Kim Kardashian to join Kamala Harris at White House to talk criminal justice

Kim Kardashian will join Vice President Kamala Harris at the White House on Thursday for a roundtable to discuss pardons issued by President Joe Biden earlier this month, a White House official said Thursday.

Kardashian previously met with former President Donald Trump at the White House as part of her advocacy for criminal justice reform. In 2018, she sat down with Trump in the Oval Office, where she was joined by Alice Marie Johnson, whose life sentence was commuted by Trump in 2018 on the heels of the reality TV star’s advocacy. In 2019, she delivered remarks from the White House East Room on a new initiative aimed at helping former inmates get jobs out of prison. She met with Trump at the White House again in 2020.

Kardashian’s advocacy has been credited in part with opening the former president up to the idea of criminal justice reform, eventually leading to the passage of the First Step Act in 2018. The prison-reform law marked a rare moment of bipartisanship during Trump’s presidency, and even some of his harshest critics have lauded its passage.

Axios first reported Kardashian’s visit to the White House.

Her visit also comes one day after Armenian Remembrance Day. Kardashian is of Armenian descent, and Biden in 2021 became the first U.S. president to recognize the massacre of Armenians under the Ottoman Empire more than a century ago as a genocide.

Late last year, Kardashian penned an op-ed in Rolling Stone urging Biden to step in amid continued conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

The meeting comes as the Biden administration marks “Second Chance Month,” during which Biden pledged to “recommit to building a criminal justice system that lives up to those ideals so that people returning to their communities from jail or prison have a fair shot at the American Dream,” in a presidential proclamation last month.

As a part of Second Chance Month, Biden this week announced clemency actions for 16 nonviolent drug offenders, pardoning 11 people and commuting the sentences of five others under his authority as president.

“Many of these individuals received disproportionately longer sentences than they would have under current law, policy, and practice,” Biden wrote in a statement. “The pardon recipients have demonstrated their commitment to improving their lives and positively transforming their communities. The commutation recipients have shown that they are deserving of forgiveness and the chance at building a brighter future for themselves beyond prison walls.”

During Thursday’s roundtable, the official said, Harris will announce a Small Business Administration rule that will remove restrictions on loan eligibility based on a borrower’s criminal record. Four of the pardon recipients announced earlier this week are also slated to participate in the roundtable, which will be moderated by White House Director of Public Engagement Steve Benjamin.