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]