He concluded his service with the CIA in 2010 “because he realized he would never have the chance to become a husband and father if he stayed in.”[3]
The right opportunity to marry came after he met Emily Norton, a widowed mother of five children, on a dating app for Latter-day Saints. They wed in 2021.
McMullin was born in Provo, Utah, on April 2, 1976, and raised just outside Seattle, Washington.
McMullin attended Brigham Young University and every summer he did an internship with the CIA. He spent a year living in Israel and Jordan and volunteered as a refugee resettlement officer for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. In 2001, McMullin graduated with a bachelor's degree in international law and diplomacy and began formal training with the CIA to become an operations officer.
After his service to the CIA, he earned an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, worked as an investment banker, was a senior adviser on national security issues for the House Committee on Foreign Affairs from 2013 to 2015 and served as chief policy director for the House Republican Conference in the U.S. House of Representatives from January 2015 through July 2016. He also co-founded a nonprofit called Stand Up Republic.
McMullin served a two-year mission to Brazil for the Church of Jesus Christ.
