Donald Trump’s beef with Snoop Dogg nearly prevented Michael “Harry-O” Harris from receiving a presidential pardon. According to Rolling Stone, Trump threatened not to commute the Death Row Records co-founder’s prison sentence due to Snoop’s past insults.
Snoop quietly campaigned for Harris’ commutation in the final days of Trump’s presidency. Trump’s aides reportedly encouraged him to remove Harris’ name from the list of prisoners receiving pardons to punish Snoop. The aides cited a paragraph from a 2021 Daily Beast article, which recounted Snoop dissing the former president.
“’I don’t give a f###, I tell ’em straight up, m###########: If you like that n####, you m###########’ racist,’ Snoop Dogg said about Trump, his MAGA fans and the president’s pal Kanye West in 2018,” the paragraph in question read. “’F### you and f### him. Now what?’ In March 2017, Trump had tweeted, ‘Can you imagine what the outcry would be if @SnoopDogg, failing career and all, had aimed and fired the gun at President Obama? Jail time!’ (Trump was referring to a music video — in which Snoop aims a toy gun at a clown who looks like the 45th U.S. president — that had clearly gotten the leader of the free world worked up.)”
Weldon Angelos, an activist who worked on securing Harris’ pardon, confirmed the article created issues.
“I was aware that the [Daily Beast] article caused a problem for Mr. Harris’ clemency petition, and I was asked by someone close to the White House to send a clip of a previously recorded message from Snoop where he commended Trump’s efforts on criminal justice reform,” Angelos told Rolling Stone. “The campaign to free Harry-O was recorded for documentary purposes.”
Trump changed his mind after viewing the documentary footage as he reportedly believed Snoop’s message was sincere. Harris, who spent decades in prison following his arrest for attempted murder and drug trafficking, received his pardon from Trump before the ex-president left office in January 2021.
The dramatic reconsideration likely explained Snoop’s recent praise of Trump. The popular rapper raised eyebrows when he said he had “nothing but love and respect for Donald Trump” in a 2024 interview with the Sunday Times.