Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs Requested Trump Pardon, but President Is ‘Not Considering’ It

Sean “Diddy” Combs wrote a letter to President Trump requesting a pardon, the president told the New York Times during a two-hour interview with the publication published Thursday. However, the president is not considering granting the request, according to the publication.

Multiple people close to the situation had stated or speculated that an official request had been sent, and the president himself had said that Combs had asked for clemency, but Thursday’s report was the first official confirmation of the letter’s existence. Combs, 56, is currently serving a 50-month prison sentence on prostitution-related charges.

Despite the controversy and wide public condemnation surrounding the charges and allegations against Combs, his request was not outside the realm of possibility, considering the president’s pardons of all convicted participants in the January 6, 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol, as well as former Honduras president Orlando Hernandez, who had been sentenced to 45 years in prison in June 2024 after a U.S. federal jury convicted him of conspiring to import cocaine into the United States and related firearms offenses.

The president told the Times reporters that Combs had “asked me for a pardon” and that the request came “through a letter.” He then offered to show the reporters the letter but did not follow through, but said he was not considering the pardon request.

The president and Combs were acquainted before Trump began his first run for president in 2015, but the president has implied that their relationship had fallen on rocky terrain.

“I was very friendly with him. I got along with him great, and seemed like a nice guy,” Trump told Newsmax in 2025, adding “I didn’t know him well. But when I ran for office, he was very hostile.”

He told reporters in the Oval Office last October, “”I call him Puff Daddy; he has asked me for a pardon,” adding, “When you knew someone and you were fine and then you run for office and he made some terrible statements… so I don’t know… it makes it more difficult to do.”

During Trump’s unsuccessful first bid for re-election in 2020, Combs called for him to be removed from office and said, “white men like Trump need to be banished.”