The LDS reporter who got the Romney scoop: He’s ‘friendly’ and ‘relentlessly fair’ but likes ‘making trouble’

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A profile of LDS journalist, BYU alum and Atlantic staff writer McKay Coppins, author of 'Romney: A Reckoning.'

Meet BYU alum McKay Coppins, who has earned politicians’ trust and Donald Trump’s wrath — and is devoted to seeking the truth, whether in religion or journalism.Unlike Bob Woodward’s clandestine meetings with chain-smoking Watergate informant Deep Throat in a darkened parking garage, journalist McKay Coppins’ secret interviews were conducted at odd hours in Mitt Romney’s Washington office or town house, where the Utah senator ate frozen salmon on a hamburger bun.

“McKay is someone you want to spend time with. He’s a genuinely friendly and pleasant person,” says The Atlantic’s editorial director,He is “relentlessly fair,” Wills says. “His commitment is to the truth, which is the guiding principle in the book.” Coppins insisted that the paper run the stories on the front page and “a lot of people got mad, including some administrators,” he says. “There was talk of an Honor Code investigation of me because the document was stolen. Luckily, I don’t think that Honor Code investigation happened.

Two weeks into the internship, however, the editors gathered the staff into a room and announced the Graham family was putting Newsweek up for sale. It was a career risk, leaving a venerable magazine with a huge national audience to go to this “cat meme website” that was just venturing into news.“We decided together we were going to take big risks with his career … going to an online startup, and turning down some offers that we knew weren’t right for us,” she says now. “I’ve always known he would be successful.

Running mate Paul Ryan; wife Janna Ryan; Ann Romney and Mitt Romney wave at the close of the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Fla., in 2012. Mitt Romney became the first — and so far only — Latter-day Saint ever to top a major party's presidential ticket. At the time, it was “a kind of surreal, bizarre run-in with a loudmouth celebrity,” Coppins recalls. “And as the years have passed, that experience has taken on more meaning and also kind of become more foreboding, in some ways, because you realized what was to come: public harassment campaigns against individuals.”

When Coppins cited that in his piece about Trump, the candidate insisted “he was being sarcastic when he complimented my wife.”

 

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