President Trump pardons Dinesh D’Souza
Article publisher:
The Hill
Article date:
31 May 2018
Article category:
National News
Medium
Article Body:
President Trump on Thursday pardoned conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza, who pleaded guilty in 2014 to making illegal campaign contributions.
"Will be giving a Full Pardon to Dinesh D’Souza today. He was treated very unfairly by our government!" Trump wrote in a morning tweet as he traveled to Texas to attend political fundraisers.
Hours later, the White House issued a statement explaining Trump believed D’Souza was the “victim of selective prosecution for violations of campaign finance laws” and that he “accepted responsibility for his actions.”
The president told reporters aboard Air Force One that he did not know D’Souza but learned about his case because "I read the papers, I see him on television.”
“I never met him, I called him last night, first time I’ve ever spoken to him, I said, I’m pardoning you. Nobody asked me to do it,” the president said, adding that “a lot of people” felt he should have been pardoned.
“What should have been a quick minor fine, like everybody else with the election stuff,” Trump said. “What they did to him was horrible.”
D’Souza is serving five years probation for illegally using straw donors to support Republican Senate candidate Wendy Long in 2012. He previously served eight months in a halfway house for the crime, which is a felony, and was ordered to pay a $30,000 fine.
Long and D’Souza were friends from Dartmouth College, and he was a vocal supporter of her campaign against New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D).
D’Souza thanked Trump on Twitter for his pardon, writing: “Obama & his stooges tried to extinguish my American dream & destroy my faith in America. Thank you @realDonaldTrump for fully restoring both.”
Soon after his guilty plea, D’Souza claimed he was targeted by the Obama administration for political reasons.
"The Obama administration tried to shut me up," he said in his 2016 film, “Hillary’s America.” "If you make a film criticizing the most powerful man in the world, expect the empire to strike back."...
Related
Dinesh D’Souza: I Was Targeted by ‘Narcissistic’ Obama, Breitbart, June 5, 2018:
Monday on CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360,”...
D’Souza said, “You have to look at the context of this. Let’s remember, just weeks before all of this went down I released a movie in the theater, 2,000 theaters about Obama and it wasn’t just a critique of his policies. I was in Kenya at his family homestead. I interviewed his brother in a slum in Nairobi. It was an emotionally damaging movie to Obama, and the president was very upset by it. I’m not just speculating. I know this because he was regularly denouncing me on his website Barackobama.com....
He continued, “Now look, I admit that I broke the law, and I demand that I receive the same penalties as everybody else who did what I did. But the point here is no American in this country’s history has been prosecuted, let alone locked up, for doing what I did. Typically these cases are prosecuted when there is a quid pro quo, or somebody commits a repeat offense, they do it all the time. So for these reasons, I became suspicious that part of the reason I was prosecuted is I did something very upsetting to a narcissistic president.”...
Political Persecution of Dinesh D’Souza, Fred Elbel, CAIRCO, July 16, 2015.
The movie Hillary's America is a real eye-opener, Fred Elbel, August 4, 2016.