# Katie McHugh Katie McHugh is a former Breitbart News editor (April 2014–June 2017) who was embedded in the alt-right during its peak, publicly renounced the movement, and then became one of the most consequential leakers exposing its ties to the Trump-era right. Her decision to turn over private correspondence to the Southern Poverty Law Center reshaped public understanding of how white nationalist ideas moved into mainstream Republican politics. ## Breitbart and the Alt-Right McHugh worked as an editor at Breitbart and was fired in 2017 over an anti-Muslim tweet. During those years she was romantically involved with [[Kevin DeAnna]] and moved within alt-right social and intellectual circles. After leaving, she renounced the far right, describing the movement as "evil" in interviews and warning others to "get out while you still can." ## The Leaks McHugh's leaks were a turning point for accountability reporting on the movement. In 2019 she gave Hatewatch (the SPLC's investigative arm) a cache of her 2015–2016 emails with [[Stephen Miller]], showing the future White House adviser steering Breitbart toward white nationalist sources and themes; she told the SPLC that "what Stephen Miller sent to me in those emails has become policy at the Trump administration." She also leaked hundreds of emails and messages tied to Breitbart's Julia Hahn. And it was McHugh's trove of emails — including her correspondence with DeAnna — that BuzzFeed News used in 2020 to reveal [[Peter Thiel]]'s 2016 dinner with DeAnna and Thiel's broader outreach to the racist fringe. ## The DeAnna Connection Because McHugh dated [[Kevin DeAnna]], her archive captured the private side of his double life as pseudonymous white nationalist "Gregory Hood" / "James Kirkpatrick." Her leak is what publicly unmasked those pen names and documented the [[Peter Thiel]] dinner and the surrounding [[Peter Brimelow]] / VDARE correspondence. McHugh stands as a rare case of an insider defector whose disclosures materially advanced the public record on the alt-right. ## See Also - [[Kevin DeAnna]] — her former partner, unmasked via her leak - [[Stephen Miller]] — subject of the most consequential email cache - [[Peter Thiel]] — his DeAnna dinner surfaced through her archive