A right-wing provocateur recently pardoned by US President Donald Trump claimed on Saturday he had not noticed that the Twitter post he retweeted included the hashtag #burnthejews.

Dinesh d’Souza is currently promoting his new film, which compares Trump to 16th US president Abraham Lincoln, and retweeted a post with a link to the trailer followed by the #burnthejews hashtag. Twitter later suspended the account that tweeted the original link.

D’Souza claimed that he did not notice the hashtag and deleted the tweet, but it had already been captured in a screenshot by a Twitter user and quickly gained traction on social media, where he was blasted by other users.

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D’Souza served as an adviser in Ronald Reagan’s administration before working for a series of conservative think tanks. After the 2008 election of president Barack Obama, D’Souza became a filmmaker with an output of movies that the Guardian had described as including a “gleeful promotion of conspiracy theories.”

I did not see the hashtag. Just trying to share the trailer on social media https://t.co/u1Wn2JPKLe — Dinesh D'Souza (@DineshDSouza) June 30, 2018

In May Trump pardoned D’Souza, who was convicted in 2014 of a campaign financing violation. He had been sentenced to five years’ probation after entering a guilty plea to a charge of violating federal election law by making illegal finance contributions to a US Senate campaign in the names of others.

D’Souza told Fox News that Trump had called to tell him he had been pardoned because he had been “screwed,” that he was a “great voice for freedom” and that the case against him was “fishy” from the start.

Eric Cortellessa contributed to this report.