Donald Trump says he considers Sean ‘“Diddy” Combs “sort of half-innocent” despite his criminal conviction in federal court in July – but the president called pardoning the music mogul “more difficult” because of past criticism.
Trump spoke about Combs during an interview on Friday night on the friendly environs of Newsmax. Combs was found guilty on 2 July of two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution, with each leaving him facing up to 10 years in prison – but he was acquitted of more serious sex-trafficking and racketeering conspiracy charges.
“He was essentially, I guess, sort of half-innocent,” Trump remarked to Newsmax host Rob Finnerty. “He was celebrating a victory, but I guess it wasn’t as good of a victory.”
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A number of media outlets reported that Trump has been weighing a pardon for Combs, with whom he had partied in public and exchanged mutual declarations of friendship before winning his two presidencies.
Trump has built a track record of pardoning convicted political supporters in what has been widely seen as a broader rebuke of a justice system that found him guilty of criminally falsifying business records less than six months prior to his victory in the 2024 White House election.
Yet Combs evidently complicated matters for himself by having told the Daily Beast in 2017 that he did not “really give a fuck about Trump”. And in 2020, when Trump’s first presidency ended in defeat to Joe Biden, Combs told radio host Charlamagne tha God that “white men like Trump need to be banished”.
“The number one priority is to get Trump out of office,” Combs said.
Trump seemingly alluded to those comments in his interview on Friday with Newsmax when asked to revisit the concept of pardoning Combs.
“When I ran for office, he was very hostile,” Trump said of the Bad Boy Records founder. “It’s hard, you know? We’re human beings. And we don’t like to have things cloud our judgment, right? But 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.”
Combs was convicted of flying people around the country, including male sex workers and girlfriends, for sexual encounters. He is tentatively scheduled to be sentenced on 3 October and has asked to be freed from custody on a $50m bond while awaiting that hearing.
At the time of Trump’s Newsmax interview on Friday, Combs was being housed at New York City’s only federal lockup.
Another federal lockup in New York City closed after the 2019 death there of disgraced financier, convicted sex offender and former Trump friend Jeffrey Epstein while awaiting federal trial.
Trump’s justice department drew bipartisan political criticism after announcing that it would not release any more documents from the Epstein investigation despite earlier pledges from the president and his attorney general, Pam Bondi, to disclose more information about the case.
Amid the furor, Trump has been asked about whether he is mulling a pardon for Ghislaine Maxwell, who has been serving a 20-year prison sentence for conspiring with Epstein to sexually traffic and abuse minors.
“Well, I’m allowed to give her a pardon,” Trump has said with respect to Maxwell, who as of Friday had been transferred from a federal prison in Florida to a lower-security facility in Texas. “But right now, it would be inappropriate to talk about it.”
