As Kim Kardashian heads to White House, I hope she advocates for many federal offenders excessively sentenced
After months of back-channel talks between Kim Kardashian and Jared Kushner, the high priestess of reality television is coming to the White House. By late afternoon on Wednesday, Secret Service agents will wave Kardashian and her attorney through the southwest appointment gate to the West Wing, where they will meet Kushner to discuss prison reform before he walks with them to sit down with President Donald Trump, likely in the Oval Office, along with White House counsel. According to a person familiar with the meeting, Kardashian plans to ask Trump to pardon a woman serving a life sentence without parole for a first-time drug offense. (White House staffers have joked about who will get to accompany her to the West Wing, and what they should wear for the occasion. The White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.)…
Kardashian, a more recent prison reform evangelist, appears to be approaching the White House meeting with equal seriousness. She will not be bringing the camera crew for her reality show, Keeping Up with the Kardashians, nor will she bring a publicist or her sisters, according to the person familiar with the situation. (Her husband, Kanye West, who recently tweeted a photo of his red Make America Great Again hat, will not be present either, though there have been talks about him making a White House appearance of his own at a later, to-be-determined date.) Instead, Kardashian hopes to make a legal argument to President Trump for why he should pardon Alice Johnson, a 62-year-old great-grandmother serving a life sentence without parole for a first-time drug offense. More than 21 years after Johnson went to prison, Kardashian came across Johnson’s story on Twitter earlier this year and reached out to Ivanka, who connected her to Kushner, according to the source. In an interview earlier this month, Kardashian said that, if given the opportunity, she would “explain to [Trump] that, just like everybody else, we can make choices in our lives that we’re not proud of and that we don’t think through all the way.”…
The Kushner-Kardashian summit marks something of a turning point for the First Son-in-Law. It will be Kushner’s first major act since he was granted a permanent, top-level security clearance last week, after more than a year of negative headlines about why his clearance had been delayed and then downgraded. Among White House tea-leaf readers, the news was received as evidence that perhaps Kushner’s legal exposure in Robert Mueller’s investigation might not be as severe as many had believed it to be, and gave credence to the idea that his standing in the West Wing might be somewhat restored. Those in Ivanka and Kushner’s social orbit in New York joked with each other about how much money they stood to lose on various bets they had made over when Kushner would be indicted by Mueller.
But Kushner and Ivanka are not focused on the chatter, or their old friends in New York — at least not on Wednesday. They plan to host Kardashian for dinner at their home after her presidential sit-down, a private evening with the most famous sibling of America’s other First Family.
I somewhat doubt that Kimme will “make a legal argument to President Trump,” but I am hoping somebody (perhaps even Jared Kushner) has thought to urge Ms. Kardashian to talk about excessively sentenced federal defendants beyond Alice Marie Johnson. In a prior post, I noted that the CANDO website has a detailed list of Top 25 Women who deserve clemency from federal prison. And the Life for Pot site has its own detailed lists of Nonviolent Inmates (over 62) Serving Life without Parole for Marijuanha and Inmates(under 62) Serving Sentences of Life without Parole in Federal Prison for Marijuana. Notably, over the weekend, Ms. Kardashian did tweet here about the story of Matthew Charles (discussed in this recent post).
It would be something for Kimme to get clemency relief for a single federal defendant; it would be something special is she could secure clemency relief for a number of individuals.
Prior related post: