LF: Kim Kardashian Heads to the White House

Title: Kim Kardashian Heads to the White House
Source: Vanity Fair
URL Source: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/201 ... hite-house-visit-prison-reform
Published: May 30, 2018
Author: Emily Jane Fox
Post Date: 2018-05-30 22:39:44 by Hondo68
Keywords: prison reform, Keeping Up with, the Kardashians
Views: 14393
Comments: 61

Keeping Up with the Kushners: With Jared Back on Top, Kim Kardashian Heads to the White House

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.)

Prison reform is an issue near and dear to Kushner, whose father, Charles, spent more than a year in a federal prison camp in 2005 and 2006 on 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. And so, while other initiatives in his once-dizzying portfolio have fallen by the wayside, Kushner has made significant progress in getting Republican lawmakers on board with the effort, bringing law enforcement officials and Evangelical leaders to the White House, taking meetings on Capitol Hill, and hosting dinner parties with key Washington power players at the home he shares with his wife, Ivanka Trump. He pushed Congress to support a bipartisan bill known as the First Step Act, which aims to better prepare inmates to re-enter society by incentivizing participation in job-training and drug-treatment programs, and which would also give nonviolent offenders more options to serve the ends of their sentences in halfway houses or home confinement. (Kushner’s father left prison 10 months early, and finished his two-year sentence at a halfway house in Newark, New Jersey.)

“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 at an event in the East Room earlier this month. President Trump promised: “Get a bill to my desk, and I will sign it.” Last week, the House passed the First Step Act in a 360-59 vote.

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.”

Kardashian’s plea, and Kushner’s push for reform, are at odds with the Trump administration’s own policies. In one of his first moves as attorney general, Jeff Sessions rescinded an Obama-era memo that increased leniency for low-level drug offenders, instructing federal prosecutors to bring punitive charges that could trigger precisely the sort of tough mandatory sentencing that condemned Johnson to life without parole. The president, however, has proven amenable to personal entreaties—especially when celebrities are involved. Last week, Trump hosted Sylvester Stallone, Lennox Lewis, and Deontay Wilder in the Oval Office, as they asked him to pardon Jack Johnson, the legendary boxer who, in 1913, was convicted of violating the Mann Act, which made it illegal to transport women across state lines for the purpose of prostitution or any other “immoral” reason. Johnson, who was widely believed to be convicted because he was black, served a year in prison. After Trump agreed to pardon Johnson, he said in a statement that he was pleased to be able to “correct a wrong that occurred in our history,” before throwing in a jab to his predecessor. “They thought it was going to be signed in the last administration, and that didn’t happen.”

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.

And I hope Trump explains to Kardashian that actions have consequences -- especially when those actions span a period of three years and involve 2,000 2,000-3,000 kilograms (that's over 3 tons) of cocaine trafficking and millions of dollars of money laundering. How many hundreds of life did she ruin with her "non-violence".

Obama granted clemency to 231 individuals in December 2016, many of whom had similar drug-related charges. But not her. That should tell you something.

I tend to agree. She should have gone to prison certainly, whether it was a first-time offense or whether she personally was involved with the rampant violence associated with the narcotics trade.

But that sentence was quite excessive. All her co-defendants ratted her out to cut deals so the prosecutor went for the full prosecution on her to rack one up for his courtroom victory tally (probably to use that record to run for higher office or to get promoted to higher prosecutorial jobs).

I think it would be a mistake to pardon her. But considering how light the sentences are for more serious crimes than hers, I'm not upset that Trump is commuting the sentence.

Notice the pattern here. Stallone and a few others got him to pardon the dead boxer, Trump met with Van Jones and worked with him on sentencing reform (for which Van Jones promptly got labelled an Uncle Tom), now he's pardoning D'Souza and shortly will commute this woman narcotics trafficker who did get an unusually harsh sentence IMO.

Trump does seem more willing to do these pardons if they have celeb advocates that will come to the WH personally. : )

For moving 3 tons of cocaine? Over a period of three years? Laundering hundreds of millions of dollars?

This was a big-time operation, and you can't tell me that in those three years no one was injured or killed. "Non- violent", my ass.

Her co-defendants ratted her out because she was the Big Kahuna. You go after the little people to get the big people. She was big people.

Plus, we only have her side of the story. She made a "mistake". She's sowwy. Screw her. May she rot in prison. I have no sympathy for drug traffickers. She knew the rules. She knew the risks. She could have stopped any time.

My reading indicates that she was a bit player in a much larger operation. If you have read otherwise, post it.

There's always a larger operation … until you get to the cartel itself. She was a big enough player in her $200 million operation that the feds got the people below her to testify against her.

