Just as the convention is underway to nominate the Republican party front-runner, Donald trum as the official nominee of the party, Rina Shah Bharara, an Indian American GOP presidential convention delegate who has been critical of presumptive nominee has been ousted from the convention.
A credentials committee on July 15 voted to reject Bharara, 32, who had been a top vote-getter at the District of Columbia’s nominating convention. Bharara said July 15 the vote is a sign the convention is controlled by pro-Trump forces.
Bharara’s role as a delegate has been controversial since she gave an interview saying her opposition to Trump was so strong that she might support Democrat Hillary Clinton instead. She has since promised to vote for a Republican in November.
The executive committee of the D.C. GOP had stripped Bharara of her delegate status in a 14-6 vote in April this year after Breitbart News reported that Bharara actually lives in the state of Virginia, not the city of Washington, D.C. Bharara does not meet residency requirements to be a D.C. delegate. The D.C. party stressed the need to unite behind a frontrunner and mentioned Trump “in that context,” according to a party official present at the meeting.
“I think she’s done a lot of damage,” Lori Saxon, a Trump delegate candidate who lost the election, told Breitbart News. “My 14-year old daughter and I really campaigned and to find out someone like this actually won? It makes you think.”
Earlier last week, though, another convention committee recommended Bharara’s reinstatement. In an earlier AP story (http://bit.ly/29ZvF1O), Bharara acknowledged that she has homes in northern Virginia and the District and that she splits her time between the two, but said her District residency is legitimate. She said the residency issue is a pretext for removal by party officials upset she said she might prefer Clinton over Trump.
“This is all because they’re trying to appease people from other states in response to my anti-Trump comments,” she had said in a phone interview. Bharara was one of 19 people elected at the D.C. party convention in March to serve as delegate to the national GOP convention. She ran as a Marco Rubio delegate and was the second-leading vote-getter.
In an April 7 interview with The Associated Press that had been previously unpublished, she was even more explicit, saying she would vote for Clinton over Trump. “I think Hillary would be better for our country,” she said then. “I personally think she is safer than this renegade crazy person.”