Several Republican state senators and senior members of the party’s official youth organization shared antisemitic, racist and violent messages in a private Telegram chat, praising Adolf Hitler and joking about the Holocaust, according to a Politico report published Wednesday.
Politico said it reviewed more than 28,000 messages exchanged over several months in a group chat involving members of the Young Republican National Federation, which represents party members ages 18 to 40 and is often seen as a pipeline for future Republican leadership. Participants included state lawmakers, local party chairs, government advisers and legislative aides from New York, Kansas, Arizona and Vermont.
In the messages, participants repeatedly expressed hate toward Jews, African Americans, LGBT people, women and people with disabilities. Politico counted more than 250 uses of racial and homophobic slurs in the chat, including the N‑word. Some users also joked about rape and slavery.
Peter Giunta, head of the New York state chapter of the Young Republicans and a recent candidate for the group’s national chair, wrote “I love Hitler” in one exchange and claimed that members of a local youth chapter “support slavery.” In another post, he joked about black athletes, saying, “I’d go to the zoo if I wanted to watch monkey play ball.” Giunta was later removed from his position.
Joe Maligno, counsel for the New York Republican Party, was reported to have made repeated jokes about the Holocaust, including one message reading: “Can we fix the showers? Gas chambers don’t fit the Hitler aesthetic.” Other users responded with comments such as “I’m ready to watch people burn now” and “We gotta pretend that we like them… Boom — they’re dead,” accompanied by heart emojis and references to “1488,” a number associated with white supremacist slogans and “Heil Hitler.”
Vermont state Sen. Samuel Douglass and his wife, Brianna Douglass, who serves as Vermont’s representative to the national organization, were also identified as participants. In one exchange, after Douglass criticized a Jewish party official, his wife replied, “You’re giving nationals too much credit and expecting the Jew to be honest?”
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Peter Giunta, head of the New York state chapter of the Young Republicans and a recent candidate for the group’s national chair
(Photo: From social media)
Following the report, several members were dismissed or suspended. Giunta apologized for what he called “insensitive and inexcusable language” but claimed the chat logs may have been “deceptively doctored.” He accused political rivals of leaking the messages to damage his campaign for national chair.
Those removed included Giunta; William Hendrix, vice chair of the Kansas chapter who also worked in the state attorney general’s office; and Bobby Walker, vice chair of the New York chapter who was later dropped from managing a congressional campaign. The Kansas chapter of the Young Republicans was suspended entirely. The Douglass couple remained in their posts as of publication.
Michael Bartels, a former senior adviser in the U.S. Small Business Administration’s Office of General Counsel under the Trump administration, was also listed as a member of the group. Though he took little part in the conversation, Politico reported that Bartels did not challenge the messages in real time. He later said he was pressured to share the chat transcripts and claimed another participant threatened his career if he failed to cooperate.
One user in the chat appeared to anticipate the fallout from a potential leak, writing: “If we ever had a leak of this chat we would be cooked.”