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Conservative filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza has struck a deal with prosecutors over charges he used straw donors to give $15,000 more to a U.S. Senate campaign than is allowed under campaign finance laws, authorities said Tuesday.
D’Souza was to have started his trial this week in New York, but instead, he pleaded guilty Tuesday to one count of making illegal campaign contributions, which carries a maximum two-year sentence. He’s expected to be sentenced in about four months.
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D’Souza was indicted in January for asking some friends to donate money to the campaign of Wendy Long, a Republican who ran unsuccessfully against Democratic incumbent Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand in New York in 2012, and allegedly promising to reimburse them for their donations.
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“It’s a remarkably selective prosecution considering Obama raised millions of dollars under similar circumstances and donors merely faced civil fines while D’Souza is charged with felony violation of federal law,†Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas told The Hollywood Reporter in February.
That having been said, it would appear, at least from the reporting, that D'Souza did indeed do what he was primarily charged with: illegally funneling campaign contributions to Long. Selective prosecution does not somehow excuse the crime: if I get busted doing 90 MPH in a 70 MPH zone on the interstate, I am not somehow excused from that ticket just because the cop didn't stop the guy in the next lane doing 100 MPH. I still did what I have been charged with.
It does make Thomas' stance on campaign finance limits a few weeks back all the more clear and correct, though. With all of the efforts to somehow quash big campaign contributions, to somehow stop people from allegedly "buying elections," all that has happened is that we have created bubbles under the wallpaper. You can give $5000 this way, but if you give $5001 then you've broken the law, unless you route it through a Byzantine system of different handling groups, at which point you can give all sorts of other money completely legally. But all of this assiduously avoids the far more basic question of why it's anyone else's business what someone does with their own money. If I had $20,000 to throw around and I decide that I want to use that money to help bankroll a poor Black kid in the ghetto to get him to college, then I'm a wonderful and noble person. If I give that $20,000 March of Dimes or the Salvation Army or the Red Cross, then I'm generous and kind. If I give that money to Andy Stephenson, then I'm a life-saver fighting for truth to power or whatever. If I put $20,000 in the jar at the convenience market to help little Timmy overcome leukemia or some other such dread disease, then I will be celebrated in the media.
If I give that $20,000 to support a candidate whose views I believe reflect my own, though, it's straight to the slam for me.
There's something very pernicious and wrong about such a system.
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