• President Donald Trump says he hasn't been approached about pardoning Sean "Diddy" Combs.
• Combs is on trial for sex trafficking and racketeering charges in Manhattan.
• Trump said he'd "look at the facts" and that Combs disliking him "wouldn't have any impact."

President Donald Trump said Friday that he hasn't been approached about pardoning Sean "Diddy" Combs — who's currently on trial on sex-trafficking and racketeering charges in Manhattan — but he'd "look at the facts" of the case.

"I would certainly look at the facts," Trump said at an Oval Office press conference. "If I think somebody was mistreated, whether they like me or don't like me, it wouldn't have any impact on me."

Trump talked about Combs' case in response to a question from Fox News' Peter Doocy, who asked whether the president would consider pardoning Combs.

Trump said he was once friends with Combs, even talking about him on "The Apprentice." But their relationship "busted up" when Trump became involved in politics, he said.

Federal prosecutors in Manhattan have accused Combs of using the resources of his record label and power in the music industry to coerce women into "freak offs," where they'd participate in dayslong, drug-fueled sexual performances with other men while he watched.

In the trial, which began earlier this month and is expected to last several more weeks, witnesses have testified about Combs personally beating and sexually assaulting victims. Combs has pleaded not guilty to the charges against him, and his attorneys say his conduct doesn't amount to sex trafficking.

Combs' trial is taking place in the same 26th-floor courtroom where a jury found Trump liable for sexual abuse in a civil trial, and where Trump briefly testified in a second trial over additional damages stemming from the abuse claims.

In the Friday press conference, Trump said he had not been following the trial closely and had not spoken to Combs in years.

He said he believes Combs' lawyers are "thinking about" asking for a pardon.

"I think some people have been very close to asking," he said.

• Judge James Boasberg found probable cause for contempt in the administration's deportation actions.
• Trump's pardon powers could spare his officials and lawyers from potential criminal consequences.
• In 2017, Trump pardoned former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio under similar circumstances.

A federal judge on Wednesday took the remarkable step of finding probable cause to hold the Trump administration in criminal contempt for violating his order to turn around a pair of El Salvador-bound planes carrying deportees.

Under a 46-page opinion by US District Judge James E. Boasberg, the administration would have several off-ramps for avoiding an actual criminal contempt prosecution against any federal officials or Justice Department lawyers.

The DOJ itself would get first crack at potentially prosecuting the administration's own people. Under the federal criminal procedure rules, the judge could also step in "in the interest of justice" and appoint an outside council.

More significantly, President Donald Trump's pardon power would enable him to void any prosecution or its consequences, legal experts told Business Insider.

"Yes, the president's pardon power does reach criminal contempt prosecutions," said Margaret Love, a clemency attorney and the US Department of Justice pardon attorney between 1990 and 1997.

"And in fact, his very first pardon during his first term in office was issued in a criminal contempt case," Love said, referring to former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio.

Arpaio was pardoned in 2017 after being found guilty of criminal contempt for violating a 2011 court order in a racial profiling case.

Wednesday's decision by Boasberg, who sits in Washington, DC, found that there was probable cause to find the Trump administration exhibited "willful disobedience of judicial orders" for ignoring his order from last month to immediately turn around planes full of deportees headed to an El Salvador prison.

The Trump administration has argued it did not violate the judge's orders because the planes had already left the United States.

The US Supreme Court vacated Boasberg's order blocking the deportation and said Texas, not DC, has jurisdiction over deciding if the federal Alien Enemies Act was properly applied in removing the deportees from the country.

Still, that "does not excuse the Government's violation," Boasberg wrote Wednesday, in pursuing a possible contempt conviction.

Boasberg in his opinion offered several steps before contempt would be prosecuted.

First, the administration could seek to remedy, or "purge" the violation of the judge's order, including by recognizing that the White House retains some control over what happens to the deportees, something Trump has so far denied. The deportees could then challenge their detentions in a US court.

The administration could also suggest its own remedy, the judge wrote.

