Trump Campaign Names "Veterans for Trump" Co-Chair Under Federal Indictment as Alternate Delegate to Republican National Convention
Last week, the New Hampshire Secretary of State released the list of delegates who will represent the state at the Republican National Convention in July. One of the alternates for the Trump campaign is Gerald DeLemus, who is currently facing federal indictment over his alleged involvement with the Bundy family.
In 2014, Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy organized an armed standoff with agents from the federal Bureau of Land Management. The 64-page, nine-count indictment issued earlier this month names DeLemus as a “mid-level leader and organizer of the conspiracy,” and alleges that he and eight others “planned, organized, led, and/or participated as gunmen in the assault, all in order to threaten, intimidate, and extort the officers into abandoning approximately 400 head of cattle that were in their lawful care and custody.”
Despite a powerful current of support for Trump in the patriot movement, the Republican frontrunner has been careful not to explicitly court militant right-wing radicals. From the New York Times, in January:
In addressing the Oregon standoff, Mr. Trump also spoke about the “great anger out there” that appears to be fueling the situation in Burns, Ore.
“I think what I’d do, as president, is I would make a phone call to whoever, to the group,” he said, adding later, “I’d talk to the leader. I would talk to him and I would say, ‘You gotta get out — come see me, but you gotta get out.’”
“You cannot let people take over federal property,” Mr. Trump said. “You can’t, because once you do that, you don’t have a government anymore. I think, frankly, they’ve been there too long.”
Mr. Trump said he wasn’t necessarily suggesting a large-scale military action, but that “at a certain point you have to do something and you have to be firm and you have to be strong, you have to be a government.”
“You have to maintain law and order, no matter what,” Trump told The Hill. But if it was the real estate developer’s intent to chasten his more extreme supporters’ revolutionary inclinations, he failed.
“It’s my intention to ensure that he has the whole story,” DeLemus, who is the co-chair of New Hampshire’s Veterans for Donald Trump group, told Reuters in January. “I think it’ll really arouse him, and once he understands, I wouldn’t be surprised to see him heading out West.”
Federal prosecutors asked that a judge deny DeLemus’ release on bail before his trial, saying that his participation in the 2014 standoff demonstrated his “desire and willingness” to kill law enforcement officers. The judge agreed, ordering that DeLemus remain in custody until his trial in Nevada.
State Representative Susan DeLemus, Gerald’s wife, is also named as an alternate, and Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski is named as a primary delegate.