Dinesh D’Souza is a conservative “scholar” and terrible filmmaker who has
- said of Obama “you can take the boy out of the ghetto”
- ridiculed Michelle Obama as “affirmative action” Princeton student
- said slavery wasn’t racist, slaves were treated “pretty well”
- mocked Rosa Parks
- suggested the Charlottesville rally was staged
- shared a meme calling Obama a “gay Muslim”
- suggested Michelle Obama is a man s
- started a conspiracy theory about the Vegas shooting
- defended Adolf Hitler as “NOT anti-gay”
…among other things. He was convicted — actually, he pled guilty — campaign finance violations. He used straw donors to make $20,000 in illegal contributions to Republican Senate candidate Wendy Long in 2012. He voluntarily pled guilty, apologized for his conduct and the judge found no unfairness.
He served his time in prison.
There is no evidence that D’Souza was treated “unfairly”.
The most effective way for an authoritarian leader to abuse the law is not by prosecuting the innocent, but by protecting the guilty.
Look, the President has the unfettered power to pardon whoever he wants, but if he’s using it exclusively in favor of political allies and those who share his ideology, then it’s a blatant abuse of that power and an obvious threat to the rule of law.
UPDATE: According to the Daily Caller, Ted Cruz was behind the whole thing, campaigning for the pardon with Trump. I guess if you know somebody powerful, you can get that kind of access.
D’Sousa also says this:
D’Souza said he was struck by Trump’s “gut sense of justice” and that any other Republican administration would have had endless “strategy meetings, focus groups, try to see whether it would benefit them politically, and that is not Trump.
D’Souza noted that he does not maintain his innocence but that “I broke the law and should receive the same punishment as any American who does the same thing.”
So, he admits he’s not innocent, but is struck by Trump’s “sense of justice”. Meaning, I guess, that Trump’s idea of “justice” is to pardon guilty people.
Also, this does help Trump politically with his base. He also gets Cruz on his side, which he needs when impeachment comes around. It’s called influence-peddling.
Trump would have you believe he’s righting wrongs, and that’s certainly in the eye of the beholder. But he’s also righting wrongs that mirror his own legal predicament. The president who routinely complained about the “witch hunt” that is special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation is using his pardon power in perhaps unprecedented ways to assert that myriad other witch hunts have taken place in recent years. It’s all self-serving on some level, regardless of how you feel about any individual pardon.