Kim Kardashian will join Vice President Kamala Harris at the White House on Thursday for a roundtable discussion to discuss the pardons granted 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 with Trump in the Oval Office, where she was joined by Alice Marie Johnson, whose life sentence was commuted by Trump in 2018, immediately following the reality TV star’s defense. In 2019, she delivered remarks from the East Room of the White House on a new initiative aimed at helping former inmates get jobs outside of prison. She met with Trump again at the White House in 2020.
Kardashian’s advocacy is credited in part with opening the former president to the idea of criminal justice reform, ultimately 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 praised his passage.
Axios first reported on Kardashian’s visit to the White House.
His visit also comes a day after Armenian Remembrance Day. Kardashian is of Armenian descent and Biden in 2021 became the first United States president to recognize the massacre of Armenians under the Ottoman Empire more than a century ago as genocide.
Late last year, Kardashian wrote an op-ed in Rolling Stone urging Biden to intervene amid the ongoing conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan.
The meeting comes as the Biden administration celebrates “Second Chance Month,” during which Biden pledged to “recommit to building a criminal justice system that lives up to those ideals so that people who return to their communities from jail or prison have a fair opportunity to achieve success.” American Dream,” in a presidential proclamation last month.
As part of Second Chance Month, Biden this week announced clemency actions for 16 nonviolent drug offenders, pardoned 11 people and commuted the sentences of five others under his authority as president.
“Many of these people received disproportionately longer sentences than they would have received under current laws, policies and practices,” Biden wrote in a statement. “The pardon recipients have demonstrated their commitment to improving their lives and positively transforming their communities. “Commutation recipients have demonstrated that they deserve forgiveness and the opportunity to build a better future for themselves beyond prison walls.”
During Thursday’s roundtable, the official said, Harris will announce a Small Business Administration rule that will eliminate restrictions on loan eligibility based on a borrower’s criminal history. Four of the pardon recipients announced earlier this week are also scheduled to participate in the roundtable, which will be moderated by White House Director of Public Engagement Steve Benjamin.