President Donald Trump announced via Twitter that he will fully pardon controversial conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza on Thursday.
Trump said that D’Souza, who was convicted of campaign finance fraud, “was treated very unfairly by our government!”
Will be giving a Full Pardon to Dinesh D’Souza today. He was treated very unfairly by our government!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 31, 2018
D’Souza, as a matter of fact, pled guilty in 2014 of funneling two payments of $10,000 to 2012 Senate campaign of his friend Wendy Long via “straw donors”—one of which was his wife. In doing so he had violated the Federal Election Campaign Act, which limited individual citizen donations to any one political candidate at $5,000.
During his trial, he admitted that he was fully aware that what he was doing was illegal and was sentenced to five years of probation. He was also required to pay a $30,000 fine and perform community service.
Yet D’Souza has also claimed that he was the victim of a political conspiracy instigated by then-U.S. attorney Preet Bharara. In 2017, when Trump fired Bharara, the pundit celebrated by absurdly claiming Bharara’s motivations in convicting him were somehow connected to the former prosecutor’s racial identity.
.@PreetBharara to me is a familiar Indian type, one of those gang leaders out of "Slumdog Millionaire" transplanted to the United States
— Dinesh D'Souza (@DineshDSouza) March 13, 2017
GOOD RIDDANCE DEPT: Obama capo @PreetBharara is a familiar Indian type, subservient to those above him but ruthless with those in his power
— Dinesh D'Souza (@DineshDSouza) March 11, 2017
D’souza, who served briefly in President Ronald Reagan’s administration and was a prominent critic of former President Barack Obama, is known to peddle in controversial and fringe right-wing ideas.
In 2016 he released a documentary called Hillary’s America which attempted to tie the Democratic Party to the Ku Klux Klan and slavery.
In another incident, he defended Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler, who murdered thousands of gay men and women, as being “NOT anti-gay.”
Hitler was NOT anti-gay. He refused to purge gay Brownshirts from Nazi ranks saying he had no problem as long as they were good fighters
— Dinesh D'Souza (@DineshDSouza) October 6, 2017
In October he propagated a hyperpartisan conspiracy theory alleging that the gunman who killed 58 people in Las Vegas, Nevada, was an anti-Trump activist.
Was the #LasVegasShooter an anti-Trump guy? This would explain why the mainstream media is so cagey about his background
— Dinesh D'Souza (@DineshDSouza) October 3, 2017
This year D’Souza was forced to apologize for mocking the student survivors of the Parkland school shooting after the state voted down a proposal to ban assault rifles.
Worst news since their parents told them to get summer jobs https://t.co/Vg3mXYvb4c
— Dinesh D'Souza (@DineshDSouza) February 20, 2018
D’Souza will be the fifth pardon of Trump’s presidency.