President Donald Trump on Friday afternoon granted a full pardon to Alice Marie Johnson, less than 24 hours after she all but endorsed him in a speech during the final night of the Republican National Convention.
Here’s the President with Johnson just an hour ago:
“I will be forever grateful,” Johnson told about 1500 Trump supporters seated on the South Lawn of the White House Thursday night from the RNC stage. “God bless you. God bless President Trump, and God bless America.”
In 2018 Trump commuted Johnson’s sentence of life in prison without parole, following a campaign by the ACLU and at the request of Kim Kardashian and Jared Kushner. It is not known why he did not grant her a full pardon at that time.
“I was once told that the only way I would ever be reunited with my family would be as a corpse, but by the grace of God and the compassion of President Donald John Trump I stand before you tonight and I assure you, I’m not a ghost,” Johnson said at the RNC. “I am alive, I am well, and most importantly, I am free.”
Attorney Adrienne Lawrence, author of a book on sexual harassment in the workplace, suggested the pardon was “quid pro quo.”
A Daily Kos senior political writer expressed a similar thought: