Dinesh D'Souza — the conservative filmmaker who pleaded guilty to using straw donors to make an illegal contribution to a Senate candidate — should have come clean to his supporters long ago, said Daniel Halper, online editor for The Weekly Standard.
"He is not an innocent man, and he did commit a criminal activity, and the law should be upheld,'' Halper told "The Steve Malzberg Show'' on Newsmax TV.
"It's unfortunate he would let his supporters go down this rabbit hole knowing full well that he was guilty of this action and not stepping out in front of them, say, 'Don't defend me this time, I screwed up.'''
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D'Souza, whose high-grossing film "2016: Obama's America" was highly critical of the president, admitted Tuesday to making illegal campaign contributions to a U.S. Senate candidate in New York.
The 53-year-old activist entered the plea in federal court in Manhattan on the day his trial was to begin, admitting that two associates each gave $10,000 to Wendy Long's campaign with the understanding that he would reimburse them.
"I did reimburse them," D'Souza told U.S. District Judge Richard Berman. "I knew that causing a campaign contribution to be made in the name of another was wrong and something the law forbids. I deeply regret my conduct."
A plea agreement D'Souza signed calls for him not to challenge any sentence within the range of 10 and 16 months.
"He owed it to his defenders rather than concoct this notion that he was being unfairly prosecuted," Halper told Malzberg.
"It looks like he's being fairly prosecuted. These laws might not be fair in that maybe the campaign finance laws should be tweaked, etc., etc., but that's a different debate altogether than whether or not the laws on the books should be upheld.
"Obviously, they weren't as he himself plead today, and obviously, he should face the law."
Meanwhile, Halper believes Hillary Clinton's soon-to-be-released memoir "Hard Choices," will deal extensively with the Benghazi attack and its aftermath to diffuse criticism should she decided to run for president.
"If she can talk about Benghazi ad nauseam two or three months from now, certainly by the time she would run for president … she could rightfully state, 'This is old news, I don't want to talk about this, we discussed this at length, and it's in my book,'" Harper said.
"With that said … it's incumbent upon [journalists] to ask serious questions about Benghazi. Now is the chance. If they're not asked now, they're going to have a hard time asking them later.
"Questions of what she did, how she responded, how she led the security situation in Benghazi … Those sorts of questions need to be asked. Whether they will by this media that seems highly uninterested is, well, that's another story."
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