CLEVELAND — Minutes before midnight on Wednesday, two of Ted Cruz’s top conservative allies – Ken Cuccinelli and Mike Lee – huddled in Cleveland’s Lakeside Street Doubletree Hotel with the top brass of the Republican National Committee.

It was a meeting meant to be kept secret – a quiet but urgent negotiation to avert an ugly and divisive fight over the future of the GOP, one the Republican leadership worried could embarrass Donald Trump, and the party, in front of a nationally televised audience.


Cuccinelli and Lee were representing a restive conservative faction of Rules Committee members, maneuvering to weaken the party’s Washington-based establishment and introduce reforms to the 2020 presidential primary process that would favor conservatives.

On the other side, two of the RNC’s senior-most leaders, Chief Operating Officer Sean Cairncross and Chief of Staff Katie Walsh, came to the table with Donald Trump’s campaign lawyer William McGinley and two aides to the presumptive nominee, Mike McSherry and Jim Murphy. According to multiple sources inside Trump’s campaign and the RNC, these GOP leaders were authorized to make a deal -- and they were close.

But instead of a truce that might have helped heal the wounds from one of the ugliest primary seasons in modern presidential politics, the negotiations ultimately collapsed, widening the gap between both sides, and leaving Cuccinelli’s and Lee’s allies virtually empty-handed. Indeed, within 12 hours, leaders on both sides were left bitterly pointing fingers.

“If there was some notion on the part of the party or the Trump campaign that they wanted unity in this convention, it is an odd way to do it to show up and kick the grassroots in the teeth,” Cuccinelli said in a Friday night conference call with the pro-Cruz Trusted Leadership PAC.

RNC allies reject that accusation and argue that it's Cuccinelli who actually spurned the grassroots by attempting to cut a backroom deal that would, effectively, force dozens of states to alter their primary process. "These folks claim that they are proponents and voices for the grassroots," said a source familiar with the meeting. "He was going to start dictating to states."

The negotiations first began more than a week ago, when Cuccinelli met RNC Chairman Reince Priebus at party headquarters in Washington. The pair sat in the Wisconsin conference room with Cairncross and senior RNC officials Chris LaCivita and John Phillippe, and over the course of 90 minutes, the two sides identified areas of “common interest” in changing party rules. Cuccinelli recognized in that meeting that he didn't have the support to pass most of his proposals in the Rules COmmittee but noted that he might be able to garner enough support to force the full national convention to debate them.

His priorities included reversing a Mitt Romney-imposed rule that made it more difficult for candidates to be formally nominated at the national convention and encouraging states to close their primaries to Democrats and independents. The meeting, both sides suggested, had set the table for a final deal when negotiators met again in Cleveland.

“They hashed out quite a bit of stuff,” said a source briefed on the meeting.

What Cuccinelli may not have been prepared for was the level of intense coordination and lobbying the RNC and Trump campaign had already been doing, in concert, to stack the deck against Cuccinelli’s favored proposals.

On Wednesday, just before Cuccinelli would huddle with RNC leaders at the Doubletree, Priebus joined senior Trump campaign officials Rick Gates and Jim Murphy to deliver a pep talk to dozens of Trump supporters on the Convention Rules Committee at the nearby Westin hotel.

"We’re together. We’re a team,” one participant in the meeting said Priebus told them. “Please work with us tomorrow to unify the party. We all need to stick together and vote as a bloc.”

The campaign and RNC left nothing to chance. As they exited the meeting, campaign officials encouraged all the delegates present to put their cell phone numbers on a list to receive text messages throughout the Rules Committee meeting instructing them how to vote on every single amendment and motion.

Indeed, Cuccinelli and his band of insurgents so spooked the Trump campaign and the RNC that it forced the two to coordinate more closely than ever before, fostering a tighter partnership between the candidate and the party leadership he and his team once deeply distrusted.

“It was the first time where the Trump operation and the RNC operation en masse melded as one,” said another source in the room, who called it a “watershed” moment of cooperation.

That preparation ensured that the RNC would enter negotiations with a dominant upper hand. Cuccinelli would struggle to get even limited support for his favored proposals without cutting a deal with the party.

The meeting in the Doubletree’s lobby began an hour late – around midnight – because a storm delayed Lee’s arrival in Cleveland. It stretched into Thursday morning, with Cairncross and Walsh leaving at 2:30 a.m., both sides thinking a deal was nearly at hand. In exchange for dropping some of his most divisive proposals – a ban on lobbyists serving on the RNC and a plan to weaken the power of the national GOP chairman – Cuccinelli would get concessions on a package of reforms to the 2020 presidential primary process, as well as on a change to the terms of RNC members. Final details would be ironed out later that morning, when the Rules Committee convened at the nearby Huntington Convention Center.

The committee sesssion opened at 8 a.m. and immediately recessed to deal with a “jammed printer,” according to committee chairwoman Enid Mickelsen. Meanwhile, Cuccinelli and the RNC’s Cairncross and Walsh were negotiating in a room down the hall. Trump envoys were there too, but this time, they stayed out of the negotiations. Priebus wasn’t on hand, according to an RNC member who said he was with the chairman in a separate strategy meeting about the Rules Committee.

