Loeffler’s campaign disavows photo

ATLANTA — The campaign of Georgia Republican U.S. Sen. Kelly Loeffler is disavowing a photo circulating on social media of her posing with a longtime white supremacist at a recent campaign event, with less than a month to go until the runoff elections that will determine the balance of the U.S. Senate.

Loeffler did not know who Chester Doles was when she took a picture with him, her campaign spokesman Stephen Lawson said in a statement to the Associated Press on Sunday. The picture was taken Friday at a campaign event in Dawsonville, Ga.

“Kelly had no idea who that

was, and if she had, she would have kicked him out immediately because we condemn in the most vociferous terms everything that he stands for,” Lawson said.

Doles is a longtime white supremacist who spent decades in the Ku Klux Klan and the neo-Nazi National Alliance. According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Doles was sentenced to prison for the 1993 beating of a Black man in Maryland and again on weapons violations in Georgia.

Doles is also associated with the Hammerskins, a racist skinhead gang, with whom he marched in the 2017 United the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va.

In response to a message from the AP, Doles said Sunday he had “publicly renounced racism on several occasions in the past couple of years.” Doles added that he attended a “redemption service,” standing “in front of an all-Black congregation and told my story and renounced all racism and asked for God’s forgiveness.”

Doles posted the picture of him and Loeffler to his account on VK, a Russian social networking site where he has posted pictures of himself posing with other Georgia politicians, including Republican Congresswoman-elect Marjorie Taylor Greene, the paper reported.