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The chief of staff for Rep. Mike Collins, the front-runner to be Republicans’ Senate nominee in Georgia, said he used his congressional position to attempt to free a Holocaust denier from prison.

Kip Talley, Collins’ current chief, detailed his efforts in a group chat that included prominent white nationalists, including Nick Fuentes and Richard Spencer. Slate has reviewed the chats.

Talley actively intervened on behalf of Charles Johnson—a notorious internet troll, Holocaust denier, and racist—while Johnson was incarcerated from November 2025 to February 2026, according to messages Talley sent to the group chat in December 2025. (Talley was, at that point, Collins’ deputy chief of staff, before being promoted to chief of staff in January).

Johnson previously has made statements about the Holocaust such as: “I do not and never have believed the six million figure. I think the Red Cross numbers of 250,000 dead in the camps from typhus are more realistic,” and suggested that “Auschwitz and the gas chambers” were “not real.” Johnson appeared in 2016 on a white nationalist podcast to discuss his belief in “race realism,” and shared an article that claimed Black Americans had a “violence gene.” He has insisted he only repeatedly used the N-word on Twitter “to study the site’s algorithms.”

Talley told the group chat: “I’m going to try and use the levers of the legislative branch to check into his detention.”

On the chat, Talley claimed he was exercising “oversight” in repeatedly checking with officials at the jail and the U.S. Marshals Service on Johnson’s behalf, scheduling a phone call........

© Slate