On Wednesday, reality TV star Kim Kardashian is meeting with President Donald Trump at the White House to discuss prison reform and the potential pardon for a non-violent female drug offender.
According to a report from Vanity Fair, Kardashian has been working with her lawyer for months in preparation for the White House meeting. Kardashian will first meet with White House Advisor Jared Kushner, who has been focused heavily on prison reform, and then meet up with President Trump, most likely in the Oval Office.
Sending a signal that she is serious, the intensely public star will not have “Keeping Up with the Kardashian” cameras with her, nor her sisters. She will reportedly be hosted by First Daughter Ivanka Trump and Kushner for dinner later Wednesday night.
Kardashian is expected to ask Mr. Trump for the pardon of Alice Johnson, a 62-year-old grandmother who is 21 years into a life sentence for a first-time drug offense. According to Page Six, the reality star stumbled upon Johnson’s story via Twitter earlier in the year and reached out to Ivanka, who then directed Kardashian to her husband.
“I’ve been in communication with the White House and trying to bring her case to the president’s desk and figure out how we can get her out,” Kardashian revealed in a MIC interview earlier this month.
As noted by Vanity Fair, Kushner has a personal connection to prison reform through his own father, Charles Kushner. In 2005 and 2006, Charles spent over a year in a federal prison camp for charges of tax evasion, illegal campaign contributions, and witness tampering.
“The experience left an indelible mark on the young Kushner who, for years, carried a wallet his father made for him in prison; when he joined the White House as senior adviser, he vowed to help improve the system that his father had come through,” reports the outlet.
Among the actions Kushner has taken to make progress on prison reform is bringing religious leaders and law enforcement officials to the White House to address the issue, holding a series of meetings and hosting dinners with “key Washington power players,” and promoting the bipartisan First Step Act, which offers programs to help inmates be more prepared for civilian life and gives nonviolent offenders more options on how to finish out their sentences, including in home confinement and halfway houses.
“If we can start showing that we can make the prisons more purposeful and more effective at lowering the recidivism rate over time, that may help the people who are trying to make the argument for sentencing reform,” Kushner said in early May.
Trump, in turn, promised: “Get a bill to my desk, and I will sign it.”