Social media users piled on conservative filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza on Monday, accusing the conspiracy theorist of hypocrisy for criticizing Joe Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter, as D’Souza received a presidential pardon of his own from Donald Trump in 2018.
The jokes began when D’Souza posted about the pardon on X, writing, “No one is above the law—except my son Hunter!” Elsewhere on his feed, D’Souza called the Bidens a “crime family” and Hunter Biden a “degenerate gangster.”
The comments quickly generated a storm of links and mockery pointing to D’Souza’s own 2018 pardon for campaign finance violations.
In addition to a dreaded community note under D’Souza’s post, many individual users also pointed to the Trump administration pardon.
“This you?” asked Armand Domalewski, founders of YIMBYs for Harris, a pro-Kamala Harris group.
“You were literally pardoned by Trump,” added MSNBC contributor Brian Tyler Cohen.
“A convicted felon who was pardoned by Trump says what?” the group Republicans Against Trump posted.
In 2018, Trump pardoned D’Souza, arguing the filmmaker had been “treated very unfairly by our government!” After the pardon, D’Souza claimed the underlying charges were a result of “Obama & his stooges” trying to “extinguish my American dream.”
Four years earlier, D’Souza pleaded guilty to breaking federal election campaign law. Prosecutors said D’Souza directed two people to make donations of $10,000 each to the U.S. Senate campaign of Wendy Long under their own names, then reimbursed them, violating individual contribution limits under the Federal Election Campaign Act by using “straw donors.”
“Following the Court’s ruling denying Dinesh D’Souza’s baseless claim of selective prosecution, D’Souza now has admitted, through his guilty plea, what we have asserted all along – that he knowingly and intentionally violated federal election laws,” then-U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said at the time.
Outside of entering the fray on the Biden pardon, D’Souza made headlines on Monday after issuing an apology about flaws in the data and analysis underlying his widely debunked 2000 Mules film, which claimed election fraud during the 2020 election and fueled numerous conspiracy theories.
In his apology, the filmmaker said one of the film’s main claims, that paid “mules” fraudulently desposited harvested ballots in swing states, had relied on surveillance video matched to “cell phone geolocation data” provided by conservative non-profit group True the Vote.
“We were assured that the surveillance videos had been linked to geolocation cell phone data, such that each video depicted an individual who had made at least 10 visits to drop boxes. Indeed, it is clear from the interviews within the film itself that True the Vote was correlating the videos to geolocation data,” he wrote. “We recently learned that surveillance videos used in the film may not have actually been correlated with the geolocation data.”
D’Souza nonetheless insisted the “underlying premise of the film holds true.”
Mark Andrews, one of the people the flim alleged to be a mule, was exonerated by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and filed a defamation suit against True the Vote, D’Souza, and the film’s distributor, Salem Media. The suit claimed the film prompted violent threats against Andrews and his family.
Salem Media apologized in May and settled with Andrews, saying in statement at the time the film “relied on representations made to us by Dinesh D’Souza and True the Vote.”
A companion 2000 Mules book was abruptly pulled from the shelves under threat of legal action to remove false claims made about other nonprofits.
