This post was originally published on this site

Andrew Kaczynski, the 26-year-old reporter who dug up evidence showing that Donald J. Trump had supported the invasion of Iraq before the war, was Google-chatting with Tim Miller, a Republican operative who was the communications director for the Jeb Bush presidential campaign.

This was last July, when Mr. Kaczynski was still at BuzzFeed.

In the conversation, Mr. Miller said CNN could use someone like Mr. Kaczynski, especially given how difficult it was to fact-check the loose-lipped Republican nominee.

“LOL,” Mr. Kaczynski replied.

But the notion wasn’t so laughable after all. A month before the election, CNN hired Mr. Kaczynski and three of his colleagues, Kyle Blaine, Nathan McDermott and Christopher Massie.

On Oct. 3, Mr. Kaczynski gave notice at BuzzFeed, where he had started in 2012 when he was still a student at St. John’s University. On Oct. 4, he went to work at CNN.

Ben Smith, the BuzzFeed editor in chief, was said to have been angry about the defection. But, he wrote by email: “He’s a great person, a brilliant researcher, and the ultimate one-man show — I’m sure he’ll do great wherever he goes.”

For his part, Mr. Kaczynski said this was the moment to leave. “I think when opportunities like that come to you in life, you either take them or you don’t,” he said.

Given the urgency of the campaign coverage and Mr. Kaczynski’s indefatigable nature, there was no chance he would take even one day off as he switched jobs.

“It’s who Andy is,” said Rachel Louise Ensign, a banking reporter for The Wall Street Journal, who is engaged to Mr. Kaczynski. “You have to accept people for who they are.”

Ms. Ensign often finds her fiancé listening to vintage audio recordings in their Brooklyn home. Co-workers at BuzzFeed and CNN have seen Mr. Kaczynski at his desk, headphones on, mining forgotten interviews for newsworthy tidbits.

Through most of his time at BuzzFeed, Mr. Kaczynski was known to reach into a bag of raw spinach as he focused on work, munching leaves as he watched analog-age footage on his screen or listened to old episodes of Howard Stern’s radio show, where Mr. Trump was a frequent and freewheeling guest. Recently he switched to eating garbanzo beans from a can as he goes about his work.

He grew up in the Cleveland suburbs. His father, the lawyer Stephen J. Kaczynski at the international firm Jones Day, is a litigator for the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company; his mother, Theresa Kaczynski, was a stay-at-home mother.

Before attending St. John’s, Andrew Kaczynski studied at Ohio University for two years. His interest in politics led him to internships with the Republican National Committee and Representative Dana Rohrabacher, of California, and former Representative Bob Turner of Queens, both Republicans. But while in college, Mr. Kaczynski also developed an absorbing hobby: seeking out revealing video clips of politicians and sending them to journalists.

“I got energy from doing it and that validation of finding something that becomes news,” Mr. Kaczynski said. “You get validation from when you see it on ‘The Daily Show.’ It feels good.”

Mr. Smith, then a high-profile reporter and columnist at Politico, frequently cited the wunderkind’s work. And soon after Mr. Smith became the editor of BuzzFeed, he brought Mr. Kaczynski aboard.

Mr. Kaczynski ended up leaving school for journalism. At BuzzFeed he earned a reputation as a gadfly whose research methods (which he keeps secret) went far beyond those of the usual reporter with a Lexis-Nexis password.

In 2012 he provided proof that Mitt Romney had touted his Massachusetts health plan as a model for the Affordable Care Act. In 2013, he discovered that Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky had given a speech rife with passages from a Wikipedia entry on the movie “Stand and Deliver” and used erroneous quotes by founding fathers in two books.

Mr. Kaczynski has little in common with those glad-handing political reporters who work in the field as they court sources attached to this or that campaign. He is a digger who, along with his team, finds scoops back at headquarters.

Having received a diagnosis of pancreatitis at 19, Mr. Kaczynski neither smokes nor drinks. To keep up his health, he runs from five to six miles each morning while wearing a 12-pound training vest. Even then he is doing his job, listening to the hours of old audio he has loaded onto his iPhone.

Andrew Morse, the executive vice president for editorial at CNN U.S. and the general manager of CNN Digital Worldwide, wooed the reporter and his three colleagues away from BuzzFeed. He was especially impressed by the 2002 snippet, found by Mr. Kaczynski and Mr. McDermott, from the Howard Stern radio show episode in which Mr. Trump said he supported the Iraq war. (The candidate continues to deny he ever approved of the invasion, despite the recorded evidence to the contrary.)

“The light bulb really went off,” Mr. Morse said.

After accepting the job, Mr. Kaczynski changed his Twitter handle from @BuzzFeedAndrew to @KFILE. But the nature of his work did not change. Just before leaving BuzzFeed, he and another reporter found that Mr. Trump had appeared in a cameo role, fully clothed, in a soft-core Playboy video in 2000. In his first CNN scoop, Mr. Kaczynksi and another reporter unearthed a similar Trump appearance in a 1994 Playboy production.

“For me, when I worked at BuzzFeed,” Mr. Kaczynski said, “it was always validation for me when my stories were getting talked about on MSNBC or CNN or Fox News.”

Since his arrival at CNN, Mr. Kaczynski has drawn the attention of Stephen Colbert. The Oct. 7 broadcast of “The Late Show” included a mock interview with CNN’s “KFILE,” who, in the show’s comedic rendering, turned out to be a pornography-obsessed millennial wearing a red visor and a gold chain named Kevin Fileman.

The character, played by the “Late Show” writer Gabe Gronli, appears to live in his parents’ basement in the manner of the stereotypical blogger.

“It seems like that guy watches a lot of porn,” Mr. Kaczynski said of the differences between him and his “Late Show” alter ego. “And I don’t live in a basement.”