If the administration instead does nothing, the judge would begin the contempt process by determining which administration official or attorney is "responsible" for violating the turn-around order.

If the government failed to assist in naming who is responsible, the judge would make a determination after holding more hearings and seeking input from the detainees' attorneys, the judge wrote.

"The next step," the judge wrote, would be for the court to "request that the contempt be prosecuted by an attorney for the government."

"If the Government 'declines' or 'the interest of justice requires,' the Court will 'appoint another attorney to prosecute the contempt,'" the judge wrote, quoting from federal criminal procedure rules.

The precedent for a presidential pardon in a criminal contempt case stretches back centuries, said Frank Bowman, an emeritus professor of criminal and constitutional law at the University of Missouri School of Law.

"There were arguments when Arpaio was pardoned, saying that to do so would invalidate the separation of powers," Bowman said. "But the truth is that the precedent for these pardons is so powerful, going back over the past two centuries."

Since Boasberg no longer has jurisdiction over the case, he can only pursue contempt for an administration official or lawyer's past conduct in his courtroom, Bowman said. If someone is found in contempt and then pardoned, "that would be the end of the ballgame," the professor said.

Trump spokesman Steven Cheung said the administration will appeal Boasberg's finding.

"The President is 100% committed to ensuring that terrorists and criminal illegal migrants are no longer a threat to Americans and their communities across the country," Cheung said.

This story has been updated to include additional expert comment.

• President Donald Trump granted Ross Ulbricht a full and unconditional pardon on Tuesday.
• Ulbricht was the founder of Silk Road, the online drug marketplace.
• He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole in 2015.

Ross Ulbricht, the founder of online drug marketplace Silk Road, received a full and unconditional pardon on Tuesday from President Donald Trump, who announced the move in a Truth Social post.

Ulbricht has been held at the US Penitentiary in Tucson since the FBI arrested him in 2013.

The FBI described Silk Road as a "digital bazaar" for illegal goods and services that buyers and sellers accessed through Tor — a network designed to conceal its users' identity and location.

The FBI said it generated hundreds of millions of dollars in sales, as well as more than $13 million in commissions.

In 2015, a judge sentenced Ulbricht, now 40, to life in prison for drug trafficking, computer hacking, and money laundering without the possibility of parole, ruling that Silk Road was "destructive to our social fabric."

Libertarian cause célèbre

Ulbricht has become a cause célèbre for the libertarian movement.

The Libertarian Party, which has long supported criminal justice reform and drug legalization, has continuously pushed for his release, viewing his life sentence as an example of government overreach.

In a speech at the Libertarian National Convention in May 2024, Trump pledged to commute Ulbricht's sentence on the first day of his administration if he was reelected president.

Trump said in his post on Tuesday that he granted Ulbricht's pardon in honor of Ulbricht's mother "and the Libertarian Movement, which supported me so strongly."

According to a 2015 Wired report, Ulbricht developed an interest in libertarian economic theory while at university and embraced the political philosophy of Ludwig von Mises, a staunch opponent of interventionism and advocate for the moral purpose of free-market capitalism.

In a letter he wrote to the trial judge in 2015, he said he created Silk Road not to seek financial gain but because he "believed at the time that people should have the right to buy and sell whatever they wanted so long as they weren't hurting anyone else."

"Silk Road was supposed to be about giving people the freedom to make their own choices, to pursue their own happiness," he added.

Ulbricht also said, "While I still don't think people should be denied this right, I never sought to create a site that would provide another avenue for people to feed their addictions."

However, according to the United States Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York, the "vast" majority of goods sold on Silk Road were illegal drugs.

Preet Bharara, the then-US Attorney for Manhattan, said at the time that: "Make no mistake: Ulbricht was a drug dealer and criminal profiteer who exploited people's addictions and contributed to the deaths of at least six young people."

Ulbricht was convicted of seven offenses after a four-week jury trial and sentenced to life in prison. He was also ordered to forfeit $183,961,921.

Trump's pardoning power

In his Truth Social post, Trump called Ulbricht's sentences "ridiculous."

