The White House is pushing back on a recent report regarding the possibility of President Donald Trump commuting Sean “Diddy” Combs‘ sentence.
Shortly after TMZ reported that a “high-ranking White House official” had said that the twice-impeached POTUS was considering commuting the disgraced mogul’s federal prison sentence “as early as this week,” the White House Communications Office fired back in a Tuesday (Oct. 21) statement, “There is zero truth to the TMZ report, which we would’ve gladly explained had they reached out before running their fake news.”
The spokesperson continued in a statement to NBC News, “The president, not anonymous sources, is the final decider on pardons and commutations.”
Billboard has reached out to Diddy’s rep for comment.
Despite the comms office’s statement, TMZ has stuck by its report, which also claimed that Trump was “vacillating” on whether to commute Diddy’s sentence. An update to the original story on Tuesday morning reads, “The White House Communications Office is saying our story is not true. We stand by our story. Our story is accurate.”
The Bad Boy Records founder was sentenced to four years in prison at the beginning of October after he was found guilty in July of two felony counts of transportation to engage in prostitution at the end of a two-month trial. He had also been charged with sex-trafficking and racketeering — which he consistently denied — but was found not guilty on those counts.
A few days after Diddy’s sentencing, Trump confirmed that the producer’s legal team had requested a presidential pardon. “A lot of people have asked me for pardons,” the president said at the time. “I call him Puff Daddy. He has asked me for a pardon.”
In May, Trump told Fox News that he would “look at the facts” of Diddy’s case to see if a pardon was warranted. “I haven’t spoken to him in years,” the politician said at the time. “He used to really like me a lot. I think when I ran for politics, that relationship busted up … If I think somebody was mistreated, whether they like me or don’t like me, it wouldn’t have any impact on me.”
Diddy’s team is working on appealing the disgraced mogul’s conviction, filing the paperwork to do so on Monday (Oct. 20).
