Former President Donald Trump would only support reality TV star Kim Kardashian’s clemency requests under one condition— if she could use her clout to get NFL stars to visit him at the White House.
The bizarre request was revealed in Jonathan Karl’s forthcoming book “Tired of Winning” set to be released Tuesday. Axios first published the excerpt Monday.
In 2018, Kardashian visited the White House to discuss prison reform with Trump and successfully led the effort to convince the then president to grant clemency to Alice Johnson, a first-time nonviolent drug offender who was serving a life sentence.
According to Karl’s book, Kardashian later tried to get Trump to grant more commutations during the final weeks of his presidency, but he told her that he would only do so if she convinced football stars to visit him at the White House.
“A source familiar with the conversations tells me Trump listened to her requests and demanded a straight-up quid pro quo,” Karl wrote in his book. “He would grant the commutations, he told Kardashian, if she leveraged her celebrity connections to get football stars who were friends of hers to come visit him at the White House.”
“Kardashian actually tried to do what Trump demanded,” according to Karl, “seeing it as a small price to pay to get justice for people she believed were serving unjust sentences. But all the players she approached declined. Trump had become too toxic. In the final two weeks of his presidency, nobody wanted to be anywhere near him.”
Months later, after Trump left the White House, Kardashian reached out to him again hoping to get a high profile endorsement for a clemency request, but Trump hung up on her because he thought she voted for Joe Biden in the presidential election.
“Hell no, the former president told her,” Karl wrote. “‘You voted for Biden and now you come asking me for a favor?'”
“After a few more choice words, the line went dead. Trump had hung up on her,” the book said.
Kardashian did not publicly confirm who she voted for in the 2020 presidential election, but after Biden was projected the winner she posted a tweet with a photo of Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris with three hearts.
A Trump spokesperson slammed Karl’s book in a statement to Axios.
“Disgraceful and talentless John Carl [sic] is a back-bencher who could never get his own show for obvious reasons. Excerpts previously released from this ‘book’ have already been thoroughly debunked,” the spokesperson said. “This filth either belongs in the discount bargain bin in the fiction section of the bookstore or should be repurposed as toilet paper.”
