Ted Cruz is positively gleeful over Trump's pardon of conservative provocateur Dinesh D'Souza

Ted Cruz.
(Image credit: Alex Wong/Getty Images)

President Trump announced Thursday he will grant a presidential pardon to Dinesh D'Souza, and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) is very excited.

"Let me tell you something that deeply concerns me: It's the abuse of power from this administration," Cruz told host Bob Schieffer. "We've seen multiple filmmakers prosecuted and the government's gone after them," he continued, including "Dinesh D'Souza, who did a very big movie criticizing the president, [and who] is now being prosecuted by this administration. Can you imagine the reaction if the Bush administration had gone and prosecuted Michael Moore, Alec Baldwin, and Sean Penn?"

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Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz also suggested D'Souza's case "smacks of selective prosecution." D'Souza ultimately pleaded guilty to charges that he made $20,000 in illegal contributions to a New York Senate candidate.

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Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.