Monday, January 27, 2014

Obama Criminalizes Dissent, Goes After Dinesh D’Souza

In 2012, conservative author Dinesh D’Souza produced an anti-Obama documentary, 2016: Obama’s America. The film earned over $33 million at the box office and was the highest-grossing documentary since 1982. The outspoken Christian conservative and bestselling author also released a book that year, Obama's America: Unmaking the American Dream. Previously, in 2008, D’Souza gave Obama’s half-brother George $1,000 for a medical emergency when Obama would not respond to George’s pleas for help. George lives in a 6 by 10 foot hut in the slums of Kenya, and told D’Souza, "You're the only guy I know I can call." George then appeared in D’Souza’s documentary, expressing his disappointment that Obama had not responded to his request for help, “he’s supposed to help his family.”

It doesn’t appear to be a coincidence that the Obama administration is now targeting D’Souza for minor campaign finance violations. Last week he was criminally indicted. But what does this really mean? There is an old saying that a good prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich, and as a former prosecutor, I agree.

D’Souza helped raise $785,000 for a friend of his who was running for Congress, Wendy Long. After he and his wife maxed out contributing the legally allowed $5,000 to the campaign, federal authorities claim that he illegally reimbursed straw donors for another $20,000 secretly coming from him. He faces up to seven years in prison if convicted.

In contrast, when Democrat Senator John Edwards received numerous $2,000 donations from support staff and paralegals at large law firms, many all on the same day, nothing happened to him. Overlawyered reported,

Washington periodical The Hill digs deeper into the curiously uniform $2,000 contributions Sen. John Edwards' presidential campaign got from so many receptionists, paralegals and other low-level staffers at plaintiff's law firms. The $2,000 donors include many employees who had not given to candidates or even voted in the past, and others who are listed on the voting rolls as Republicans. Many spouses and relatives of the staffers likewise contributed the maximum. Some of the munificent staffers have recently gone through the kind of personal financial reverses -- bankruptcy filings, for example -- which would not seem to correlate in the natural order of things with having a large available checkbook for political donations. "In many instances, all the checks from a given firm arrived on the same day -- from partners, attorneys, and other support staff."

Read the rest of the article at Townhall

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