Alina Habba Panics After Opposing Counsel Reminds Her What Happens To People Who Play Stupid Games

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Alina Habba (headshot from Habba Madaio LLP)

On Friday, Donald Trump’s razzmatazz lawyer gave a bonkers press conference decrying the judge, jury, state of New York, New York Attorney General, and President Biden for conspiring with E. Jean Carroll to tank Trump in 2024. In fact, she was so busy fulminating against the Federal Rules of Evidence and Civil Procedure that we missed her complaining about a supposed connection between Judge Lewis Kaplan and Carroll’s lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, who are not related.

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“It was never disclosed. It’s insane and so incestuous,” she vamped.

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Yesterday, Habba filed a letter fleshing out her allegations such as they are.

Apparently, she has just discovered that the two Kaplans overlapped for two years back in the 90s at Paul, Weiss, when the judge was head of litigation and the lawyer was a junior associate. ¡Escándalo!

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This discovery does not come from LinkedIn or their public bios, but rather from reporting by conservative blowhard Charles Gasparino writing at the New York Post. Said “reporting” takes the form of a blind quote from an unnamed “former Paul Weiss partner” who insists that Judge Kaplan “was like her mentor.”

The article relies largely on quotes from Habba herself, who called the supposed connection a “conflict of interest” and an ethics violation.

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Meh, if true!

In typical fashion, Habba’s letter is full of snarling innuendo and demands for an inchoate remedy.

“If Your Honor truly worked with Ms. Kaplan in any capacity—especially if there was a mentor/mentee relationship—that fact should have been disclosed before any case involving these parties was permitted to proceed forward,” she wrote, adding that “Here, without knowing more information (or having a specific factual denial by Your Honor that you had a mentor-mentee relationship with Ms. Kaplan), we are unable to flesh out our position concerning what specific relief should be requested[.]”

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Throw in some statutory misconstruction …

Alina Habba is such a bad lawyer she forgot not to italicize and bold the part of the law that wrecks her argumenthttps://t.co/EfgDtsVNHy pic.twitter.com/cuBn3rgnRh

— Andrew Fleischman (@ASFleischman) January 29, 2024

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… and that’s a BINGO.

Suffice it to say that Robbie Kaplan was pissed.

“Here are the facts,” she wrote in a letter response this morning, noting that she and the judge, then head of litigation at the firm, had no contact and worked on zero matters together before he left the firm for the bench in 1994.

“This is hardly surprising since at that time, I was a very junior associate at a large New York law firm and Your Honor was one of the leaders of the Paul, Weiss litigation department,” she continued, adding that there was “nothing for Your Honor to disclose.”

Carroll’s lawyer characterized the defendant’s letter and the article itself as part of Habba and her client’s campaign to foment a “false narrative of judicial bias so that they could characterize any jury verdict against Trump as the product of a corrupt system.”

She closed with an ominous warning that she and her client “reserve all rights, including but not limited to the right to seek sanctions pursuant to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 11” with respect to “both the substance and timing of [Habba’s] false accusations of impropriety.” 

This appears to have awakened some latent survival instinct in Trump’s counsel. Perhaps a distant memory from law school or the MPRE. Maybe it was the more recent memory of the million dollars in sanctions she’s currently appealing in Florida. Or maybe it was the even more recent memory of the requested disciplinary referral pending in New Jersey after Habba intervened in a sexual harassment case at Trump’s Bedminster club.

Whatever the precipitating event, it seems to have finally occurred to Habba that she was in danger of winning some very stupid prizes. And so she fired off yet another indignant missive.

“I write in response to the letter submitted earlier today by Plaintiff’s lead counsel, Roberta Kaplan,” she huffed. “In her letter, Ms. Kaplan mischaracterizes the substance of a letter recently submitted on behalf of President Trump, and makes inflammatory and unwarranted accusations against the undersigned.”

Which is a little pot and kettle, TBQH.

Habba goes on to say that she is JUST ASKING QUESTIONS, YOUR HONOR. Sure those questions suggest — albeit ineptly — that Judge Kaplan violated the code of judicial ethics. But despite telling the reporter that this supposedly “incestuous” conflict would form the basis for her appeal, she now claims “no personal knowledge as to whether the information contained in the article is true or false.”

“The point of my January 29 letter was to verify whether the information contained in the New York Post article is accurate. Since Ms. Kaplan has now denied that there was ever a mentor-mentee relationship between herself and Your Honor, this issue has seemingly been resolved,” she concludes, before reverting to form in a footnoted warning that “various other issues relating to the Court’s conduct, including potential bias hostility towards defense counsel, that will be raised in post-trial motions and on appeal.”

Oh, Alina.

Carroll v. Trump I [Docket via Court Listener]
Carroll v. Trump II [Docket via Court Listener]

Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she runs the Law and Chaos substack and podcast.

Topics

Alina Habba, Courts, Donald Trump, Government, Judge Lewis Kaplan, Roberta Kaplan