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Trump Is Weighing a Pardon for Sean 'Diddy' Combs and Other High-Profile Convicts.

Resist Now 3 min read
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President Trump is privately weighing clemency for Sean “Diddy” Combs and other well-known figures, people familiar with his thinking told CBS News on July 3. No decision has been made. Combs was not among those who received pardons on Friday, and the pardons team did not put him on its recommendation list.

The talks come as outlets report Trump may mark the country’s 250th birthday with a burst of clemency. Alongside Combs, he is said to be considering rapper Prakazrel “Pras” Michel, Malaysian financier Jho Low, and people convicted of clean-air and emissions violations.

What Combs Was Actually Convicted Of

The record is narrower than the headlines suggest. A federal jury in July 2025 acquitted Combs of racketeering conspiracy and sex trafficking and convicted him on two counts of transporting people to engage in prostitution under the Mann Act. In October 2025, Judge Arun Subramanian sentenced him to four years and two months, a $500,000 fine, and five years of supervised release. He is serving his term at the federal prison in Fort Dix, New Jersey.

Combs asked for the pardon himself. He wrote Trump a letter, and Trump told the New York Times in January he was not considering it. That has now changed.

Why a Celebrity Pardon Fits the Pattern

A pardon for Combs would travel the same road as most of Trump’s second-term clemency. Career lawyers at the Office of the Pardon Attorney exist to review petitions, check the facts, and recommend the cases that merit relief. Of roughly 1,600 people granted clemency since January 2025, only about 10 came through that process.

The rest were routed through political channels. When the standard review is skipped, the question stops being whether someone has been rehabilitated and starts being whether they can reach the president. A famous name and a direct letter are exactly the kind of access the process was built to filter out.

The clean-air and emissions cases on the same list point the other way. Pardoning people convicted of pollution crimes erases penalties that courts already imposed for poisoning air and water, with no career recommendation behind it.

What You Can Do Now

  1. Use the letter below to ask your senators and representative to back guardrails on the pardon power, including a requirement that the Office of the Pardon Attorney review and publish its recommendation before any grant. A disclosure step would make celebrity access harder to hide.

  2. Call your members of Congress at (202) 224-3121. Ask whether they believe a president should be able to erase a federal sentence for anyone who writes him a letter, and ask them to say so on the record before any July 4 pardons are announced.

  3. Track the grants. CREW keeps a running list of who received clemency and how they got it. Share it when someone claims every president does this at the same scale.

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