UPDATED with Fox News appearance: President Donald Trump has tweeted that he’ll grant a full pardon to conservative author/filmmaker and federal campaign finance law violator Dinesh D’Souza. “He was treated very unfairly by our government!” Trump tweeted by way of explanation.
Shortly after Trump’s tweet, D’Souza took his moment in the Twitter spotlight to plug his upcoming movie. His best-known film, the 2012 documentary 2016: Obama’s America, was panned by critics, with Entertainment Weekly calling it “nothing more than an insidious attempt to dishonestly smear the President [Obama] by giving intellectual cover to the worst in subterranean conspiracy theories and false, partisan attacks.”
Also today, Fox News Channel said that D’Souza will appear Friday on its POTUS-approved morning show Fox & Friends.
D’Souza pleaded guilty to violating federal campaign finance laws in 2014. The perpetual Clinton and Obama foe had earlier been indicted for illegally using straw donors to make financial contributions to New York Republican senate candidate Wendy Long.
D’Souza was sentenced to five years of probation and fined $30,000.
The presidential pardon drew a quick and concise analysis from Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe, who called the move “obstruction”:
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