Markwayne Mullin takes his latest risk: A Senate bid

When Markwayne Mullin sees a problem, he tries to tackle it. Sometimes literally.

The 44-year-old Oklahoma Republican’s tendency to run head-first toward threats hasn’t always helped him during his House career, and could complicate his run for Senate. Mullin’s bid to enter Afghanistan for an evacuation mission following the Biden administration’s botched military withdrawal there last year, for example, didn’t sit well with a military already dealing with enough crises without lawmakers willfully endangering themselves.

He was also the first House member to join the Capitol Police in responding to pro-Trump rioters trying to break into the chamber on Jan. 6, 2021, though he voted not to certify 2020 election results. Then there was the physical confrontation at last year’s House GOP retreat between Mullin, a former mixed martial arts fighter, and a man who had verbally accosted Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo).

The man in question “tried to take off” after showing up at the Orlando hotel where GOP lawmakers were staying and calling Boebert “threatening and vulgar and disgusting” names, Mullin said in a wide-ranging interview. So Mullin pulled the man to the ground as he tried to leave the complex: “I drug [sic] him back and let the police take it from there.”

Mullin would easily win the crowded Republican primary to succeed retiring Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) if it were based solely on who voters might want to hang out with. As it is, the fifth-term daredevil is facing real competition from other candidates, including Inhofe’s former chief of staff. Still, he’s leaning into his black belt in jiujitsu and his spot in Oklahoma’s National Wrestling Hall of Fame, releasing a recent campaign ad titled “You don’t want to fight with him.”

And he’s opening up in typical freewheeling style about his highest-profile moment on the national stage: his off-the-books attempt to enter Afghanistan during the U.S. withdrawal last summer in order to evacuate a family from the war-torn country.

Mullin said he coordinated that effort, funded through private donors, with State Department and Pentagon officials. But as he explained it, he started hitting obstacles that he blames on the U.S. government and, in response, cut off communications with them.

Shortly after he went dark, Mullin said, came news reports that he was missing — including one broadcast that showed his picture and described him as a missing congressman carrying a large bag of cash. The published reports on his attempts to enter Afghanistan, he asserted, put a target on his back and ultimately forced him to abandon his attempted rescue.

In characteristically uncensored style, Mullin is anything but coy about who he blames for leaking his location. The White House, he said, didn’t want him showing in real time that American citizens, such as the family he tried to help, were left behind during the military’s exit from Afghanistan.

“Without question, they tried to kill me,” he said, alleging the White House deliberately put him at risk.

“All we were trying to do is just help get Americans out because we had the ability to do it. Why is that a bad thing?” Mullin added.

The White House referred questions about Mullin's version of events to the Pentagon, where spokesperson John Kirby said in a statement that the government was clear about its limited ability to support “uncoordinated travel to Afghanistan” and that it takes exception to “any suggestion” that it was not trying to help save lives. The State Department pointed to its clear warnings governing travel to Afghanistan; a spokesperson said “the brave men and women of the U.S. diplomatic corps and military worked around the clock” to protect and relocate Americans and Afghan allies last year. “Any statements to the contrary are not grounded in fact," the spokesperson added.

But the Republican, whose trip to the region alarmed officials in the moment and who blasted the State Department on Fox News after his return to the U.S., said he knew the risks when he set out. The father of six children, three adopted, had gone so far as to tell his wife Christie and two oldest sons that there was a good chance he wouldn’t be coming home.

And while Mullin has the backing of his Republican colleagues, some of them chafe privately at his propensity to pick a fight, no matter the underlying political dynamics.

Fellow Oklahoma GOP Rep. Stephanie Bice described Mullin as a “renegade,” acknowledging that his approach doesn’t always win him fans. Despite the controversy surrounding his Afghanistan trip, she said "it really goes to show that he just wanted to be helpful.”

Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) put it simply: “He's intense. And he is always trying to figure out what he can fix or what he can do."

While Mullin said he has an itch to head to Ukraine amid the Russian invasion, he's staying stateside this time around.

Hailing from Cherokee Nation in eastern Oklahoma, Mullin is leaning on his rural rancher persona as well as his experience turning around a family plumbing business and generating hundreds of jobs in the state to distinguish himself in the GOP primary. As staunchly conservative as he is, having voted with Trump most of the time between 2017 and 2020, he's not considered among the conference's biggest acolytes of the former president and he doesn't belong to the House Freedom Caucus.

According to a polling memo conducted by Cygnal for Mullin’s campaign, Mullin is leading the other four other candidates in the primary by double digits.

His habit of putting himself in harm’s way while trying to be helpful dates back to his own first term. Another Oklahoma Republican, Rep. Tom Cole, recalled that during a 2013 tour of his hometown after tornadoes had torn through the area, Mullin decided to crawl "through all the rubble” to turn off a pipe shooting water into a damaged home.

Mullin brings his own unorthodox background to his work as a member of the House Intelligence Committee: He was among the House Republicans who in 2019 entered the chamber's secure intelligence facility, known as a “SCIF,” to break up the deposition of an official who was testifying as part of Democrats' impeachment inquiry into then-President Donald Trump’s contacts with Ukraine. Mullin doesn’t regret it, arguing that Democrats treated Trump poorly.

Mullin also won't directly respond to the conclusion some of his colleagues have drawn about another part of his pre-Congress background — that he once worked as an intelligence community contractor, giving him experience in dangerous situations.

Asked to elaborate on that assumption about his past, Mullin said only: “No."

He's more open about his defense of Boebert during last year's GOP retreat. After hearing the first-term Coloradan describe her encounter with the heckler, Mullin said he tackled the man in question and then turned the situation over to the Capitol Police, who were in the vicinity.

That wasn't the first time he's stood up for female colleagues, either. During a closed-door GOP conference meeting near the height of the #MeToo movement raising awareness of sexual harassment, Mullin stood up to warn his fellow male lawmakers about the way some of them were touching or talking to women in Congress, both members and staff.

Some GOP colleagues called that episode confusing. But Mullin suggested he was speaking to specific Republicans who were serving at the time, saying he also privately confronted those members and they are no longer serving in the chamber. (More than a half-dozen members of Congress retired or resigned during the 115th Congress amid allegations of sexual misconduct, including five House Republicans.)

“I just wanted to let people know," Mullin said, "that that's not right.”

Burgess Everett contributed to this report.