Kim Kardashian West goes to the White House to talk pardon

ENT

Kim Kardashian West goes to the White House to talk pardon

2018-05-31 14:23 Last Updated At：14:23

Reality TV star Kim Kardashian West paid a visit to the White House Wednesday to make a star-powered case to President Donald Trump and his staff on behalf of a woman serving a life sentence for drug offenses.

Kardashian West has been urging the president to pardon Alice Marie Johnson, 63, who has spent more than two decades behind bars and is not eligible for parole.

It had been unclear whether the socialite would have the chance to sit down with Trump while she was in Washington, but Trump confirmed the meeting — as he often does — via Twitter, writing, "Great meeting with @KimKardashian today, talked about prison reform and sentencing."

He included a picture of the two in the Oval Office — Trump seated behind his desk and Kardashian West, dressed in all-black, standing to his right.

Kardashian West arrived at the White House just after 4:30 p.m. for what was expected to be a meeting with Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law and senior adviser, who is overseeing the administration's push to overhaul the nation's prison system. She appeared to preview the visit on her Twitter feed, writing: "Happy Birthday Alice Marie Johnson. Today is for you."

A rare A-list celebrity to visit the White House since Trump took office, Kardashian West was seen posing for photos in front of the West Wing before entering.

Attorney Brittany K. Barnett, a member of Johnson's legal team, said Kardashian West had hoped to discuss the issue with Trump directly. She said after the meeting that she had consulted with those who had attended and said it "seemed to go well."

"It is now in President Trump's hands to decide whether to save Alice Johnson's life," Barnett said.

In an interview with Mic released earlier this month, Kardashian West said she'd been moved by Johnson's story after seeing a video by the news outlet on Twitter.

"I think that she really deserves a second chance at life," Kardashian told Mic. "I'll do whatever it takes to get her out."

Kardashian West said in the interview she'd been in touch with Kushner over the case and that, if she had the chance to bring it up with Trump, she'd tell him, "I really do believe that she's going to really thrive outside of prison, and I would just urge him to please pardon her."

Trump last week granted a rare posthumous pardon to boxing's first black heavyweight champion, clearing Jack Johnson's name more than 100 years after what many saw as a racially charged conviction.

The boxer's pardon had been championed by actor Sylvester Stallone, who Trump said had brought the story to his attention in a phone call.

Trump has issued just a handful of pardons, including one for former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, a staunch campaign supporter; one for Scooter Libby, who served as chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney; and one for a U.S. Navy sailor convicted of taking photos of classified portions of a submarine.

Kardashian West supported Trump's rival, Democrat Hillary Clinton, during the 2016 election. But her husband, rapper Kanye West, recently offered his support for Trump in a series of tweets, saying they both share "dragon energy." Kardashian West defended her husband when he caught flak on social media for his tweets.

West also paid a visit to the then-president-elect in New York before his inauguration. Trump said they talked about "life" as they posed for photos in the lobby of Trump Tower. West has said he didn't vote in the presidential election, but if he had, he would have cast a ballot for Trump.

Trump and members of his administration have spoken passionately in favor of prison and sentencing reform, but that has sometimes clashed with Trump's law-and-order approach, especially at the Justice Department.

Indeed, Trump has called for getting tougher on drug dealers, including suggesting that some should receive the death penalty.

Johnson was convicted in 1996 on eight criminal counts related to a Memphis-based cocaine trafficking operation involving more than a dozen people. The 1994 indictment describes dozens of deliveries and drug transactions, many involving Johnson.

She was sentenced to life in prison in 1997, and appellate judges and the U.S. Supreme Court have rejected her appeals. Court records show she has a motion pending for a reduction in her sentence, but federal prosecutors are opposed, saying in a court filing that the sentence is in accord with federal guidelines, based on the large quantity of drugs involved. The U.S. Attorney's Office in Memphis did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday afternoon.

A criminal justice advocacy site, CAN-DO, and one of Johnson's attorneys say a request for clemency was rejected by former President Barack Obama. The reasons are unclear.

