Rep. Mike Collins's Georgia Senate campaign appointed county organizers who had held leadership roles in American Patriots USA, a group founded by former Klan leader Chester Doles. FOX 5 Atlanta's October 7 report, following a Daily Beast investigation, identifies Joshua Mote and Michael Boggus. The campaign says their past associations were unknown to it.
Mote had been the group's vice president; Boggus its state director. The Southern Poverty Law Center classifies American Patriots USA as a white nationalist hate group. These are former roles in that organization, not evidence that either man belonged to the Ku Klux Klan. Precision costs nothing.
The campaign's spokesman, Meyer Siegfried, said the men's views do not represent Collins or the campaign's wider county network. His explanation included this sentence fragment:
"The past associations of these individuals was not known to the campaign"
All right. Then we are talking about vetting. A campaign can say it did not know something without explaining how it failed to know it. Those are different questions, and only the first has received an answer in that statement.
There is also a timing correction worth making before this story gets flattened into a headline. Mote told reporters that he began as Hall County's convoy captain in February and left in April after his young son's death. He denied racism and said he had left Doles's group after concluding Doles was not the reformed Christian he claimed to be. Boggus represented Banks County. The reporting does not establish that both remain current organizers.
I am not going to turn county volunteers into paid senior staff to improve a sentence. Nor does this reporting prove Collins knowingly recruited white nationalists. What it documents is a campaign appointment process that put these men into county organizing roles, followed by a denial of prior knowledge when their histories became news.
That is enough to ask a serious question. Who checks the people handed a campaign's name at the county level? Local organizing is where a candidate becomes a neighbor's recommendation and a familiar face at an event. It is part of the campaign, even when the people doing it are not drawing salaries.
Our earlier Collins file concerns other episodes. This disclosure belongs in its own entry. Repeating an older controversy as though it were new would be sloppy. Ignoring a new disclosure because the candidate already has a file would be worse.
A convincing response would describe the checks that were made and the standard that will govern future appointments. A statement that disclaims the views is useful. It does not do that work. Georgia voters should be able to expect a Senate campaign to know whom it asks to organize on its behalf. The campaign's own explanation says it didn't.
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