After Sean “Diddy” Combs’ partial acquittal on sex trafficking charges in a bombshell criminal trial earlier this summer, the music mogul’s legal team has been public about their efforts to secure a presidential pardon. But is that even possible? What would the process look like? And how might Combs’ reps try to win over President Donald Trump?
Combs was acquitted on July 2 of racketeering and sex-trafficking, the most serious counts he faced in a trial over his drug-fueled, marathon sex-parties known as “freak-offs.” The rapper was convicted only of hiring sex workers for the orgies, significantly reducing his potential prison sentence from decades to likely just a few years.
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Though Combs’ team of lawyers celebrated the verdict as a major win, they’re not done fighting and will likely appeal Combs’ counts of conviction after his October sentencing hearing. And then there’s the possibility of a pardon; one member of Combs’ defense squad told CNN earlier this month that they have approached Trump about clemency.
There are actually two ways that Trump could free Combs: a pardon, which wipes a conviction from someone’s criminal record; or a commutation, which just erases a prison sentence while leaving the record intact. Trump has not said publicly yet whether he’d consider granting either type of clemency to Combs.
So what does the process look like for Combs’ attorneys to pursue a pardon? According to Mark Osler, a leading clemency attorney and law professor at the University of St. Thomas, there really isn’t any process under Trump’s presidency.
Osler says that in the past, clemency lawyers filed form applications to the Department of Justice’s Pardon Attorney, and these petitions would then go through several levels of review before making it to the White House. But Trump broke with tradition at the end of his first term by granting several pardons that hadn’t gone through this process, and then-President Joe Biden did the same this past December and January. Now, with Trump back in the White House, pardons are coming straight from his desk without review in large numbers — including a blanket grant of clemency to over 1,000 January 6 insurrection defendants.
“The mechanism is falling apart,” Osler tells Billboard. “It’s fair to say many people are confused about what the process is now. Some people are filling out the form, some people are trying to appeal directly to [Trump’s so-called pardon czar] Alice Marie Johnson, some people are trying to talk to Trump at Mar-a-Lago, some people are trying to get on Fox News to pitch their case. It’s hard to tell what will work and for who.”
With Trump now making so many pardon decisions on his own, it’s likely that Combs’ reps are trying to make their case directly to the president’s inner circle. This is no small feat: as Osler puts it, “People are spending a lot of money trying to get in front of the right people to be considered.”
This begs another question: if Combs’ team does go through the trouble to get in front of Trump’s advisers, what pitch will they make? Osler says it’s common to appeal to a president’s personal values — which for Trump, he says, are “loyalty and celebrity.”
Celebrities do make up a sizable chunk of Trump’s pardon history. If Combs ends up getting clemency, he’ll join the ranks of other musicians like Lil Wayne, Kodak Black and YoungBoy Never Broke Again — all of whom were pardoned of weapons charges by Trump.
Combs’ lawyers also could try to pitch Trump that the rapper’s conviction is unjust or even racist. The music mogul was found guilty of prostitution under the Mann Act, a 1910 statute that has a sordid history of being used to target Black men and interracial couples. (It was originally known as the “White-Slave Traffic Act.”)
“The Mann Act is rarely used today,” says JaneAnne Murray, a clemency lawyer and professor at University of Minnesota Law School. “It comes out of a puritanical era, and its enforcement was driven by sexist and racist assumptions.”
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The fact that these Mann Act counts were the lowest-level charges in an indictment that accused Combs of the far splashier and more serious crimes of sex-trafficking and racketeering could also be key to a pardon argument.
Since Combs was acquitted of racketeering and sex-trafficking, his lawyers have a strong case to argue that he never should have been charged with these higher-level crimes in the first place. And Murray says that if Combs had been charged only with prostitution under the Mann Act, “It’s almost inconceivable that any resolution of the case would have involved a custodial sentence.”
“One of the arguments I make for my clients is, ‘Look, they went to trial and were acquitted of the first-degree [murder charge]. They got convicted of the second degree— but had they been properly charged in the beginning, we would have negotiated from that lower baseline, and they would have received a much more lenient sentence,’” Murray tells Billboard.
All that said, Combs still faces an uphill climb in securing a pardon from Trump. According to Osler, presidents tend to think seriously about the potential political ramifications of their pardoning decisions. Trump’s White House may not want to be associated with the sordid details and admitted abuse that came out during Combs’ trial — especially in light of the public relations firestorm ignited in recent months by renewed interest in Trump’s past associations with Jeffrey Epstein.
“Historically, sex crimes have kind of been the third rail of clemency,” says Osler. “Almost never have you seen grants for them.”