Kip Talley runs the day-to-day office of Mike Collins, the Trump-endorsed Republican nominee now facing Sen. Jon Ossoff in November. Slate has reviewed the group chat he was part of: roughly 30 people, including white nationalist livestreamer Nick Fuentes and neo-Nazi figurehead Richard Spencer. Inside that chat, Talley wasn’t a silent member. He was actively working the room, telling everyone he was using his government contacts to spring a Holocaust denier from federal custody.
The chief of staff for Rep. Mike Collins, now the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in Georgia after winning the June 16 runoff, was an active participant in a group chat that included two of the most notorious white nationalist figures in American politics, according to messages reviewed directly by Slate.
Who Was Actually in This Chat
The group chat, titled “Research Group—Johnson ‘28?,” was organized by Charles “Chuck” Johnson, a notorious internet troll and Holocaust denier, and included roughly 30 members. Among them: Nick Fuentes, the white nationalist livestreamer known for Holocaust denial and open racism, and Richard Spencer, the figure credited with popularizing the term “alt-right” and who led the “Jews will not replace us” chant at the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville.
Kip Talley, then Collins’s deputy chief of staff before his January promotion to chief of staff, wasn’t a passive lurker. He was an active participant, using his position and government contacts on behalf of the chat’s own organizer.
What Talley Actually Did Inside the Chat
While Johnson sat in federal custody from November 2025 to February 2026, Talley told the group: “I’m going to try and use the levers of the legislative branch to check into his detention.” He followed up with something more specific: “I’m reaching out to my people at FBI and DOJ. Trying to get him out.”
Talley described repeatedly checking in with jail officials and the U.S. Marshals Service on Johnson’s behalf, scheduling a phone call with him, arranging funds for his prison commissary account, and telling the group he’d “read a bunch of your messages” to Johnson and had built “a relationship with the officer and the U.S. Marshal so I should be able to call once a week now.” He left the group chat on May 2, after the effort to free Johnson had already run its course.
That’s not incidental membership in a group someone else set up. That’s a sitting congressional chief of staff actively coordinating with a chat full of prominent white nationalists, deploying institutional access, contacts at federal law enforcement agencies, on behalf of the very person who organized the group.
Talley’s Defense Doesn’t Address the Company He Was Keeping
Talley gave Slate a statement focused narrowly on his intentions, not on his membership in the chat itself: “I acted solely in my personal capacity after hearing concerns that an acquaintance I have known for years was being mistreated in custody and denied basic medical care. I was simply trying to help a suffering inmate connect with counsel. I did not act at the direction of Rep. Collins, use official resources, or coordinate with anyone else in the group chat.”
Notice what that statement doesn’t do: it doesn’t explain why a senior congressional staffer was in a group chat with Nick Fuentes and Richard Spencer in the first place, doesn’t dispute that he was, and doesn’t reconcile “I did not... coordinate with anyone else in the group chat” with his own message telling that same group he was “reaching out to my people at FBI and DOJ” on their organizer’s behalf. Collins’s office declined to comment on the record.
This Isn’t Collins’s First Brush With This World Either
This is the third staffing controversy to hit Collins’s operation in recent memory. His previous chief of staff, Brandon Phillips, was fired after mocking the wife of a rival strategist for being an alleged rape victim, and remains under a House Ethics Committee investigation over unrelated allegations. Separately, William Paul, Collins’s 2025 digital director, confronted Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.) at a Capitol Hill bar with a barrage of antisemitic insults. Collins’s own social media history has, per reporting from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Jewish Insider, included antisemitic and racist tropes of his own.
The Race This Is Happening In
Collins secured the Republican nomination on June 16, defeating former football coach Derek Dooley 55.5% to 44.5% after a late Trump endorsement, an outcome that also handed Trump a rare primary win in a race where Gov. Brian Kemp had backed Dooley. Collins now faces Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff in November, in a race widely viewed as one of the most competitive and expensive Senate contests in the country, and one Democrats need to hold if they hope to retake the chamber.
The chief of staff running the day-to-day operations of Georgia’s Republican Senate campaign spent months in a group chat alongside Nick Fuentes and Richard Spencer, two of the most prominent white nationalist figures in the country, organized by a Holocaust denier, and wasn’t a bystander in it. He was actively using his access to federal law enforcement contacts to help free that same Holocaust denier from custody. Collins’s office won’t comment on the record, and Collins is now the official nominee heading into a general election against Jon Ossoff this November.