A filmmaker who has released projects critical of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton is telling WND he’s amused that Democrats – all of a sudden – are rejecting the idea of trying to jail a political opponent in America.
Because the Democrats did exactly that to him.
And a new report reveals that there are at least 16 recent cases where those circumstances have been present.
The issue has arisen because of GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump’s promise during Sunday night’s debate to have a special prosecutor look into Hillary Clinton’s email scandal, where she used a private, non-secure server to handle some of the nation’s classified security secrets. The FBI found she was “extremely careless” but it did not recommend a criminal prosecution.
Democrats reacted with outrage that such an idea – jail for a criminal offense if there would be a conviction – would even be considered.
Former attorney general Eric Holder tweeted: In the USA we do not threaten to jail political opponents.
In the USA we do not threaten to jail political opponents. @realDonaldTrump said he would. He is promising to abuse the power of the office
— Eric Holder (@EricHolder) October 10, 2016
“I was very amused to see the tweet by Eric Holder waxing indignant about the idea of jailing your political opponents,” said Dinesh D’Souza, whose projects have included “Hillary’s America,” “America: Imagine the World Without Her,” “What’s so Great About Christianity” and more.
“Let’s talk about my case for a second. No American in the country’s history has been locked up for doing what I did,” he said. “This is typically handled not even as a criminal matter but as a civil matter by the SEC. It was highly unusual for the government to prosecute in this way.”
D’Souza was sentenced to overnights in jail and other penalties after he admitted arranging “straw donors” to contribute to the unsuccessful 2012 U.S. Senate campaign of Wendy Long, a college friend.
Obama administration prosecutors actually had told the judge they were insisting on 10 months in prison.
At the time, supporters of D’Souza saw a double standard, maintaining Holder’s Justice Department typically ignores similar technical violations in contributions to Democratic Party campaigns.
Gerald R. Molen, producer of D’Souza’s films, told WND the charges were “the equivalent of prosecuting a political dissident in the Soviet Union for jaywalking.”
“Yes, jaywalking in the Soviet Union is a crime, but it’s a minor crime,” he said.
Now D’Souza is pressing the point.
“Given the facts [of my case] … this came on the heels of the movie about Obama. [Critics were justified] in saying this was a political vendetta.”
He said Obama, well known as a “narcissist,” was “very bitter about the movie, and was railing on his website.”
“My case revealed the real difference between the right and the left. Conservatives would never think of jailing Michael Moore, however offensive we might consider his movies. We might ridicule him, but we wouldn’t try to destroy his life,” he said.
Trump’s comment came during the debate conversation about Clinton’s email scandal. The GOP candidate promised, if elected, to have a special prosecutor look at the facts.
When Clinton claimed he should apologize to some of those he’s criticized, he responded, “When you talk about apology, I think the one you should really be apologizing for and this thing you should be apologizing for are the 33,000 emails that you deleted and that you acid washed and then the two boxes of emails and other things last week taken from an office and are now missing.”
Clinton claimed the statements were untrue and shot back, “It’s just awfully good that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the law of our country.”
“Because you’d be in jail,” Trump said, to cheering and clapping.
Holder’s response didn’t take long coming.
“In the USA we do not threaten to jail political opponents. … [Trump] said he would. He is promising to abuse the power of the office.”
He continued, “Be afraid of any candidate who says he will order DOJ/FBI to act on his command. This is dangerous, so is @realDonaldTrump – he’s not qualified.”
It was the Federalist where writer Bre Payton listed those 16 cases where Democrats have, in fact, tried to jail political opponents.
“The media had a fainting spell over Trump’s comment, and are insisting he’s behaving like a dictator and threatening to jail a political opponent. Here’s a few of the numerous overwrought headlines that have emerged,” she wrote.
Vox: Donald Trumps threat to imprison Hillary Clinton is a threat to democracy
The New Yorker: Trump Shows His Inner Dictator
CNN: Trump threatens to jail Clinton if he wins election
ThinkProgress: Trump campaign can’t decide whether Trump was joking about putting Hillary in jail
- David Daleiden: “After publishing undercover footage of Planned Parenthood harvesting organs from the bodies of aborted babies and discussing agreements to sell those baby organs, Daleiden became public enemy number one for Democrats.” The report said the case was filled with conflicts, including a prosecutor who got more than $25,000 from an abortionist.
- Little Sisters of the Poor: “The Obama administration tried to fine this Catholic organization, which cares for impoverished elderly individuals, for refusing to provide birth control to their employees.” The report said Obama’s administration tried to force them to pay $70 million a year in fines.