A 1997 Associated Press story on Johnson's sentencing said she headed up a multimillion-dollar drug ring. But Memphis attorney Michael Scholl, who filed the latest court documents in her request for a sentence reduction, said she was not a leader in the cocaine operation.

"What is the purpose of putting a lady with no prior criminal record, on a nonviolent drug offense, in jail for her entire life?" he said in a telephone interview. "She's a model inmate."

Scholl added that Johnson has admitted her wrongdoing, which is borne out in letters she has written to U.S. District Judge Samuel H. Mays, who now oversees her case.

"Judge Mays I'm writing to you to express my deep remorse for the crime that I committed over 20 years ago. I made some bad choices which have not only affected my life, but have impacted my entire family," she said in a February 2017 letter in the court record.

In a hand-scrawled letter last June she wrote: "I'm a broken woman. More time in prison cannot accomplish more justice."

Stormy Daniels describes meeting Trump during occasionally graphic testimony in hush money trial

2024-05-08 04:57 Last Updated At：05:00

NEW YORK (AP) — With Donald Trump sitting just feet away, Stormy Daniels testified Tuesday at the former president's hush money trial about a sexual encounter the porn actor says they had in 2006 that resulted in her being paid to keep silent during the presidential race 10 years later.

Jurors appeared riveted as Daniels offered a detailed and at times graphic account of the encounter Trump has denied. Trump stared straight ahead when Daniels entered the courtroom, later whispering to his lawyers and shaking his head as she testified.

The testimony was by far the most-awaited spectacle in a trial that has toggled between tabloidesque elements and dry record-keeping details. A courtroom appearance by a porn actor who says she had an intimate encounter with a former American president added to the long list of historic firsts in a landmark case laden with claims of sex, payoffs and cover-ups and unfolding as the presumptive Republican nominee makes another bid for the White House.

Daniels veered into salacious details despite the repeated objections of defense lawyers, who demanded a mistrial over what they said were prejudicial and irrelevant comments.

“This is the kind of testimony that makes it impossible to come back from,” attorney Todd Blanche said. “How can we come back from this in a way that’s fair to President Trump?”

The judge rejected the request and said defense lawyers should have raised more objections during the testimony. The Trump team later in the day used its opportunity to question Daniels to paint her as motivated by personal animus and profiting off her claims against Trump.

"Am I correct that you hate President Trump?” defense lawyer Susan Necheles asked Daniels.

“Yes,” she acknowledged.

Daniels' statements are central to the case because in the final weeks of Trump’s 2016 Republican presidential campaign, his then-lawyer and personal fixer, Michael Cohen, paid her $130,000 to keep quiet about what she says was an awkward and unexpected sexual encounter with Trump in July 2006 at a celebrity golf outing in Lake Tahoe. Trump has pleaded not guilty.

Led by a prosecutor's questioning, Daniels described how an initial meeting at a golf tournament, where they discussed the adult film industry, progressed to a “brief” sexual encounter that she said Trump initiated after inviting her to dinner and back to his hotel suite.

She said she didn’t feel physically or verbally threatened, though she knew his bodyguard was outside the suite. There was also what she perceived as an imbalance of power: Trump “was bigger and blocking the way," she said.

At the time, Trump was married to his wife, Melania, who has not been in court for the trial. Daniels said Trump told her they did not sleep in the same room, prompting him to shake his head at the defense table.

After it ended, Daniels said, “It was really hard to get my shoes because my hands were shaking so hard.”

“He said, ‘Oh, it was great. Let’s get together again, honey bunch,’” Daniels said. “I just wanted to leave.”

In the years since the encounter was disclosed, Daniels has emerged as a vocal Trump antagonist, sharing her story innumerable times and criticizing the former president with mocking and pejorative jabs. But there was no precedent for Tuesday's testimony, when she came face-to-face with Trump and was asked under oath in an austere courtroom to describe her experiences to a jury weighing whether to convict a former American president of felony crimes for the first time in history.

She told jurors how she met Trump because the adult film studio she worked for at the time sponsored one of the holes on the golf course. She said they had a brief conversation when Trump's group passed through, chatting about the adult film industry and her directing abilities. The celebrity real estate developer remarked that she must be “the smart one” if she was making films, Daniels recalled.

