Kam keeping up with Kardashian
Reality-TV personality and entrepreneur Kim Kardashian was back at the White House Thursday to discuss pardons of nonviolent drug offenders with Vice President Kamala Harris — four years after she stood alongside Donald Trump at a similar clemency event.
The Biden White House hitched its wagon to the “Keeping Up with the Kardashians” star to promote clemencies for 16 offenders — 11 who served prison time and five whose sentences were commuted.
In addition to starring on Hulu’s “The Kardashians,” the latest iteration of her family’s long-running reality enterprise, Kim, 43, has juggled co-owning the $4 billion Skims clothing brand empire with her lobbying for criminal-justice reform.
“It was actually this very room that I was in years ago, my first clemency meeting, that really inspired me to take a journey of really helping to figure out how I can be helpful and how I can tell the amazing stories that I would hear from the success stories of individuals like yourself,” Kardashian said at a roundtable with Harris and several of those granted clemency.
The celeb teamed up with the Trump White House to promote efforts to ease ex-felons back into the workforce and back the commutation of sentences for four women convicted of nonviolent crimes.
“I didn’t know a whole lot,” added Kardashian, who needed four attempts to pass California’s First-Year Law Students’ Examination — commonly known as “the baby bar exam” — and announced this year her dreams of becoming a practicing attorney were “on pause.”
Law-school dreams
“I was inspired to go to law school and really further my education to see what I can do to help and not rely on these two women behind — who have been coming with me everywhere, my attorneys — to kind of translate everything for me because I really couldn’t grasp what all of this means,” she said.
“I am super honored to be here to share your stories today, and I think it’s so important to share them and amplify them because there’s so many people that are in your position that can use the inspiration.”
Almost all the ex-cons had cocaine or crack convictions over a three-decade period, with at least one also sentenced for methamphetamine distribution and another for heroin possession.
Harris, 59, touted her own record of reducing recidivism and supporting prisoner reentry initiatives while serving as San Francisco district attorney and later attorney general of California.
“We have pardoned all people for federal convictions for simple marijuana possession,” Harris declared, though a recent congressional estimate found about 2,700 people are still incarcerated for pot-related offenses.
“Many of you have heard me say, ‘I just don’t think people should have to go to jail for smoking weed,’ ” she added — despite overseeing 1,900 pot-related convictions during her DA tenure, according to a 2019 analysis by the San Jose Mercury News.
The administration’s pardoning of 6,500 Americans with simple marijuana possession convictions in 2022 included only people no longer in prison.
Kardashian’s ex-husband Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, was an early supporter of Trump’s presidency.
Kardashian, meanwhile, promoted Trump’s First Step Act and helped secure the pardon of Alice Johnson, a black woman who was sentence to life for a nonviolent drug offense.