Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

Kim Kardashian Meets With Jared Kushner At White House To Talk Prison Reform

Following months of talks, Kim Kardashian West visited the White House on Wednesday to discuss prison reform with Jared Kushner and President Trump, Vanity Fair reported.

The Oval Office meeting centered around the reality star’s plea for the president to pardon Alice Marie Johnson, a black woman from Mississippi who was sentenced in 1996 to life in prison without the possibility of parole for a first-time drug offense. West has publicly advocated for her release and funded lawyers to help with the case.

Johnson’s 63rd birthday fell on the day of the White House meeting. “Today is for you,” West tweeted, along with a happy birthday wish for Johnson.

Kushner, Trump’s senior adviser and son-in-law, has advocated for prison sentencing reform since taking on a White House role. 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 encouraging participation in job-training and drug-treatment programs, and which would also give nonviolent offenders more options to serve the final part of their sentences in halfway houses or home confinement. Kushner’s father Charles served 14 months in prison in 2005-2006.

“Get a bill to my desk, and I will sign it,” President Trump reportedly promised. However, the president has also assured he would be tough on crime. Trump has extended a presidential pardon in only a few cases, such as with jailed kosher meat executive Sholom Rubashkin and former Dick Cheney aide Scooter Libby.

Contact Haley Cohen at [email protected]

The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.

This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

2X match on all Passover gifts!

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines.
You must comply with the following:

  • Credit the Forward
  • Retain our pixel
  • Preserve our canonical link in Google search
  • Add a noindex tag in Google search

See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.