Republican front-runner Donald Trump's campaign team launched a blistering attack on his party rival Senator Ted Cruz. (Reuters file photo)
Ahead of the crucial East Coast primaries, Republican front-runner Donald Trump's campaign team launched a blistering attack on his party rival Senator Ted Cruz from Texas, calling him a liar who is trying to mathematically exploit the nomination process.
"There's the liar (Cruz), not Trump. I mean, he's got to change the narrative. He's losing. You know, he is on the cusp of having the nomination be mathematically taken away from him. And so, he's trying to change the narrative," Paul Manafort, the Trump Campaign Manager told Chris Wallace of Fox News in an interview.
Mr Manafort, who joined the Trump campaign recently, alleged that Mr Cruz was spreading lies about Mr Trump, who is leading against the Texas Senators by nearly 300 delegates.
"Cruz just made that up from whole cloth because he's got to find something that gets people away from focusing on the real campaign which is next Tuesday when he's going to lose all five states and probably finish third in most of them," Mr Manafort said.
On Tuesday -- April 26 -- Republican primaries would be held in the states on Maryland, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Connecticut and Rhode Island. Mr Trump is leading in most of them as per latest polls, while Mr Cruz is trailing behind in all of them.
"He (Cruz) has got a failed candidacy and you can see in that desperate kind of tactic the kind of way he's trying to gloss over it," Mr Manafort said alleging that Mr Cruz is following the same tactics which he tried against some other previous Republican candidates like Ben Carson in Iowa and Marco Rubio in Florida.
"We are running the campaign to win the votes on the first ballot and we're going to and we're going to win on the first ballot," Mr Manafort said.
"At the end of the day it's only going to hurt the party, it's not going to hurt Trump because he's still going to be the votes cast on the first ballot and there's going to be no second ballot, which will be very clear when the process is over on June 7th," he said.
The Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus told the ABC news that the party is working hard to make sure that "we've got an open and fair convention" so that they get to that place where they can unify around one person.
The top Republican leadership said, while Mr Trump is leading in polls, it is a split decision on the delegate front. As of Saturday, Mr Trump had 845 delegates against 559 of Mr Cruz. They need to have at least 1,237 delegates to earn the Republican presidential nomination.
Mr Priebus said the platform -- like party manifesto in India -- is up to the delegates at the convention.
"So if that's what Donald Trump is intending, then he needs to make sure that the people that agree with him are the people that are getting elected to the platform committee," he said.
"I think our platform's pretty clear on those subjects. We believe that life begins at conception and that 14th Amendment rights apply to unborn children," Mr Priebus said.