According to Reuters, right-wing media star Dinesh D'Souza “was sentenced on Tuesday to spend eight months in a community confinement center” as part of five years of probation for violating federal campaign finance laws.
In January, D'Souza was indicted for arranging excessive campaign contributions to the Senate campaign of his friend Wendy Long. After spending several months protesting the charges and claiming he was being unfairly targeted for his political beliefs, D'Souza pleaded guilty in May.
Reuters reports that a federal judge today declined to sentence D'Souza to jail time, opting for probation, time in a community confinement center, a fine, and community service:
The defendant, a frequent critic of President Barack Obama, was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Richard Berman in Manhattan. He was also given a $30,000 fine and ordered to do one day of community service a week during his probation.
D'Souza, 53, admitted in May to illegally reimbursing two 'straw donors' who donated $10,000 each to the unsuccessful 2012 U.S. Senate campaign in New York of Wendy Long, a Republican he had known since attending Dartmouth College in the early 1980s.
“It was a crazy idea, it was a bad idea,” D'Souza told Berman before being sentenced. “I regret breaking the law.”
Since being indicted 8 months ago, D'Souza has found steady support from his allies in the media and Congress, who decried the charges as everything from “stifling political dissent” to something that might happen in “Nazi Germany.”
He has made numerous appearances on Fox News to lament his prosecution. Fox News' website states that D'Souza is scheduled to appear on The Kelly File tonight.
UPDATE: Dinesh D'Souza used his September 23 appearance on The Kelly File to resuscitate the myth that his indictment was political retribution. D'Souza described his reaction to his sentence to host Megyn Kelly, saying “I've got a big smile on my face now,” because “this was really an effort to put me out of business...and a federal judge said 'no.'” D'Souza added, “There seems to be a pattern of this administration using the instruments of the law, the IRS, and so on to go after its critics.” Despite D'Souza's recently announced sentence and his guilty plea to a felony, Kelly continued her longstanding support for the right-wing media darling, declaring “Only you, Dinesh, could walk away from this kind of an experience where you admit you committed a felony, you were facing 16 months in jail, and now the whole process has restored your faith in America, the judicial system and it's made you love the country even more”: