Indian-American prosecutor Preet Bharara wants Indian-American conservative commentator and author Dinesh D'Souza who made a highly critical 2012 documentary of President Barack Obama, jailed for 16 months for campaign finance violations.
Bharara, US attorney for Manhattan made the recommendation to US District Judge Richard Berman opposing convicted D'Souza's lawyer's request for only probation and community service for his client who is now "disgraced and humiliated".
Prosecutors said D'Souza, 53, who had pleaded guilty, hasn't taken responsibility for his crime and still brands himself a victim of unfair prosecution for his dislike of the Obama administration, New York Daily News reported.
D'Souza's college-aged daughter Danielle defended him via YouTube, pleading for leniency citing her father's troubled personal life and explaining that his error in judgment coincided with her parents' divorce
"A few weeks after making the mistake of violating New York's campaign finance laws, my parents filed for divorce. He was very stressed during this time as my parents had been married for 20 years," she has been quoted as saying in a letter to the judge.
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D'Souza was forced to resign in October 2012 as president of The King's College, a Christian school in New York, when it emerged that he was engaged to a woman while still married to his first wife.
His 2012 illegal Senate contributions, to the campaign of long shot Republican candidate Wendy Long, were made as his marriage broke down and he even used his mistress as a straw donor, Daily News said.
FOX News contributor Laura Ingraham, who had dated D'Souza before he married his first wife Dixie, also wrote a letter in support of D'Souza, the paper said.
A former policy advisor to President Ronald Reagan, D'Souza directed a 2012 documentary, "2016: Obama's America," that was highly critical of Obama and based on his book "The Roots of Obama's Rage".
D'Souza says his film imagines what today's world would be like if America had never existed because "we are now living in the America that we warned our fellow citizens could come to pass if President Obama were re-elected".
Considered the second-most-successful political documentary in US box office history, "2016" has made more than $33 million since it was released in July 2012 during the heat of the presidential elections, according to Deadline.