Sean “Diddy” Combs’ legal team has officially reached out to Donald Trump about securing a presidential pardon. Attorney Nicole Westmoreland confirmed the outreach during an interview with CNN correspondent Elizabeth Wagmeister, which aired Tuesday, August 5.
“It’s my understanding that we’ve reached out and had conversations in reference to a pardon,” Westmoreland stated. “I think that Mr. Combs is a very hopeful person, and I believe that he remains hopeful,” she added after Wagmeister noted Trump’s reluctance to grant the pardon.
Trump himself addressed the situation during a recent Newsmax interview, saying, “I was very friendly with him, I got along with him great, and he seemed like a nice guy. I didn’t know him well. But when I ran for office, he was very hostile,” explaining that this tension makes a pardon “more difficult to do.”
Back in May 2025, as Combs’ criminal trial began, rumors circulated that his team had already been holding “ongoing and preliminary” talks with Trump regarding a potential pardon, despite past friction between the two. Reports last week suggested that Trump was “seriously considering” the move.
Combs, 55, was recently convicted on two federal counts of transporting women across state lines for the purpose of prostitution but was acquitted of racketeering and sex trafficking charges. Earlier this week, Judge Arun Subramanian denied Combs’ latest bail request, citing the Grammy winner as a “risk of flight or danger.”
“Even if the flight-or-danger requirement was satisfied, there are no ‘exceptional reasons’ warranting a departure from what Congress has required,” Subramanian wrote. “Combs’s Mann Act arguments might have traction in a case that didn’t involve evidence of violence, coercion, or subjugation in connection with the acts of prostitution at issue, but the record here contains evidence of all three.”
Combs’ attorneys are now pushing to have his conviction overturned or to secure a new trial, arguing that the jury’s ruling under the federal Mann Act was unconstitutional. “The government told the jury it had to convict so long as Mr. Combs arranged for a long-time girlfriend or a paid male escort or entertainer to travel across state lines to get together and have sex,” his legal team stated. “And that is all the jury convicted him for.”