"They’re gonna have to get Kanye to call me instead," sources told Rolling
Stone Trump said as his presidency wound down.
In the final weeks
of his life, Brandon Bernard and his attorneys made frantic calls to anyone
from activists, advocates, celebrities, music producers, and controversial
political operatives to get then-President Donald Trump to put a stop to his
scheduled execution. Ultimately, they were unsuccessful—but Kim Kardashian,
who began working with Bernard’s team in November 2020 and who’d had
previous success getting Trump to commute sentences, never even got a chance
to try.
According to a devastating report from Rolling Stone, the
former president had abruptly stopped taking Kardashian’s calls by then.
Kardashian seemed to have had Trump’s ear since 2018, when she
led the public crusade for the clemency of Alice Marie Johnson, a mother of
five from Mississippi who’d served 21 years in prison for her role in a
cocaine-trafficking ring. Just one month after they met in the Oval Office,
Trump commuted Johnson’s life sentence. By 2019, Kardashian was on hand at
the White House for his signing of a criminal justice reform bill, and in
2020, she lauded Trump after he granted clemency to a handful of other
women.
But after Kardashian appeared to celebrate Joe Biden’s win in
the 2020 presidential election, sources told Rolling Stone that Trump told
his staff that he didn’t want to hear “a word” from her about anything—most
of all, Bernard’s forthcoming execution.
“They’re gonna have to
get Kanye to call me instead,” Trump allegedly told staffers. Kanye did not
call on Bernard’s behalf, but celebrity attorney and friend to all
questionable millionaires and billionaires, Alan Dershowitz, did. On a
20-minute call, Dershowitz is said to have cited the fact that Bernard was
sentenced for his involvement in a 1999 carjacking and double homicide, had
already spent more than half of his life in prison, had never accumulated
any infractions, and had dedicated himself to counseling at-risk
youth.
Instead, Trump sided with the family of the victims of the
carjacking—despite the fact that Bernard never once fired the gun that ended
the lives of two youth ministers—claiming the crime was too horrific. On the
day of his execution, Bernard was injected with a fatal dose of
Pentobarbital, a barbiturate that “cripples the central nervous system,
shutting down the lungs and heart.”
“As the drug started taking
its effect, he’s looking in our direction, as if he just wanted somebody to
help him,” Chuck Formosa, a defense investigator who developed a friendship
with Bernard and attended the execution, told Rolling Stone. “It was the
most fucked-up thing I’ve ever seen, watching them kill my friend.”
Bernard was one of 13 people to be executed within a six-month
period during Trump’s administration, Rolling Stone reported. Among the
others was Lisa Montgomery, a severely mentally ill and traumatized
52-year-old woman who endured decades of sexual assault, beatings, and gang
rape, before strangling a pregnant woman to death. Before Trump’s murder
spree in 2020, there had been just three federal executions in 60 years.
In
his memoir, One Damn Thing After Another: Memoirs of an Attorney General,
Trump’s attorney general and a longtime death-penalty advocate Bill Barr
recalled there was not one discussion with the former president with regard
to any of the 13 inmates who were put to death.
According to
Rolling Stone, Bernard’s final words were: “I’m sorry. That’s the only words
that I can say that completely capture how I feel now and how I felt that
day.”