In a statement on Tuesday, Angela McArdle, the Libertarian National Committee Chair, thanked Trump for following through on his promise.

"I'm proud to say that saving his life has been one of our top priorities, and that has finally paid off," she said.

"This is an incredible moment in Libertarian history," McArdle added.

On Monday, Trump also issued sweeping pardons for roughly 1,500 people related to the January 6 Capitol riot, fulfilling a campaign promise to wipe clean the records of most people connected with the riot.

• President Donald Trump on Inauguration Day issued pardons for January 6 defendants.
• He'd pledged to grant clemency to at least some of his supporters who stormed the Capitol in 2021.
• About two-thirds of those charged with federal crimes had pleaded guilty as of January.

President Donald Trump on Monday pardoned roughly 1,500 people related to January 6-related offenses, fulfilling a campaign promise to wipe clean the records of most people connected with the Capitol riot.

"We hope they come out tonight, frankly," Trump said after signing the pardons. "They're expecting it."

Trump said he included six commutations in the pardon package so that their cases could be studied further. Among those whose sentences were commuted were the leaders of the far-right Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, who had been charged with seditious conspiracy. Stewart Rhodes, the Oath Keepers' founder, was in the middle of serving an 18-year prison sentence.

Outside the commutations, Trump's pardon is sweeping in scope. It applies to "all other individuals convicted of offenses related to events that occurred at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021."

Earlier during the day, Trump told supporters that he was asked not to include mentions of January 6 "hostages" in his official inaugural address.

"I was going to talk about the J6 hostages, but you'll be happy because, you know, it is action, not words that count," Trump said during a speech to supporters in an overflow room at the US Capitol. "And you're going to be happy, because you're going to see a lot of action on the J6 hostages."

During the presidential campaign, Trump described imprisoned January 6 defendants as "political prisoners," asserting they were "ushered in" to federal buildings by police.

Despite opposition from some prominent Republicans, including former Vice President Mike Pence, whom the rioters targeted, Trump had said that he would pardon many of the defendants.

He made an exception for those who are "evil and bad," as he told Time in April.

After Trump won the presidential election in November, January 6 defendants started filing motions to delay their hearings in the hopes Trump would pardon them once in office.

Several Proud Boys leaders asked Trump for pardons in November, two months before he was set to take office.

In an interview with NBC's "Meet the Press" last month, he said he would "mostly likely" pardon convicted defendants "very quickly" upon taking office. He said then, too, that there may be exceptions.

With just hours left in office, President Joe Biden has issued a preemptive pardon for Anthony Fauci, America's top infectious disease expert.

For nearly four decades, Fauci directed the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. He advised seven presidents, beginning with Ronald Reagan and, among his many accomplishments, played a crucial role in the response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Fauci was a leading architect of PEPFAR, the global AIDS response program begun by President George W. Bush that is estimated to have saved 25 million lives. Fauci served as Biden's medical advisor until his retirement at the end of 2022.

"For more than half a century, Dr. Fauci served our country," Biden said in a statement released this morning. "He saved countless lives by managing the government’s response to pressing health crises, including HIV/AIDS, as well as the Ebola and Zika viruses. During his tenure as my Chief Medical Advisor, he helped the country tackle a once-in-a-century pandemic. The United States is safer and healthier because of him."

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• In 2020, Donald Trump pardoned cybersecurity executive Chris Wade for crimes that had been sealed.
• Unsealed documents show he was part of a sophisticated spam email operation busted by an informant.
• Prosecutors want to keep part of his case sealed — the reason behind that remains a mystery.

In August 2005, years before he was an executive at a cybersecurity company, Chris Wade was vacationing at a casino in Las Vegas, planning to meet an associate who was supposed to hand him an envelope containing $2,500 in cash.

Wade, who controlled tens of thousands of hacked computers at the time, had agreed to use his network to send emails promoting a stock pump-and-dump scheme. The cash was payment for his services.

But what Wade didn't know was that his associate was a government informant and that prosecutors would soon charge him with an array of cybercrimes, accusing him of using the hacked computers to commit fraud.

