Dominic Patten
Looking at life behind bars if found guilty on charges of sex trafficking and more, Sean “Diddy” Combs and his lawyers are now going on the offensive against the Department of Homeland Security.
In a risky tactic, Combs’ defense are accusing DHS agents of leaking grand jury information and orchestrating a smear campaign against the “It’s All About the Benjamins” performer. As the bail denied Combs stews in the raucous Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, his Marc Agnifilo and Teny Geragos team are demanding an pivotal hearing in front of Judge Arun Subramanian ASAP over the alleged DHS “misconduct.”
“Defendant Sean Combs moves for four forms of relief related to what the defense believes was a series of unlawful government leaks, which have led to damaging, highly prejudicial pre-trial publicity that can only taint the jury pool and deprive Mr. Combs of his right to a fair trial,” declares a potentially perturbing memorandum of law in support of motion for an Evidentiary hearing filed late Wednesday in federal court.
Read Sean Combs’ defense’s memorandum of law accusing DHS of misconduct here
Coming one day after the September 16 arrested Bad Boy Records founder started his appeal for pre-trial release with claims of the feds concealing evidence, the newly filed document beats on a very similar drum. However, unlike the Hail Mary appeal, which saves its ire for the U.S. Attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, this filing is almost all about the DHS – almost. In fact, playing on the usual jockeying and in-fighting among bureaucracies, Combs’ team say “the reason a hearing is needed is to determine exactly what the DHS did, and did not do regarding these leaks, and what the U.S. Attorney’s Office did and did not do to stop them.”
Lamenting “underhanded tactics” by DHS, today’s filing hopes to reframe the March 25 raids by the feds on Combs’ Miami and LA homes as being “specifically designed to be public spectacles of brutality and were not primarily focused merely on acquiring potential evidence.”
In that vein, the defense invoke the claims of rape, abuse and more horrors that Combs’ ex-girlfriend Cassie Ventura made against the rapper in her short-lived and quickly settled suit of November of last year. While Combs is said to have paid Ventura around $30 million to end her suit, he always denied her allegations of what went down over the years they were together. That facade fell pretty fast when security footage of Combs attacking and beating Ventura in the corridor of an upmarket LA hotel in 2016 hit the airwaves on CNN and elsewhere in May.
At the time, Combs apologized for his “inexcusable behavior,” saying what the video showed “disgusted” him. Now, citing the public airing of the eight-year-old surveillance video as “the most egregious example” of government trial by public opinion, the defense wants a “gag order” and “suppression of any evidence leaked by government employees.”
Seeking to keep that brutal video away from a jury, the defense says: “The videotape was leaked to CNN for one reason alone: to mortally wound the reputation and the prospect of Sean Combs successfully defending himself against these allegations. Rather than using the videotape as trial evidence, alongside other evidence that gives it context and meaning, the agents misused it in the most prejudicial and damaging way possible. The government knew what it had: a frankly deplorable video recording of Sean Combs in a towel hitting, kicking and dragging a woman in full view of a camera in the hallway of the hotel.”
“The potential problem for the government is that if an agent provided this videotape to CNN, this would be a violation of grand jury secrecy,” Combs’ team adds sticking in the shiv Roy Cohn style.
But here’s the thing, it isn’t clear from today’s filing that the defense really think they have DHS on the run. “After the undersigned notified the government that we would be filing this motion, prosecutors responded that the video broadcast by CNN was not obtained through grand jury process and that DHS did not have possession of the videotape prior to CNN’s publication of it,” a footnote in Wednesday’s 17-page memo states. “However, government attorneys have not given any indication that they have investigated any of the leaks related to this case.”
To that, neither reps from SDNY US Attorney Damian Williams office or DHS responded to request from Deadline on today’s filings and the allegations that contain. if either entity get back to us, this post will be updated.
With all this going on and the bail appeal process beginning, tomorrow will see Combs, his lawyers and prosecutors back in court for a pre-trial status conference.
Among the issues likely to be raised are discovery, sealing of certain evidence and scheduling a trial for Combs. “Mr. Combs continues to assert his right to a speedy trial and intends to request a trial date in April or May 2025, and as consistent with the Court’s trial schedule,” Agnifilo and Geragos said in a correspondence to Judge Subramanian.
With these new accusations by the defense, and the state of bail appeal, that trial start date might be too optimistic.