Donald Trump on Monday ordered surrogates on a campaign call to continue attacking a federal judge overseeing a lawsuit against him, according to two sources on the call.
Trump has ignited a firestorm by calling federal Judge Gonzalo Curiel a “hater” and describing the Indiana-born jurist as “a Mexican.”
The presumptive Republican nominee told top surrogates on the conference call to ignore a campaign memo issued the night before urging them to dodge questions about the lawsuit and Trump’s controversial questioning of the judge’s impartiality, the sources told CNN. The call was first reported by Bloomberg Politics.
Trump made it clear on the conference call that there would be no apologies for his comments about the judge and said he feels that he’s been wronged in the fierce criticism he has faced over the comments, a top Republican official and a Trump campaign surrogate told CNN, requesting anonymity to divulge details of a private conversation.
Instead, Trump readied his team for a longer fight about the issue, urging surrogates to back him up and go after the media for pressing the line that his comments about the judge were racist.
The news comes after prominent Republicans, including former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a Trump backer, came out strongly against Trump’s comments about the judge. Gingrich called them “one of the worst mistakes Trump has made.”
The Republican official on the call told CNN that the campaign was dismayed and felt let down by Gingrich’s criticism.
Trump and a top campaign official on the call also pressed surrogates to raise the issue of judicial activism as a larger problem, the Republican source said, with Trump specifically pointing to Judge Gonzalo Curiel’s membership with the La Raza Lawyers of California, a Latino bar association, according to Bloomberg.
The surrogates on the call included former Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, former Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown and Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, Bloomberg reported.