Later, in an area known as the “gift room,” where celebrity golfers collected gift bags and swag, Trump remembered her as “the smart one” and asked her to dinner, Daniels said.

She said her then-publicist suggested in a phone call that Trump’s invitation was a good excuse to skip a work dinner and would “make a great story” and perhaps help her career.

“What could possibly go wrong?” she recalled the publicist saying.

The two saw each other periodically in the ensuing years, when she said she spurned Trump's advances.

In 2011, several years after she and Trump were last in touch, she said she learned from her agent that the story of her encounter with Trump had made its way to a magazine.

She said she agreed to an interview for $15,000 because “I’d rather make the money than somebody make money off of me, and at least I could control the narrative.” The story never ran, but later that year, she was alarmed when an item turned up on a website.

Perhaps seeking to preempt defense claims that she was in urgent need of a massive payout, Daniels testified that she was in the best financial shape of her life when she authorized her manager to shop her story during the 2016 presidential campaign.

She said she had no intent of approaching Cohen or Trump to have them pay her.

“My motivation wasn’t money," she said. "It was to get the story out,” she testified.

But Necheles zeroed in on that point, pressing Daniels on the fact that she owes Trump hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees stemming from an unsuccessful defamation lawsuit and that she tweeted in 2022 that she “will go to jail before I pay a penny.”

“That was me saying, ‘I will not pay for telling the truth,’” Daniels testified Tuesday.

She later forcefully denied that she was trying to squeeze Trump for money.

"You were looking to extort money from President Trump,” Necheles said.

“False,” Daniels responded.

“Well, that’s what you did,” the lawyer said.

“False,” Daniels answered.

Daniels was expected to return to the witness stand Thursday, when the trial resumes.

Testimony so far has made clear that at the time of the payment to Daniels, Trump and his campaign were reeling from the October 2016 publication of the never-before-seen 2005 “Access Hollywood” footage in which he boasted about grabbing women’s genitals without their permission.

Before that video was made public, "there was very little if any interest” in Daniels' claims, according to testimony earlier in the trial from her then-lawyer, Keith Davidson. A deal was reached with the National Enquirer for Daniels’ story, but the tabloid backed out. Davidson began negotiating with Cohen directly, hiked up the price to $130,000, and reached a deal.

After the deadline for the $130,000 payment from Cohen came and went, she authorized Davidson to cancel the deal. He did, by email, according to documents shown in court. But about two weeks later, the deal was revived.

Daniels testified that she ended up with about $96,000 of the $130,000 payment, after her lawyer and agent got their cuts.

She also said she was steadfast in abiding by her nondisclosure agreement with Cohen, declining to comment to The Wall Street Journal for a November 2016 story that reported she had been in discussions to tell her story on “Good Morning America” but that nothing had come of it. She also declined to comment for the newspaper before it broke the news of her hush money arrangement in 2018.

After that story was published, her life turned into “chaos,” she testified.

“I was front and foremost everywhere,” she recalled.

Prosecutors are building toward their star witness, Cohen, who pleaded guilty to federal charges related to the hush money payments.

Trump is charged with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in connection with the payments. The trial is the first of his four criminal cases to reach a jury.

Tucker reported from Washington.

Kim Kardashian West goes to the White House to talk pardon

ENT

Kim Kardashian West goes to the White House to talk pardon

Next Article

Stormy Daniels describes meeting Trump during occasionally graphic testimony in hush money trial

Some colleges that had been permissive of pro-Palestinian protests begin taking a tougher stance

Here is what Stormy Daniels testified happened between her and Donald Trump

The Latest | Defense begins cross-examination of Stormy Daniels in Trump hush money trial

Rep. Greene and Speaker Johnson meet for a second day as possible vote on his ouster simmers

Beraldo selected in central defense for PSG to face Dortmund in Champions League semifinal

Israeli tanks have rolled into Rafah. What does this mean for the Palestinians sheltering there?

US repatriates 11 citizens from notorious camp for relatives of Islamic State militants in Syria