Dinesh D'Souza indicted for excessive Senate campaign contributions
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Version 0 of 1. The conservative commentator and best-selling author Dinesh D'Souza has been indicted by a federal grand jury, for arranging excessive campaign contributions to a candidate for the US Senate. According to an indictment made public on Thursday in federal court in Manhattan, around August 2012 D'Souza reimbursed people he had directed to contribute $20,000 to the candidate's campaign. The candidate was not named in the indictment. Attempts to reach D'Souza and a lawyer representing him were unsuccessful. D'Souza was charged in the indictment with one count of making illegal contributions in the names of others, and one count of causing false statements to be made. In 2012, federal law limited primary and general election campaign contributions to $2,500 each, for a total of $5,000, from any individual to any one candidate. "As we have long said, this office and the FBI take a zero tolerance approach to corruption of the electoral process," the US attorney for Manhattan, Preet Bharara, said in a statement released by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Bharara is an Obama appointee. D'Souza, 52, who was born in Mumbai, is a former policy adviser to President Ronald Reagan, and has been affiliated with conservative organizations such as the American Enterprise Institute and the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He also directed a 2012 film critical of President Barack Obama, entitled 2016: Obama's America, and has written books including The End of Racism, Life After Death: the Evidence and Obama's America: Unmaking the American Dream. D'Souza campaigned in 2012 on behalf of Wendy Long, a lawyer and Republican who sought to unseat Democratic incumbent Kirsten Gillibrand as New York's junior senator. Long graduated from Dartmouth College in 1982, a year before D'Souza. Long could not be reached for comment on Thursday. Gillibrand, a 1988 Dartmouth graduate, ended up winning re-election to her first full term, collecting close to 72% of the vote. In late 2012, D'Souza resigned his post as president of King's College, a small Christian college in New York City, after admitting he had become engaged to a woman even though he was legally married, though separated from his wife. He has been an outspoken defender of traditional marriage. |