Doug Collins holds a master’s degree in divinity from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary and pastored a church for 11 years. He served as a U.S. Navy chaplain for two years in the late 1980s. After the Sept. 11 attacks, he joined the U.S. Air Force Reserve as a chaplain. Collins deployed to Balad Air Force Base in Iraq for five months in 2008. He remains a colonel in the Air Force Reserve.
He also became a lawyer well into adulthood.
Collins’ political career was shaped representing one of Georgia’s most conservative regions. He was a member of Congress from 2013 to 2021.
He was elected to the Georgia state House in 2007 and served three two-year terms. He was a floor leader for Gov. Nathan Deal, a fellow northeast Georgian, for one of those terms, helping to broker a budget cut that kept Georgia’s lottery-funded HOPE Scholarship program going at a time when leaders feared it would go bankrupt and not be able to pay promised college tuition for all beneficiaries.
Collins acquired a national reputation while defending Trump as the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee during the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller into whether Russia improperly influenced Trump’s 2016 election victory.