Several volunteer leaders for Georgia Senate candidate Mike Collins have serious criminal histories, including one man convicted of sexual battery involving his underage stepdaughter.
Mike Collins is running for Senate on a tough-on-crime message. His campaign now has to explain why several people serving as volunteer “convoy captains” come with criminal histories that read like the exact opposition-research packet a campaign never wants to receive.
The Daily Beast reported that Brett Benny Langham, one of the campaign’s grassroots leaders, was convicted of sexual battery involving his underage stepdaughter. Collins’s campaign says Langham is an unpaid volunteer and that officials were unaware of his criminal record.
Another convoy captain, Joey Jackson, was charged with child cruelty after authorities alleged he failed to intervene while students were assaulted on a school bus he was driving. A third, former dentist Gordon Austin, has a fraud conviction.
The campaign says none of the men are paid staff members and that their backgrounds do not represent Collins or the broader volunteer organization. Officials also say they are reviewing the situation after learning of the histories through press reporting.
That defense matters because “volunteer” and “staff” are not the same thing. But the campaign itself created the convoy-captain roles as leadership positions for organizing supporters, so the people involved were not simply random voters who once held a yard sign.
The story also lands against a backdrop of earlier controversy surrounding people in Collins’s orbit. The Washington Post reported in August that a former Collins staffer posted Nazi imagery and an image depicting himself in Ku Klux Klan robes.
That former staffer said some of the posts were satire. Collins has publicly condemned racism and antisemitism and has said the views reflected in extremist imagery do not represent him.
The Daily Beast has also reported that some Collins campaign-linked figures have ties to American Patriots USA, a group founded by former Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi figure Chester Doles. Collins has described that organization as a hate group.
All of that creates an uncomfortable pattern question even if the individual controversies are separate. A campaign can plausibly say it did not know about one volunteer’s background. The explanation gets harder every time another name requires its own paragraph.
Collins is challenging Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff in one of the most important Senate races in the country. The race has already featured arguments over extremism, antisemitic content and who the candidates choose to associate with.
Ossoff has used those controversies aggressively, while Collins says Democrats and the media are trying to smear him through the behavior of other people. That is a predictable political defense, and voters will decide how much responsibility candidates should bear for people operating under their banner.
The criminal histories themselves are not allegations in every case. Langham’s sexual-battery conviction and Austin’s fraud conviction are matters of record, while Jackson’s child-cruelty matter is a charge and should not be treated as a conviction.
The campaign says it did not knowingly put people with these histories into leadership roles. That may ultimately be true, but it also creates a less flattering question about vetting.
Campaigns routinely background-check paid staff, surrogates and anyone likely to appear publicly as a representative. If someone is organizing voters under a campaign-created leadership title, “we had no idea” is both a defense and a management review.
Collins has spent the campaign arguing that Georgia needs stronger leadership and accountability. His team is now discovering that those words become much more interesting when reporters start Googling the people wearing your campaign badge.