- Gov. Rick Snyder: “Leftists called for Michigan’s Republican governor to be jailed after emails revealed his office was worried about water conditions in Flint a year before he took action on the local affair.”
- Wisconsin’s John Doe Probe: “A Democratic district attorney used the state’s legal system to intimidate Republicans in a witchhunt against Republican Gov. Scott Walker.” The report said Dems ordered police to raid homes of conservative activists.
- Gov. Rick Perry: “In 2013, Rosemary Lehmberg, a Texas district attorney for Travis County and a Democrat, was arrested for drunk driving. A video of her booking, in which she’s visibly under the influence and slurring her words, went viral. Former Gov. Rick Perry tried to remove her from office by threatening to ‘veto funding for a statewide public corruption unit that she headed unless she resigned.’ Democrats tried to get him prosecuted in retaliation.”
- Gov. Bob McDonnell: “Last year, the former Republican governor of Virginia was found guilty of wire fraud, extortion, and other felony charges after accepting large sums of money from a campaign donor he later named as a cabinet member.” Reports said the judge appeared to have a personal vendetta against McDonnell.
- ‘Climate Change Deniers’: “Leftist TV actor Bill Nye ‘the science guy’ said in April that those who are skeptical of so-called ‘climate change’ should probably go to jail. … Robert Kennedy said he ‘wish[ed] there were a law you could punish them with.'”
- Gov. Mitt Romney: “In 2012, a pro-Obama super PAC, Priorities USA Action, released a TV ad basically calling the former Massachusetts governor a murderer and intimating that he gave a woman cancer.”
- Advocates for Sex-Protected Bathrooms: “The Obama administration threatened to defund schools that didn’t want to allow transgender students to share bathrooms, locker rooms, and overnight sleeping quarters with children of the opposite biological sex.”
- Cake Bakers: “A Denver-area cake baker, Jack Phillips, became an enemy of the state after he refused to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex couple. … The Colorado Civil Rights Commission has mandated that he must bake cakes for all weddings, even those he objects to for religious reasons, and that he must ‘re-educate’ his staff and keep records for two years to prove he’s complying with state law.”
- Conservative Nonprofits: “After Catherine Engelbrecht filed an application to get tax-exempt status approved for her voter integrity group True The Vote, she and her husband were raked over the coals by the IRS, investigated by the FBI, and later investigated by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF).”
- Dinesh D’Souza: “The Obama administration had the filmmaker arrested after he encouraged others to donate to a New York senatorial candidate and later reimbursed them.”
- The Filmmaker Hillary Blamed For Benghazi: “Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, the filmmaker Hillary Clinton falsely accused of producing an inflammatory video she falsely told Americans had spurred the terrorist attack in Benghazi where four Americans died, was sentenced to a year in prison for publishing the short film on the Internet in violation of his parole.”
- Pro-Lifers: “Daleiden isn’t the only pro-life advocate liberals have twisted the law to pillory. For 28 years a pro-abortion group, the National Organization for Women, went after pro-life activists who had volunteered to lend support and counseling to women seeking an abortion. The attorney representing NOW accused the group of violating the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act. As Life Site reports, the RICO act is ‘a statute intended to prosecute members of the mafia.'”
- Karl Rove: “Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was annoyed at House Republicans for their probe into Attorney General Eric Holder’s Operation Fast and Furious — a series of botched sting operations that resulted in the deaths of American border patrol agents and countless Mexican people. So she bragged to reporters that she could’ve thrown Karl Rove in jail, but didn’t because she’s nice.”
- Sen. Tom Cotton: “After Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) penned an open letter criticizing the Iran nuclear deal, Democrats accused him of violating an obscure, 200-year old law called The Logan Act. The funny thing is, no one has even been found guilty of violating the act in the history of the United States. So why start with Cotton? Probably because he was critical of their pet project, which is a pretty raw deal for America and the rest of the world.”
That D’Souza is a critic of Democrats is unquestioned.
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His new website supporting his book “Hillary’s America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party,” has been getting a lot of attention.
He warns: “We are on the brink of losing our country forever. After eight years of Obama, four years – or possibly eight years – of Hillary Clinton as president of the United States would so utterly transform America as to make it unrecognizable.”
He said if Clinton wins the presidency, America will no longer be a land of opportunity.
“Hillary as president will complete the transformation of America into a land of rapacious crony capitalism, run solely for the benefit of friends of the Obamas and the Clintons and the Democratic Party,” D’Souza stressed.
