It may be too late for a man identified as a white nationalist leader to be removed from a list of Trump delegates, an official in the California Secretary of State's Office told NPR.
"The Trump campaign did not reach out to our office about removing William Johnson's name as a delegate until Tuesday, May 10 — which is past the statutory deadline to submit delegate lists to the Secretary of State's office," Press Secretary Sam Mahood said in a statement.
William Daniel Johnson is affiliated with the American Freedom Party, identified as an extremist group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. The Los Angeles attorney is known for proposing an amendment to strip U.S. citizenship from nonwhites. His existence on the list was first reported by Mother Jones.
After Johnson's name appeared on a Trump delegate list published this week by the California secretary of state, the campaign blamed a computer error and said it had taken immediate steps to remove him.
"Upon careful review of computer records, the inclusion of a potential delegate that had previously been rejected and removed from the campaign's list in February 2016, was discovered," the Trump campaign's California state director, Tim Clark, said in a statement Tuesday. "This was immediately corrected and a final list, which does not include this individual, was submitted for certification."