(Luis Cornelio, Headline USA) The White House pushed back Tuesday against a TMZ report claiming that President Donald Trump was “vacillating” on potentially commuting Sean “Diddy” Combs’s sentence for his prostitution conviction.
A Trump White House official told NBC News that there is “zero truth” to TMZ’s report. The official said TMZ never reached out to them before running “their fake news.”
They added that Trump, “not anonymous sources, is the final decider on pardons and commutations.”
TMZ reported on Monday that an anonymous source said White House officials were urging Trump not to commute Diddy.
The disgraced hip-hop mogul was sentenced to four years in prison and ordered to pay $500,000 after a federal jury found him guilty on two counts of transportation for the purposes of prostitution.
According to TMZ’s source, “Trump will do what he wants” and could let Combs walk free as early as this week.
Shortly after his sentencing, Combs’s attorneys privately pursued a pardon for the convicted felon.
Combs, who has long despised Trump, has maintained his innocence.
Trump previously did not immediately rule out pardoning Combs, recalling that he “was very friendly with” him.
“I got along with him great and seemed like a nice guy. I didn’t know him well,” Trump said in an interview. “But when I ran for office, he was very hostile.”
Combs has been a staunch Democrat for years, going as far as saying, “white men like Trump need to be banished.”
He even campaigned for Barack Obama ahead of the 2008 presidential election and hosted a virtual event with then-Vice President Kamala Harris in 2020.