What happened next is the source of the ongoing acrimony.

After five hours of closed-door negotiations, Cuccinelli’s supporters on the Rules Committee balked at the deal he had brokered, sending him back to the bargaining table. He returned with a new proposal on closed primaries and also a proposal to establish a study commission on changing the primary process – but one that the RNC wouldn’t get to appoint. It was too great an ask.

“Pigs get fed, hogs get slaughtered,” one participant in the meetings said.

Suddenly, the RNC began to doubt whether Cuccinelli was authorized to speak on behalf of the delegates he purported to represent. Though the two sides continued to barter, the RNC pulled out of the talks when, according to three sources involved in the final negotiations, Cuccinelli conceded that he couldn’t guarantee the support of his faction – even for a more favorable version of the agreement.

"It became clear ... that he was shaky," said a source involved in the talks. When the RNC asked him to identify the delegates he could bring on board, Cuccinelli acknowledged, "I’ve lost a couple of them." After a huddle between senior RNC officials and Priebus, negotiators returned, Walsh returned to the room and ended negotiations.

"We made the call, no deal," the source said, adding that a deal was possible with Cuccinelli "if he was leader" of the group he purported to represent. RNC officials noted that by walking away from the table, it actually forced debate into the open -- the Rules Committee considered Cuccinelli's proposals and rejected them.

Cuccinelli, though, characterizes the breakdown as an abrupt decision by the RNC to quit on the talks. The two sides had hammered out agreements on nearly every subject, Cuccinelli supporters say: Republicans on the RNC would no longer see their terms end in the middle of presidential election years; a Mitt Romney-imposed rule stiffening the threshold for candidates to be nominated at the national convention would be reversed; and most importantly, states would be encouraged to close their primaries to Democratic and independent voters.

But Cuccinelli said the deal fell apart over the way to reward states with closed primaries. He sought a proposal to provide closed-primary states with a 25 percent bonus in their delegate pool at the national convention. The RNC countered by proposing a 15 percent bonus to states’ at-large delegate pools.

“That was ... when the RNC pulled out,” Cuccinelli said. “Katie Walsh … came over to me and said ‘Nope, we don’t want to talk anymore.’”

At 1 p.m. on Thursday, the Rules committee convened with no deal in place and the first amendement up for debate was on the lobbyist ban.

The RNC activated its cell phone list, gathered the day before, to text more than 80 members of the Rules Committee with instructions on how they should vote. Those text messages encouraged members to support any proposals backed by favored RNC members like New Hampshire’s Steve Duprey and Tennessee’s John Ryder while rejecting those offered by more rebellious members like Arizona’s Bruce Ash and Virginia’s Morton Blackwell. In addition, former Congressman Doug Ose, one of Trump’s supporters on the committee, repeatedly invoked procedural motions that permanently ended debate on the most divisive subjects, catching Trump’s opponents off-guard and ensuring that the committee proceedings moved apace.

The joint Trump-RNC teams knew they only had to monitor about two dozen opponents: about 20 who aligned with Blackwell, a veteran conservative known for his efforts to overhaul party rules, and a handful backing Colorado delegate Kendal Unruh, leader of an anti-Trump effort to unbind delegates from the results of primaries and caucuses.

But if the RNC and Trump teams were nervous about the start of voting, their unease lifted quickly. Committee members followed their lead and quickly killed the Cuccinelli proposal when fewer than two dozen committee members showed support for the measure.

The RNC and the Trump campaign finally learned, in an on-record vote, just how deep their support ran in the committee.

What ensued was a rout of all Cuccinelli-favored proposals. RNC forces and Trump allies crushed every proposal offered by forces aligned with Cuccinelli and Lee.

Their job was to keep the anti-Trump forces off-balance – and they did it repeatedly. After a five-hour delayed start, they decided – with little warning – to continue meeting late into the night Thursday, while most of Trump’s opponents were preparing to recess and continue debate on Friday.

“Why give them a whole day to regroup, refresh,” said one RNC official. “Once you press the attack, you don’t let off.”

It was an acrimonious end to a process that both sides said had began with an earnest effort to find common ground. Though Cuccinelli was always dramatically outnumbered on the Rules Committee by forces loyal to the RNC and Trump, the RNC agreed to talks to avoid the appearance that grassroots conservatives were getting steamrolled.

Now Cuccinelli is threatening to disrupt Monday’s convention proceedings by encouraging delegates to vote down the rules passed by the committee, when they come up for a final vote. That would throw the convention into chaos on the day delegates are expected to formally nominate Trump. He’s also promising to pursue “minority reports” for the proposals that his allies failed to advance – vehicles that could be used to force the full convention to vote on them anyway.

“It did look like for a while there was a sincere effort to turn the rules process into something that could’ve been a unifying opportunity,” Cuccinelli said, “instead of the kind of shattering disunity that we saw … in 2012.”