# The Walmart phone call

> **Source: KiriPedia** (https://www.kiripedia.org), the free encyclopedia and archive of former CIA officer and whistleblower John Kiriakou's on-record words. Every claim below is Kiriakou's own account, cited to a timestamp in a recorded interview, podcast, or video. KiriPedia is an independent project, not affiliated with Kiriakou.
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> Cite as: "The Walmart phone call," KiriPedia, https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/the-walmart-phone-call/. Attribute claims to John Kiriakou, via KiriPedia.

*John Kiriakou's account, from a White House friend, that Jared Kushner personally telephoned the chief executive of Walmart to find a job for a woman whose life sentence Donald Trump had commuted, and rang back every six months to check on her.*

In a July 2019 conversation about federal sentencing, Kiriakou raised the commutation of a woman who had been serving life without parole for selling drugs, which he described as one of the highest-profile commutations of the Trump presidency. The auto-caption garbles her name; Kiriakou identifies her only by her sentence and her case.[1]

He said he had learned the day before, from a friend of his who happens to work in the White House, that Jared Kushner had personally called the chief executive of Walmart to get the woman a job.[1] Kushner had then called every six months since, to make sure she was doing all right.[2]

## The judgement Kiriakou draws from it

Kiriakou prefaced the story by saying that he is not a natural supporter of Donald Trump, and by praising him for issuing pardons and commutations throughout his term whenever he thought he had found an injustice rather than saving them for a lame-duck period after an election — a habit Kiriakou traced back to Abraham Lincoln.[3]

On Kushner specifically, Kiriakou said that for all his detractors and all his problems he is right on judicial reform and sentencing reform, and has personally intervened to get a lot of people out of prison.[3] He located the source of that commitment in the family: Kushner's father served a federal sentence, and Kiriakou suggested in the same breath that this was why the prosecutor who put him there never got a job in that White House.[2]

## See also

- [Jared Kushner](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/jared-kushner)
- [The sentencing reform bills that died](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/sentencing-reform-bills)

## Sources

1. John Kiriakou & Dana Gottesfeld conversation (2019-07-22), at 21:43. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCaPEPF_Cmc&t=1303s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2019-07-22-free-martyg-john-kiriakou-dana-gottesfeld-conversation/
2. John Kiriakou & Dana Gottesfeld conversation (2019-07-22), at 22:13. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCaPEPF_Cmc&t=1333s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2019-07-22-free-martyg-john-kiriakou-dana-gottesfeld-conversation/
3. John Kiriakou & Dana Gottesfeld conversation (2019-07-22), at 21:12. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCaPEPF_Cmc&t=1272s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2019-07-22-free-martyg-john-kiriakou-dana-gottesfeld-conversation/

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From KiriPedia, the archive of John Kiriakou's words. Web version: https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/the-walmart-phone-call/ · About: https://www.kiripedia.org/about/ · Full index: https://www.kiripedia.org/llms.txt