Dinesh D’Souza claims that a member of Congress told him about his FBI file, and that there is reason to suspect bias in what he found.
Conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza is well-known for a number of reasons. Mostly, he’s known for pieces he’s written, including books and films, from a conservative and Christian viewpoint. However, some may know him best for being charged in 2014 with making $20,000 in illegal campaign contributions to a New York Senate candidate, Wendy Long, and making false statements to the Federal Election Committee. He was pardoned by President Trump recently.
Now, according to claims from D’Souza, Representative Ron DeSantis, a republican from Florida, revealed the contents of his file from the Federal Bureau of Investigation to him. According to him, what he found was very interesting. His file was ‘red-flagged’ for being a ‘right-wing conservative,’ an outrage which certainly suggests that Barack Obama and his administration were targeting conservatives.
On a C-SPAN show called “Washington Journal,” D’Souza declared that DeSantis called him after he managed to receive a redacted version of the file through the a congressional inquiry.
According to the filmmaker, the first thing that struck the congressman when he reviewed the file was that the case concerned an alleged $20,000 violation, but the Federal Bureau of Investigation “immediately” assigned $100,000 to investigate the violation.
That’s five times the value of the allegedly illicit contribution.
According to DeSantis, that was an extremely abnormal practice.
D’Souza also declared that his file on said on it ‘red-flagged,’ and stated that “Dinesh is a right-wing conservative.”
That sounds like the result of brilliant detective work from someone in the government, and certainly not information that could be gleaned from simply plugging his name into Google and reading a few of his articles or watching the advertisements for his movies on YouTube.
However, he raised a good point in his discussion. He pointed out that to his mind, it should have never been listed on his file at all.
After all, in theory, the FBI, and the federal government should not be interested in his political stance, or who the illicit money was heading to, but rather in whether or not he committed a crime.
He posited that the reason it showed up in his file was to alert the Department of Justice that perhaps they would be more interested in going after him.
D’Souza has long maintained that he was unfairly targeted by the federal government, and has suggested that the Obama administration took aim at him due to his political views and the various films and written works he produced.
According to Gerad Molen, the man who co-produced the his 2012 film ‘2016: Obama’s America,’ the indictment was politically motivated retribution for the success of that film in theatres and with American audiences.
Alan Dershowitz, a noted legal mind, Harvard law professor, liberal, and even a former member of the O.J. Simpson legal team, seemed to agree with their claims.
Dershowitz, one of the brightest American legal minds living, said that charging D’Souza with a felony didn’t seem like “a proper exercise of prosecutorial discretion,” and that he couldn’t help but come to the conclusion that politics had something to do with it.
The famed lawyer said that the whole thing smacked of “selective prosecution.”
He also stated that similar allegations of campaign violations are common in politics.
These claims didn’t seem to do much good, even when made by people with as much legal clout as Dershowitz. D’Souza was sentenced in a federal court to five years of probation, eight months in a halfway house, and to a fine of $30,000, on a conviction for one felony count of making illegal contributions in the name of others.
However, the story did have a somewhat happy ending, as President Donald Trump pardoned him on May 31, 2018.
Still, this does lend some credibility to Mr. D’Souza’s ongoing claims that the was targeted for his politics, rather than his crime, and to the idea that the government went out of their way to prosecute him, at great expense, over a contribution to a losing candidate.
While leftists, who once questioned everything the federal government said or did during the George W. Bush years, suddenly pretend that the FBI has always been an honorable agency, the reality is that for much of its time in operation, it has been a political tool.
Its founder, J. Edgar Hoover, often used the agency to target political opponents and those he simply had disdain for. The agency spied on famous civil rights leaders, including none other than Martin Luther King Jr.
It’s hard to prove, or to disprove, the idea that D’Souza was targeted due to his “right-wing” conservative beliefs. However, it certainly sounds like it.
