Kim Kardashian will return to the White House on Thursday to participate in a roundtable with Vice President Kamala Harris to highlight President Joe Biden’s recent pardons.
Axios first reported that the reality star will appear at the afternoon event.
It will mark his first trip to 1600 Pennsylvania during the Biden administration, after lobbying former President Donald Trump on criminal justice reform during his tenure.
The invitation could preempt a potential Kardashian endorsement, though that could also complicate the Biden campaign’s courtship of pop star Taylor Swift, as Kardashian and Swift are in a long-running feud.
Kardashian arrives in DC two days before the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, an event she has attended frequently over the years.
Kim Kardashian (left) poses with former President Donald Trump (right) in the Oval Office on May 30, 2018. Kardashian’s first visit to Trump was to ask him to pardon Alice Johnson.
Reality TV star Kim Kardashian (center) sits between Jared Kushner (left) and Ivanka Trump (right) at a White House event on criminal justice reform in June 2019.
Kim Kardashian (left) addresses a crowd in the East Room about criminal justice reform alongside former President Donald Trump (right) in June 2019.
She last attended the annual dinner in 2022, along with her then-boyfriend Pete Davidson.
On Wednesday, Biden granted clemency to 16 people convicted of nonviolent drug crimes as part of “Second Chance Month.”
Harris’ roundtable will include four of the people who received clemency, Axios reported.
Kardashian became part of Trump’s orbit when she visited the White House in May 2018 to pressure the then-president to pardon Alice Johnson, a Black woman serving a life sentence for a nonviolent drug offense.
That June, Trump commuted Johnson’s sentence and then granted him a full pardon in August 2020, just months before the presidential election.
In turn, Johnson became a surrogate for Trump’s re-election campaign and gave a speech at that summer’s Republican National Convention, which was held in Washington due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
During this same period, Trump became angry with Kardashian, who has never publicly said who she voted for in the 2020 presidential race.
Kim Kardashian (right) is in DC two days before the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner. The last time she attended the dinner was in 2022 with her then-boyfriend Pete Davidson (left).
In November, Trump called Kardashian “the most overrated celebrity in the world.”
Trump was angered by an anecdote in ABC News’ Jonathan Karl’s book, Tired of winning: Donald Trump and the end of the grand old partyHe said the then-president had asked Kardashian for help in attracting ‘soccer stars.’
In the final days of his administration, Kardashian, who was working to get nonviolent criminals out of prison, had asked Trump to commute more sentences, as he had done after their highly publicized meeting in the Oval Office in 2018.
A source told Karl that “Trump listened to their requests and demanded a simple quid pro quo.”
“He would grant the commutations, he told Kardashian, if she took advantage of her celebrity connections to get soccer stars who were friends of hers to come visit him at the White House,” the ABC News reporter wrote.
‘Kardashian actually tried to do what Trump demanded, 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,” Karl said. ‘Trump had become too toxic. In the last two weeks of his presidency, no one wanted to be around him.
In a Truth Social post, Trump dubbed Karl a “failed ABC fake news reporter” and added that he “works very hard, but has very little talent.”
‘In the “book” you have the world’s most overrated celebrity, Kim Kardashian, supposedly telling me that she would ‘leverage her celebrity to get football stars to come to the White House’ if I commuted the sentences of several prisoners.’ Trump wrote. “This story is fake news because she would be the last person I asked to get football players.”
Trump then boasted about having “many teams from all sports and leagues in the White House.”
Kardashian never explicitly said she was a Biden supporter, although she posted a photo of Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris with three blue hearts after the Democrats won the election over Trump in 2020.
While Trump said on Truth Social that there were “many other false stories in Karl’s very boring book,” the journalist reported that Trump was angry with Kardashian’s support for Biden.
Months after Trump left the White House, Kardashian approached him to see if he would be willing to back a high-profile clemency petition.
“He quickly received a call from Trump,” Karl wrote.
“Hell no,” the former president told him. He wouldn’t do it. “You voted for Biden and now you’re here to ask me a favor?” “Trump told him so,” said the ABC journalist. After a few more words, the line went dead. “Trump had hung up on him.”