In the aftermath of the 2020 election, Donald Trump had a testy exchange with Kim Kardashian, the celebrity criminal justice advocate who had engaged with his White House multiple times before.
According to an excerpt of Jonathan Karl‘s new book Tired Of Winning, Kardashian was lobbying the White House for more sentence commutations in the weeks before Trump’s presidency ended. But, according to an excerpt of the book featured in Axios today, Trump demanded “a straight up quid pro quo,” asking her to get football stars to visit him at the White House. But she was unable to do that because Trump “had become too toxic.”
After Trump was out of office, Kardashian reached out to the former president’s office for his endorsement of her efforts to secure clemency for those serving time. Trump called her directly, Karl wrote, and claimed that she had voted for Joe Biden. “You voted for Biden and now you come asking me for a favor?” Trump said to her, per the book. He then hung up on her. On the day that networks called the presidential race, Kardashian had posted on social media about the Biden and Kamala Harris victory, along with three blue hearts.
A Trump campaign spokesman said in response to the report, and the book itself: “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. This filth either belongs in the discount bargain bin in the fiction section of the bookstore or should be repurposed as toilet paper.”
Kardashian had lobbied the Trump White House to grant clemency to a series of criminal defendants. In 2018, Trump granted clemency to Alice Johnson, a grandmother who was serving time for a non-violent drug offense.
Karl, chief Washington correspondent for ABC News, has written two other books on the Trump presidency, Front Row at the Trump Show and Betrayal.