Pardon recipients are trying to sell Trump on his own criminal law
In early July, former President Donald J. Trump received a somewhat unlikely visitor at his golf club and estate in Bedminster, NJ: Michael Harris, the founder of Death Row Records, who was imprisoned for drug trafficking and attempted murder, came to meet privately with the man who had pardoned him.
Mr. Harris was connected to the former president through Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and his daughter Ivanka Trump, who had helped him run for a pardon, according to two people familiar with the process. The couple was staying at Trump’s club in Bedminster when the meeting took place, and Mr. Kushner joined, two people briefed on the matter said.
But their lunch served another purpose for some people close to Mr. Trump: Mr. Harris is the kind of high-profile black celebrity that some Trump aides hope will lead to the former president’s signature federal immigration reform bill next year criminal law, the First Step Act, will highlight. which was one of Mr. Kushner’s top priorities during his time as a White House adviser.
Although Mr. Harris is not a beneficiary of the criminal law, having been pardoned on the last full day of his term after spending decades in prison as part of a series of pardons, he has nevertheless become an evangelist for it.
Mr. Trump, who has shown gains among black voters in some recent polls, hopes to win a slightly larger margin than in the past, with the potential to sway key states. He has been indicted four times, a fact that his advisers and allies say — without providing any evidence — will somehow benefit black voters as he claims he is the victim of overzealous prosecution. (He has also repeatedly called the three black prosecutors investigating him “racist.”)
But some of his closest allies, trying to convince him of the value of bragging about his own record on this issue, claim he has absorbed their message, although it is unclear whether that is true or more a projection of their own wishes.
Mr. Harris declined to discuss what happened during their meeting, but he expressed gratitude to the Trump administration in a statement and praised the criminal law. “The passage of the First Step Act and similar ‘criminal justice reform’ initiatives have provided much-needed relief to so many deserving individuals and families,” he said.
An aide to Mr. Kushner and a spokesman for Mr. Trump did not respond to requests for comment.
Not everyone close to the former president believes he should endorse the First Step Act, which Mr. Trump himself soured on soon after signing the law. Trump, who is often influenced by what he thinks his core voters want, felt vindicated in that view after some hardcore Republicans began criticizing it in 2021 and 2022 amid a rise in crime. Some of his conservative aides, who see the bill as problematic for Republicans, said privately that they were unhappy that he had met with Mr. Harris.
While the issue poses a potential challenge for Mr. Trump’s team, the discussions also underscore a broader challenge for President Biden’s team heading into 2024: How to pin down an opponent who has a four-year record and decades of contradictory statements on almost any issue.
Mr. Trump has a long history of racist statements, including attacking a judge’s Mexican heritage; calling for the death penalty for the teenagers arrested and later forced to confess in a brutal rape case in Central Park in 1989; telling a group of congresswomen of color – almost all of whom were born in the United States – to go back to their country; and, perhaps most famously, highlighting that the first black president may not have been born in the United States.
He has also become increasingly violent in his rhetoric on crime in America, saying he admires the freedom despots have to execute drug dealers and that shoplifters should be shot on sight.
At the same time, he has made clear that he viewed the law, which sought, among other things, to reduce mandatory minimum sentences for certain crimes, as something that should have won him support from black voters.
“Did it for African Americans,” he wrote to this reporter for a book in 2022 when asked about his repeated expressions of regret about the law. “No one else could have done this. I have zero credit.”
But the Democratic coalition of black, Latino and younger voters has been shaken since Biden’s victory, with Trump drawing support from those groups. And one difficulty in holding Mr. Trump accountable is that he often has a contradictory set of words and actions that different people can align with.
And the bipartisan First Step Act, which Mr. Trump signed in December 2018, is part of his record that some of his allies believe they can use in 2024 to downplay his rhetoric and actions around race and violence.
“Trump was bloodthirsty in his rhetoric but signed the First Step Act, which marked major sentencing reform,” said Michael Waldman, the president and CEO of the Brennan Center for Justice, who also served in the White House during the presidency by Bill Clinton. “Whether he really believed in it or not, he did it.”
While Gov. Ron DeSantis, the Republican of Florida, attacked Mr. Trump over the law, calling it a “jailbreak” bill despite voting for an early version of it, his criticism did not dent Mr. Trump’s support. And Republican criticism of the law has grown more muted as the party has coalesced around him.
Both praising the legislation and making racist statements would be consistent with Trump’s 2016 campaign, which was a mix of demagoguering immigrants and petty criminals, using law-and-order rhetoric and blaming of Hillary Clinton of racism against black men.
It is also far from the only issue on which Mr. Trump has decades of action and statements to point to, allowing different people to read into his behavior whatever they want, and he will happily play to whatever audience he is in front of.
Other than Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican majority leader, no one is more responsible than Mr. Trump, who gave the Supreme Court a 6-3 conservative majority, for overturning the landmark decision that recognized abortion rights as constitutionally protected. Still, Mr. Trump called a six-week abortion ban signed by Mr. DeSantis a “terrible mistake” and declined to be specific about a national ban. That has alarmed Democrats, who worry he will try to appear moderate in the general election race against Biden.
More recently, some of Mr. Biden’s allies watched angrily as the Spanish-language network Univision, which has attacked Mr. Trump in the past but now has new ownership, gave the former president a relatively soft interview, one that Mr. Kushner arranged: and minimized opposition from Mr. Biden’s team.
It remains to be seen how willing, if at all, Mr. Trump will be to speak about criminal justice, and whether Mr. Harris will be asked to speak publicly.
The same week that Mr. Harris met Mr. Trump, the former president received a call from Alice Johnson, whose life sentence on charges related to cocaine possession and money laundering was commuted following a meeting between Mr. Trump and celebrity Kim Kardashian . Ms. Johnson was the person who recommended that Mr. Kushner and Ms. Trump grant Mr. Harris clemency.
“My whole conversation was just encouragement” about the criminal justice reform bill, said Ms. Johnson, who spoke at the Republican National Convention in 2020 and was pardoned by Mr. Trump a short time later. She said no one asked her to call him next year or run for him in politics. But, she added, “he’s actually proud of that piece of legislation.”