NEW YORK — President Donald Trump unexpectedly announced on Thursday that he will issue a pardon to conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza, who pleaded guilty to campaign finance fraud four years ago.
D’Souza was sentenced in New York to five years of probation in 2014 after copping to charges that he illegally used straw donors to contribute to Republican Senate candidate Wendy Long.
“Will be giving a Full Pardon to Dinesh D’Souza today. He was treated very unfairly by our government!” Trump tweeted.
D’Souza, a right-wing political commentator and the former president of Manhattan’s The King’s College, has penned several best-selling books and was an outspoken critic of the Obama administration.
Much like the president, the 57-year-old has courted controversy with his contentious social media posts and comments.
In 2013, he made disparaging remarks about then-President Barack Obama in the wake of the Trayvon Martin’s death. Recently, he took heat for criticizing the survivors of he Parkland, Fla. school shooting.
“Worst news since their parents told them to get summer jobs,” D’Souza tweeted after Florida lawmakers voted against legislation banning the sale of assault weapons.
A year earlier he was forced to step down as the head of the evangelical King’s College when he began introducing his mistress as his fiancee despite still being married to his wife of 20 years.
D’Souza ran afoul of federal campaign finance laws in that same year and later pleaded guilty to reimbursing two associates after directing them to contribute $10,000 each to Long’s campaign. He admitted at the time he knew what he was doing was illegal.
The Federal Election Campaign Act barred individuals from donating more than $5,000 to a candidate.
Long lost the 2012 race to incumbent Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand.
Then-U.S. attorney Preet Bharara prosecuted D’Souza.
“Dinesh D’Souza attempted to illegally contribute over $10,000 to a Senate campaign, wilfully undermining the integrity of the campaign finance process,” Bharara said at the time. “Like many others before him, of all political stripes, he has had to answer for this crime – here with a felony conviction.”
Bharara was fired last year soon after Trump took office.
D’Souza, who made the incendiary anti-Obama documentary “2016: Obama’s America,” shared Trump’s tweet, but did not immediately comment.
Critics blasted the pardon as politically motivated — and a signal to former aides and associates charged in the federal Russia investigation that Trump is willing to offer a helping hand.
“Dinesh D’Souza pled guilty to violating campaign law; funneling cash to a GOP campaign,” VoteVets, a left-leaning group aiming to support veterans’ public office bids, tweeted. “Trump’s pardon doesn’t just signal Manafort & others that they’ll get one, but foreign regimes that they too can break laws to help Trump.
“We didn’t serve to see our vote attacked this way,” the group added.
The surprise announcement on Thursday was Trump’s fifth pardon since taking office, including his controversial choice to pardon former Arizona sheriff Joseph Arpaio.
While most presidents often wait until the end of their term to issue pardons, Trump has used the power of the executive office to aid GOP-friendly convicts including former Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff “Scooter” Libby and Arpaio.
Last week, Trump issued a rare posthumous pardon to Jack Johnson, boxing’s first black heavyweight champion.
The pardon cleared Johnson’s name more than 100 years after he was convicted for what many argued was the racially motivated charge of traveling with his white girlfriend.
