Conservative author Dinesh D’Souza ’83, a former editor-in-chief of The Dartmouth Review, slated to visit the College on Thursday, pleaded not guilty on Jan. 24 to charges that he illegally redirected $20,000 in campaign contributions to a candidate in a 2012 U.S. Senate election. D’Souza was indicted for campaign finance fraud on Thursday.
At Friday’s hearing in Manhattan, a prosecutor told U.S. District Judge Richard Berman that D’Souza redirected funds to the campaign of Republican candidate Wendy Long ’82 during her 2012 Senate race against Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand ’88, D-N.Y., Bloomberg reported. Long told U.S. investigators that D’Souza had lied to her about the source of the money.
Both parties will reconvene at a conference on Mar. 4 to determine whether the case will go to trial or be settled outside of court, said Stephanie Cirkovich, a spokesperson for the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of New York.
The federal grand jury charged D’Souza with making illegal contributions in the names of others, which allowed him to surpass the 2012 donation limit of $2,500 per candidate in the primary and another $2,500 in the general election, Reuters reported.
D’Souza donated $5,000 — the maximum permissible by law — to Long’s campaign, as did his then-wife Dixie D’Souza, Federal Election Commission records show. Both donations were made on Mar. 16, 2012. D’Souza also allegedly directed his associates to make the donations and subsequently reimbursed them, according to a Justice Department press release.
Government professor Joseph Bafumi said that federal campaign finance laws are designed to limit the amount an individual donor can contribute to a single campaign.
“It’s essentially like he’s cutting a larger check to the campaign himself and he’s filtering it through other people,” Bafumi said of D’Souza.
In an additional count, D’Souza was charged with causing false statements to be made to the FEC. Between the two charges, D’Souza faces up to seven years in prison, according to the Justice Department press release.
The indictment resulted from the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s review of FEC campaign filings after the 2012 New York Senate race, the release said.
D’Souza is scheduled to come to Hanover for a Jan. 30 event. The program, a debate between D’Souza and 1960s counterculture activist and Weather Underground founder Bill Ayers, is co-sponsored by The Dartmouth Review.
Editor of The Dartmouth Review Nick Desatnick ’15 said the debate is still on despite the arraignment and that D’Souza is eager to return to campus.
“He’s excited about it,” Desatnick said. “He wants to do it. He’s really keen on the idea.”
The debate will focus on the status of America today and the bigger question of what it stands for as a socioeconomic and geopolitical force, Desatnick said.
“The whole point of the debate is to be free flowing and off-the-cuff,” he said. “We don’t want to have any preset questions, and we want a lot of audience input.”
The New York FBI office’s Public Corruption Unit is prosecuting D’Souza’s case.
D’Souza has visited the College previously to discuss affirmative action, debate western hegemony and promote his 2003 book, “What’s So Great About America.” He also co-directed “2016: Obama’s America” (2012), the second-highest domestic grossing political documentary in the world.
D’Souza made headlines in 2012 when he resigned from the presidency of King’s College after being accused of having an extramarital affair.
