“I’m not going to vote for him if he's a convicted felon,” Hutchinson said. “'I’m not going to vote for him if he's convicted of espionage, and I'm not going to vote for him if he's (convicted of) other serious crimes. And I'm not going to support him.”
Top Republican Party officials have a message for any candidate worried about signing a loyalty pledge to potentially support a convicted felon: There’s the door.
Members of RNC leadership arranged a call with Hutchinson on Thursday, but the former governor himself did not take part in the conversation, only a staff member. During the brief call, RNC leaders declined to make any changes to debate requirements and told the staffer the committee is “not dealing with hypotheticals” on Trump’s legal fate. One of the individuals with knowledge of the call described it as “contentious.
Though it's unclear if Hutchinson would meet the other qualifications for the debate in August, the back and forth between the campaign and RNC highlights the conundrum the latter is in. Forcing candidates to pledge loyalty to one another may appear to be squarely in the party’s interest. But with the former president’s lengthy list of legal battles hovering over next year's campaign it now carries some risk, including to the committee’s commitment to neutrality in the primary.
The committee recently released its requirements to participate in its first sanctioned debate — scheduled for Aug. 23 in Milwaukee on Fox News Channel. Alongside usual criteria about minimum polling and donor thresholds, it included signing a pledge “to support the eventual party nominee,” though the RNC has not yet shared the precise language of that oath.
Repeatedly this year, Christie has said he will not support Trump if he is the nominee. Last week Christie said he would sign the RNC’s pledge in order to debate, but would only take it “as seriously as Donald Trump did eight years ago.” Trump in the 2016 election signed a similar pledge, but later said he would not necessarily commit to supporting someone else as the nominee.
But the themes of the emails echo the ones the Trump campaign itself has used in rallying to the former president’s defense. They have asked recipients to judge for themselves whether the prosecution is “political vengeance” under the guise of a poll, while others include sentences such as, “Our borders are overflowing with illegals, but radical Democrats have focused their attention on indicting Trump AGAIN.
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