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Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) began telling his inner circle that he was weighing retirement earlier this year. On Wednesday, he told the rest of the world, saying he would not run for re-election and calling for both Joe Biden and Donald Trump to make way for a “new generation of leaders.”
Hours after Romney’s announcement, The Atlantic dropped a bombshell of its own: One of the magazine’s journalists, McKay Coppins, has been working with the Utah senator to chronicle his political life for the last two years. Romney gave Coppins superlative access to both his public and private life, turning over hundreds of pages’ worth of emails, texts, and personal journals. In one case, Romney literally took a crowbar to a locked filing cabinet to get at records for the reporter’s use.
The result is his forthcoming biography, Romney: A Reckoning, a portion of which was published in The Atlantic on Wednesday afternoon. The nearly 10,000-word extract reveals how Romney’s high hopes for his time in the Senate turned into disillusionment and eventual ostracizing from his own party.