Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump addresses supporters during a political rally in July. (Photo by Charlie Leight/Getty Images)
Donald Trump s campaign said it will protest Colorado s delegation to the Republican National Convention this summer, a move that only amplifies the candidate s rhetoric that the system is rigged.
Paul Manafort, the Trump campaign s convention strategist, said Sunday his team is putting together a legal case to challenge the state s 34 delegates — which are all supporting Ted Cruz.
We’ll be filing protests, he told ABC s This Week. “Missouri, we’re going to be filing protests. Colorado, we’re going to be filing protests.
He continued: You saw in Colorado last week where the voters were left out of the process — a groundswell of support against the system.
Manafort s comments echo the message from Trump supporters who gathered for a rally at the Capitol on Friday. An organization called Stop the Steal helped add weight to the rally — in what appears to be its first major public event — and is working to catalog stories about potential issues with the Colorado caucus vote.
On the sidelines of the protest, James Baker, a one-time Colorado campaign director for Trump now consulting for the Stop the Steal effort, pointed to two situations to justify his claims of fraud. One, he said Trump supporters names disappeared from the delegate ballots. And two, he said Colorado GOP officials were openly opposed to Trump s candidacy.
There was voter discouragement and voter fraud in this state, he told reporters in an interview. We are asking for regular voters to tell their stories and we are documenting these.
Baker said he started Feb. 1 as the campaign s staffer for Colorado. Politico reported that he was fired April 2, just 48 hours after landing in the state.
In the interview, he pushed back against the suggestion that the candidate didn t understand the state s caucus system.
We also understood it would be almost impossible for us to actually to make a lot of headway as far as delegates just because the system was so stacked against us, he said. The people who were voting on delegates were party regulars and our base mostly is not party regulars.
So It wasn t that we didn t understand it, he added. It s that we understood it too well in understanding that it was set up for us to lose.
Two Colorado delegates will sit on the credentials committee at the Republican National Convention and both are Cruz supporters. Colorado Republican Party officials have defended the caucus process, saying it is no different from the system used in the prior three presidential campaigns.