For nearly two decades, the charges against Wade would remain a secret. In an unusual move, the judge sealed the entire court docket, hiding all public records of Wade's involvement in the case.

While it's common for individual court documents to be sealed or partially redacted, Wade's case was different.

Wade pleaded guilty to all the charges against him in July 2006. However, no reference to the case appeared in public federal court databases — even after he was sentenced in 2011 to time served.

The very fact that Wade had a criminal past was a secret — until Donald Trump pardoned him.

That left many wondering what would account for the curious court-sanctioned secrecy surrounding the case. One explanation, legal analysts say, is that Wade could have become a government informant himself.

A pardon for a secret crime

Years after the hacking charges, Wade went legit.

In 2011, he launched iEmu, a company that grew a cult following among developers by allowing them to emulate iPhone apps on Windows, Mac, and Android devices. In 2017, he cofounded Corellium and is its chief technology officer.

Corellium has carved out a prominent place in the software market, creating sophisticated tools for cybersecurity researchers. It fought, and ultimately settled, a protracted legal battle against Apple, which alleged Corellium violated copyright law by creating a virtual version of iOS that researchers could test for security vulnerabilities. Another one of its cofounders helped the FBI unlock the iPhone used by one of the suspects in the 2015 San Bernardino mass shooting attack.

Trump granted Wade clemency near the end of 2020, with less than a month left in his first presidential term.

While Wade's case was sealed, the pardon effectively made it public.

But Wade's crimes, at the time, remained a mystery.

The White House's announcement said only that Wade "served two years' probation after pleading guilty to various cyber-crimes" and "has shown remorse and sought to make his community a safer place."

It also said the pardon was supported by Isaac "Ike" Perlmutter, the former Marvel executive and a Mar-a-Lago member who has supported Trump's political campaigns; Mark Templeton, the former Citrix CEO who has since taken a seat on the board of Corellium; and "numerous current and former law-enforcement officials."

The pardon itself is not much clearer. It says Wade is granted "a full and unconditional pardon" for his conviction "in sealed Docket No. 06-cr-394" and notes that "the offenses of conviction and sentence are also under seal." The Justice Department's website still says his offenses were "sealed" and that his sentence was "unknown."

A representative for the DOJ pardon attorney's office didn't respond to a request for comment.

The pardon was announced in a White House press release along with pardons and commutations for more than 20 other people, many of whom were businessmen charged with tax-related offenses. The list included Trump's political allies Roger Stone and Paul Manafort, who were criminally charged in the Mueller investigation, and Jared Kushner's father, Charles Kushner, who Trump has since selected as his ambassador to France for his coming second term.

Wade, through his attorney Paul Kreiger, declined to comment.

In October, following legal action by The New York Times, a judge unsealed documents containing the charges against Wade and details about his sentence.

The criminal complaint said that Wade was arrested with the help of a confidential government informant who was assisting a unit in the US Secret Service's New York field office investigating a spam email scheme.

The informant, whose identity remains unknown, had been convicted of unrelated cyber-fraud charges and was trying to leverage his connections in the hacking world to help law enforcement with the hope of receiving a lighter sentence, the complaint said.

The informant had helped authorities catch two other men, Adam Vitale and Todd Moeller. They had bypassed AOL's spam filters and blasted out tens of thousands of emails a day promoting obscure stocks, which Vitale and Moeller then dumped for profit.

Vitale used "SpamsMVP" as one of his instant message nicknames. Moeller bragged that he was making $40,000 a month by selling the stock. Both pleaded guilty to the charges against them.

Wade was the "proxy guy" in the spam email operation. Wade routed the emails through the computers of hundreds of AOL users, who were hacked and unwittingly used to transmit spam, making them look legit to AOL's filters. While he was waiting on the $2,500 payment from the informant, Wade bragged that he was able to control a "botnet" of 20,000 computers to launder spam emails, the court documents said.

The informant tried to get in on the operation. He also cut a side deal with Wade at the expected price of $2,500 a week to take advantage of his botnet. Wade took Western Union wire transfers or cash, the documents said.

