President Trump on Thursday granted a full pardon to conservative filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza, who pleaded guilty to making illegal contributions to a US Senate race in New York.
Speaking aboard Air Force One during a flight to Texas, Trump explained his reasoning.
“I’ve always felt he was very unfairly treated. And a lot of people did, a lot of people did. What should have been a quick minor fine, like everybody else with the election stuff,” Trump said. “What they did to him was horrible.”
In a statement, the White House said D’Souza was the victim of “selective prosecution” in the president’s eyes.
“Mr. D’Souza accepted responsibility for his actions, and also completed community service by teaching English to citizens and immigrants seeking citizenship,” the statement continued.
D’Souza said he was thankful for Trump’s pardon.
”Obama and his stooges tried to destroy my American dream and faith in America. Trump has fully restored both. I’m very grateful,” he told Yahoo News.
D’Souza was convicted in 2014 for using “straw donors” to donate $20,000 to Wendy Long’s 2012 campaign.
Long, who was running against Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, attended Dartmouth University with D’Souza.
He was indicted by then US Attorney Preet Bharara, who was appointed by former President Obama and fired by Trump in 2017.
Bharara posted his reaction to the pardon on Twitter.
”The President has the right to pardon but the facts are these: D’Souza intentionally broke the law, voluntarily pled guilty, apologized for his conduct & the judge found no unfairness,” he wrote on his account. “The career prosecutors and agents did their job. Period.”
D’Souza was sentenced to eight months in a halfway house and five years of probation – as well as getting hit with a $30,000 fine.
In 2012 D’Souza made an anti-President Obama documentary ”2016: Obama’s America” and has repeated a far-right conspiracy theory that Jewish billionaire George Soros was a Nazi sympathizer in his 2017 book, “The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left.”
The president’s announcement that he would pardon D’Souza’s came just two days after Donald Trump Jr. retweeted Roseanne Barr’s posting of the debunked claims about the Hungarian-born Soros.
The comedian’s hit sitcom “Roseanne” was dumped by ABC on Tuesday after she let loose a tweetstorm that included a racist attack comparing Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett to an ape.
In her feverish rants, she also repeated the conspiracy theory that Soros was a Nazi collaborator.
In Barr’s posting, retweeted by Donald Jr., she claimed Soros “turned in his fellow Jews 2 be murdered in German concentration camps & stole their wealth-were you aware of that?”
She went on to accuse him of trying to “overthrow” the “us constitutional republic by buying/backing candidates … who will ignore US law & favor ‘feelings’ instead.”
Trump has also used his pardon power on controversial Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, who was convicted of disobeying a court order in an immigration case, and Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the chief of staff to former Vice President Cheney for obstruction of justice.