Donald Trump's campaign says the Tennessee Republican Party is stopping delegates who support him from being a part of the state's' convention delegation, adding to the complaints it voiced about Louisiana after
rival candidate Ted Cruz won the most delegates there while losing the primary election.
"They're picking anti-Trump people," Darren Morris, the state director of Trump's Tennessee campaign, told
The Tennessean.
"They're picking establishment picks who don't support Donald Trump, and it's just the same effort that they're conducting all over the country to steal a vote here, steal a delegate there, to affect the outcome of the convention in July and take the nomination away from Donald Trump," Morris continued.
Morris said he and and Tennessee Republican Party Chairman Ryan Hayes agreed Wednesday on seven of the 14 at-large delegates that are to be appointed to the state's delegation to the convention, but when he got a list of names later in the week, the delegates they agreed on were replaced by "anti-Trump" names.
But Brent Leatherwood, executive director of the Tennessee Republican Party, said there was no agreement with the Trump campaign, and accused Morris of "stirring up strife and grossly mischaracterizing the conversation."
Trump's 39 percent win in the primary means that he gets 33 of the 58 overall delegates, Sixteen others are committed to Ted Cruz, and nine to Marco Rubio, who has since dropped out of the race. That leaves the 14 delegates the campaign is questioning, and three more to be appointed by the Republican National Committee.
Meanwhile, Leatherwood said that state law mandates all delegates are to be bound to their candidates during two rounds of convention ballots, and there are no exceptions to that rule.
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Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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