EXCLUSIVE: It seems Donald Trump won’t be springing Sean Combs out of prison any time soon.
After months of consideration of a pardon for his old NYC party pal, the former Apprentice host has pretty much nixed any notion of a commutation or get out of jail card for Diddy, we’ve learned. While nothing is ever set in stone in Trumpland besides grievance, it looks like POTUS has decided not to do Combs, who was sentenced to four-years in federal prison on October 3, any presidential favors.
A TMZ story late Monday citing a “high-ranking White House official” claiming the president could free the Marc Agnifilo- and Teny Geragos-represented Combs in the next few days got a swift “zero truth” response from the administration. However, despite the backlash generated by that story from the Fox Corporation-owned outlet, it was actually White House fears of Trump’s increasingly volatile MAGA base turning on the president over Diddy getting clemency that put the brakes on things, we hear.
A big concern is the reaction from the MAGA base, something that one source close to the White House predicted would be “catastrophic,” comparing it to the discontent of a number of supporters over the way the Jeffrey Epstein case was handled earlier this year.
The caveat is the president, prone to make surprise decisions and announcements, could shift in favor of Combs’ clemency.
“The president, not anonymous sources, is the final decider on pardons and commutations,” a White House official said in response to the TMZ report.
(L-R) Cassie Ventura, Sean Combs, Donald Trump & Melania Trump in 2008
Joe Schildhorn/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images
Various figures from the much-accused Combs’ inner circle have been seeking a pardon almost since the day the Bad Boy Records founder was arrested in September 2024 on sex-trafficking and RICO charges. The din got more intense as Combs’ “freak-offs,” abuse, and sex tapes dominated the trial, which started in May and continued through the summer – even as the likes of Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson and the influential Megyn Kelly argued against Trump giving Combs a pardon.
What put the case in POTUS’ crosshairs — as Deadline has previously reported — was the fact that the presiding judge Arun Subramanian was a Joe Biden appointee and the lead prosecutor for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York was Maurene Comey, the now fired daughter of Trump foe and ex-FBI boss James Comey. An appeal from Combs himself, as revealed by Trump earlier this month, probably didn’t hurt, though POTUS has more than once noted his old friend had become very critical of him in the past several years.
“There was a lot here (in the Combs’ case) to draw Trump in and appeal to his love of revenge and giving the middle finger to those he feels wronged him,” an individual close to the case says. “But, it was always going to be a long shot if he would grant the pardon or not.”
Representatives for Combs’ defense team did not respond to Deadline’s request Tuesday on the state of a Trump pardon for their client.
In the past week or so, a renewed sense of urgency emerged for a possible Combs pardon as the deadline for a legal appeal for the once mogul loomed. On October 20, the Agnifilo and Geragos-led defense filed a notice of appeal in federal court to get the ball started overturning the 50 months behind bars, $500,000 fine and five years of supervised release the currently incarcerated Combs got for being found guilty of two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution.
Perhaps ever more poignant for the Trump White House was the publication Tuesday of alleged Jeffery Epstein and Prince Andrew victim Virginia Giuffre‘s much excerpted posthumous memoir Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting For Justice book. Sources tell us worries about what the book from former Mar-a-Lago employee Giuffre would say about Trump and Epstein’s friendship had ricocheted around an administration. But the bombshells in the book focused on Prince Andrew, who dropped use of his royal titles last week in response.
As for Sean Combs, along with the announced appeal, the “All About the Benjamins” performer is seeking to be moved to a cushier prison for his sentence. Presently in a shared cell at Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center, where he has been for over a year, Combs has requested to be moved to the lower-security FCI Fort Dix in New Jersey for the remainder of his sentence.
No decision has been made yet by Judge Arun Subramanian on whether Combs will be moved to Fort Dix or not. However, an October 8 notation on the court docket indicated where this and Combs is going.
“The Court will recommend a facility in the geographic location of the defense’s choosing, but not the specific facility, which is determined by the Bureau of Prisons,” the note says “For that reason, the Court will include the following recommendation, based on the defense’s request: ‘The Court recommends that the Defendant be incarcerated as close as possible to the New York metropolitan area, and recommends that the Defendant be considered for admission to any available substance abuse program, including the Bureau of Prisons’ Residential Drug Abuse Program (RDAP), for which he qualifies.’”