The informant didn't actually bring the cash to Wade at that Las Vegas casino. But he'd collected enough evidence for the Secret Service to bring criminal charges. According to the charging document, AOL determined that Wade, Moeller, and Vitale spammed 1,277,401 different AOL email addresses.

'You're not supposed to have a case that never existed'

In January, a lawyer for The New York Times asked a federal judge to unseal the case, noting the bizarre circumstances of the "blanket sealing."

"The presidential pardon power is virtually unchecked. As a result, the public's need to know how the power is being used and who is benefiting is at its pinnacle," David E. McCraw, the lawyer for the Times, wrote.

The US Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York, which prosecuted Wade, agreed to unseal certain key documents.

But other ones, prosecutors said, should remain secret. The reasons for keeping them sealed have also been withheld from the public record, with the Justice Department arguing that "would, in effect, risk disclosing the very information that warrants ongoing protection."

Wade's lawyers, in arguments that remain sealed, have also asked the judge to keep certain filings private.

It remains to be seen whether more court documents from Wade's criminal case will become public in the future. The Times has not published a story on Wade and his pardon in the months since the documents were unsealed. The judge's deadline for additional unsealing requests has passed. A representative for the Times declined to comment.

While Moeller and Vitale were charged as codefendants in 2006, prosecutors severed Wade's case from theirs and sealed it.

Prosecutors may agree to seal a case when a defendant cooperates and prosecutors want to keep the relationship a secret.

"The government will want to conceal the entire thing because they don't want other related bad guys to know that this investigation is ongoing," said John Kucera, a former federal prosecutor who investigated complex financial crimes and now works as a defense attorney at Boies Schiller Flexner.

But even when there's a secret cooperator, the court docket normally becomes public once the defendant is sentenced. That didn't happen in Wade's case.

The yearslong secrecy across multiple administrations — and the fact that the Justice Department still wants to keep portions of the case sealed — is unusual. One possible explanation, said Dan Boyle, a former federal prosecutor and US military intelligence professional, is that Wade helped the government on some kind of sensitive matter.

Boyle told BI that sealing the case indefinitely could indicate that the Justice Department didn't want anyone to know Wade had interacted with law enforcement.

"You're not supposed to have a case that never existed," said Boyle, also a Boies Schiller Flexner defense lawyer. "It happens, but it's an extraordinary circumstance."

Jason Brown, the Secret Service agent who wrote the criminal complaint against Wade, declined to answer questions about the case beyond what is available in public court records, citing laws regarding grand jury secrecy. Representatives for the US Attorney's Office in the Southern District of New York didn't respond to a request for comment.

Thomas G.A. Brown, who later oversaw the office's unit investigating complex fraud and cybercrime, was the prosecutor in the Wade, Vitale, and Moeller investigations. Court records show he was involved in numerous high-profile cases, including the prosecution of Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht, the leadership of the hacking group LulzSec, and numerous digital currency cases. (Trump has vowed to commute Ulbricht's sentence on "day one" of his second term.)

Brown, who left the Justice Department in 2014, didn't respond to requests for comment.

Wade's pardon could make it easier for Corellium to seek contracts with government agencies and security companies, Adam Scott Wandt, an associate professor of technology at the John Jay School of Criminal Justice, told BI. Without a pardon, Wade would likely have difficulty obtaining security clearance or getting approval for funding from federal agencies, he said. And with the case fully sealed, Corellium may have been in a tight spot if it was asked to disclose whether its executives had criminal records.

Wandt also said the pardon would make disclosures less awkward if Corellium seeks an initial public offering in the future.

"If they're going to go public at some point, they'd have to disclose a lot about their C-suite personnel, about their leadership," Wandt said. "They might want to pardon him so they don't have to disclose that a former felon is their CTO."

Considering the success of Corellium and the technical sophistication required to run the spamming operation two decades ago, Wade may have had skills the FBI found useful.

"He probably has a lot of techniques that became useful to the bureau, and maybe that's how he worked his time off," Boyle said.