Johnson has been imprisoned for 21 years since she was found guilty of drug conspiracy and money laundering in 1997, according to a 2013 profile by Mic. The single mother of four is from Olive Branch, Miss., and first got pregnant at age 15. She divorced her husband in 1989 and developed a gambling addiction, which resulted in the loss of her 10-year career at FedEx. She filed for bankruptcy and her home foreclosed, and one year later, in 1992, her son was killed while riding a scooter.

Alice Marie Johnson has been in prison for 21 years for a first-time, nonviolent drug offense. pic.twitter.com/VFe29D2ve8
— Mic (@mic) October 23, 2017

Johnson then became involved in drug dealing, specifically engaging with a multimillion-dollar organization that carried cocaine from Memphis. According to Mic, during the trial, Johnson’s partners plotted against her, despite her minimal role (she alleges that she never sold drugs but rather assisted with communications in the organization), resulting in her life sentence at Aliceville Correctional Facility in Alabama without parole, plus 25 years.

To be fair, most of the articles about her do not detail the evidence brought against her. She claims she functioned as a telephone mule, relaying messages to various members of the local gang. Maybe she was the head of the gang but they seem to have no evidence that she was. Others were convicted but given light sentences or probation for testifying against her. They had strong incentives to blame her for everything.

Those 10 who testified against her. What did they say she did? They have no reason to lie. She does.

Come now. They had lots of reasons to lie. Like getting probation for actually moving and supplying the product. They could all blame her, saying they were just following her orders by phone on what to pick up and where to deliver it.

Even so, her sentence seems pretty harsh by the sentencing guidelines and by the standard set in similar crimes committed at the time and punished by the courts.

They had a deal. Why jeopardize it by telling 10 different stories? The truth is less complicated.

Trafficking 3,000 kilos of cocaine is off the chart of any federal guideline I could find. She got (I think) life plus 25 years. I guess that means her corpse will be incarcerated.

I'm afraid Trump is ready to make that deal. Our opinions don't count as much as a Kardashian's, it seems.

The black folks have to keep on the move so Trump doesn't show up and try to take a photo with them.

Trump would love to cripple the Dems by slicing off another 10%-20% of the black vote. He already did better in 2016 than most GOP candidates and his support is growing, including Kanye. Van Jones worked with him. Kanye kinda defends him.

So, yeah, Trump absolutely wants to cut deals with blacks if he gets some credit for it. And that's what is finally happening.

He is denting the Plantation Vote. But more importantly, exposing the Dem game while changing blacks perception of themselves and why, "WE ALL MUST VOTE DEM".

What would change a lot of black votes is campaigning for complete school choice so that state and federal money follows the student wherever their parents choose to send them in public or private schools, something black parents desperately want and something the Dem party is absolutely committed to preventing.

It's the one real wedge issue the GOP has with black voters. This is what they want and that the Dems refuse to give them. And black voters are somewhat restive, realizing how little the Dems did for them overall despite having 0bama in office for 8 years, a House majority and 60-vote Senate for 2 years, and strong position in the Senate throughout even after they lost the 60-vote majority. And what did blacks get for all that? Well, kinda nothing really. And they know it.

The Plantation is a little restive. They're asking themselves if they can cut a better deal even with the hated GOP. And Van Jones and Kanye/Kim really do help make that more thinkable, more doable. This is the reason why the libmedia has been so insanely determined to oppose Trump on everything, so as to resist "normalizing" his presidency. IOW, make him so radioactive that anyone who does deal with him gets branded an Uncle Tom, even a Lefty of impeccable standing like Van Jones. Now some of them talk about him like he's Clarence Thomas's long-lost twin, part of a matching porch monkey set for Da White Man. Or in this case, Da Orange Man.

The generic answer is no. But they can cut a deal with the King, and he'll make the GOP do his bidding. Trump is the key, not the GOP.

Not true really. Various elements of the GOP have tried for years to ram through school choice. They had it for a while even in DC, then 0bama came to power and re-enabled the teachers' unions and ruined it all. A lot of blacks were pretty unhappy to be forced back to their old inferior neighborhood schools so the suburbs could go back to being accidentally all-white and lavishly funded.

In fact, Trump isn't all that interested in the issue. I can name a number of GOP elected officials who have championed this cause for many years. A few have even bankrolled private schools for inner city kids (Mitch Daniels did it with some fellow-Presbys, for instance).

And school choice fits well for private schools and homeschools as well. So the GOP is broadly in favor of all these things over urban schools that are primarily run for the benefit of the teachers' unions and administrators and that fail their mission miserably, year after year.