Trump says he won't be pardoning Diddy

In a new New York Times interview, Trump revealed he'd received a letter from Sean Combs' team, asking for clemency in his 2025 conviction.

By William Hughes  |  January 8, 2026 | 7:56pm
Brian Grazer, Donald Trump, Director Brett Ratner, Melania Trump and Sean "Diddy" Combs at the world premiere of Tower Heist on October 24, 2011 in New York City. (Photo by Jim Spellman/WireImage)
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Trump says he won't be pardoning Diddy

Donald Trump gave a fairly rare interview to The New York Times this week, in which he took time out of his busy schedule of talking about hating (and occasionally suing) the ol’ Grey Lady so that he could talk through many of the other grievances, flitting bouts of self-aggrandizement, and apparently endless cravings for Diet Coke that are cycling endlessly in his head, instead. In the midst of the interview—which our brains cannot help but point out came less than a week after the Times revealed that it had very politely sat on information about the invasion of Venezuela in the lead-up to the United States military’s Saturday morning attack on the South American country—Trump also touched on the topic of one of his favorite presidential abilities, the power to pardon people, and how he won’t be using it on behalf of Sean “Diddy” Combs.

In the interview, Trump revealed that he had received a formal request for clemency from Combs, stating that he’d received a “letter” from the rapper and mogul, who was convicted on two counts of transportation for the purposes of prostitution in July of 2025. Despite facetiously offering to show reporters the letter, Trump also made it clear that he was not considering a pardon for Combs, slightly contradicting reports from last year that he was at least mulling over the possibility. (Hopes for the Combs camp seemed to have diminished by October 2025, when Trump was back in grudge mode, noting that despite earlier friendly relations between the two men, “When I ran for office, he was very hostile.”)

Barring intervention—or the success of a rapid-fire appeal that’s expected to be launched in the spring of 2026—Combs is expected to remain in prison until October of 2028, having already served a year of his four-year sentence before his trial concluded.

 

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