Trump's Bringing His Sparklemagic Lawyer Alina Habba To DC

Classin' up da joint.

There are so many downright evil people who will be in the second Trump administration, and they are going to do so many hideously cruel things. So we must take our joy where we can find it, if only to maintain our sanity.

Here’s a thing that brings me joy.

Alina Habba, at the White House.

No, not the White House, Black Market store at the mall in Cherry Hill. The actual White House in Washington DC where Donald Trump will soon be shitposting through Fox & Friends every morning before dreaming up new ways to burn down the country and humiliate Chief Justice John Roberts.

Habba is the lawyer who filed a RICO suit against Hillary Clinton, James Comey, Rod Rosenstein, and half of DC in Florida. That fun outing got her and Trump sanctioned to the tune of $1 million.

“This case should never have been brought. Its inadequacy as a legal claim was evident from the start. No reasonable lawyer would have filed it,” Judge Donald Middlebrooks wrote.

She followed that up by going on Hannity to explain that she’d filed an appeal against the wishes of her client.

“The former president looked at me and he told me, ‘You know what, Alina? You’re not going to win. You can’t win. Just get rid of it. Don’t do the case.’ And I said, ‘No, we have to fight. It’s not right what happened.’ And you know, he was right,” she rambled indignantly. “It’s a sad day for me personally because I fought him on it and should have listened, but I don’t want to lose hope in our system, I don’t.”

This is the lawyer who sent the Pulitzer Committee a “spoiliation” letter in 2021 threatening a defamation lawsuit if it didn’t revoke the 2018 prize awarded to the Washington Post and New York Time for stories on the Russia investigation. (The statute of limitations for defamation is two years in Florida and one year in both DC and New York.)

This is the lawyer who steered her client into one $5 million judgment in favor of E. Jean Carroll, and then another $83 million award because he could not STFU. Along the way she: publicly inveighed against the jurors; forgot to assert presidential immunity until it was far too late; demanded discovery sanctions during the trial (more than a year after discovery was closed); argued multiple times that it didn’t count if the assailant failed to forcibly penetrate the victim with his penis, resulting in the judge branding Trump a digital rapist; and closed strong by insisting that her client was so rich that he was exempt from the statutory bond requirements (he wasn’t). The only thing she succeeded in doing was amusing the hell out of every lawyer on social media by botching everything from the Erie doctrine to the rules of evidence.

And that was before she got Trump that $364 civil fraud verdict in New York. Did she fail to ask for a jury trial and then complain bitterly about it for the entire duration? Whoopsie doodle! That was the case where she escaped being sanctioned because she supposedly wandered off to spend more time with Trump’s PAC money, then wandered back into court so that she could summon trollstorms on the judge’s law clerk.

Along the way she filed a SLAPP suit against the New York Times and reporters Susanne Craig and Russell Buettner for doing tortious journalisms to him by publishing his father’s estate documents that showed the family had looted his assets before he died to avoid paying taxes. That resulted in $400,000 in attorneys fees, with the judge remarking that “The revised anti-SLAPP law was specifically designed to apply to lawsuits like this one … In fact, among other reasons, plaintiff’s history of litigation — that some observers have described as abusive and frivolous — inspired the expansion of the law.”

The only Trump case she appears to have won is when Michael Cohen was stupid enough to file his own performative trollsuit against Trump and the DOJ for retaliatory imprisonment.

Habba came to Trump’s attention in 2021 when, as a member of his New Jersey golf club, she offered to intercede with a waitress who had been sexually harassed and assaulted by a member of the staff. Representing herself as a “neutral” third party, Habba brokered a settlement between “two really good friends.” Except one of the “friends” was a 21-year-old kid, induced to fire her lawyer and sign a contract with an unenforceable liquidated damages clause and an illegal non-disclosure agreement. And the other friend was a billionaire who went on to hire Habba as his personal lawyer five minutes after she got him a sweetheart settlement for pennies on the dollar. In September, Habba got her own hush money agreement with the victim.

This is a lawyer who said on air that she would rather be pretty than smart, because “I can fake being smart.” (She neglected to say when she would start that process, though.)

And now this dingbat, who steered Donald Trump into so many idiotic lawsuits, is going to be guiding him in the White House.

“Counselor to the president” is functionally the same as “top advisor.” It was the position held by Kellyanne Conway during the first administration, from whence she spent her days cheerfully leaking to every reporter between DC and New York. Conway is an amoral ghoul, but when she spewed bullshit about “alternative facts,” she knew that we knew she was lying. And she’s been in politics for decades and could legitimately offer competent (if evil) advice to the president.

But while Conway is a creature of the beltway, Habba is a little more, uh, bridge and tunnel. Before representing Trump, she ran a three-lawyer shop in New Jersey that did family law and commercial real estate. She served as chief counsel for a chain of parking garages owned by her husband, which is a perfectly respectable living, but it’s hardly preparation for the shark tank of DC. And it’s not going to equip her to advise Trump on politics or policy, to the extent that it will matter this time around.

She’ll be a cheerleader — the human instantiation of the endless joyscroll generated by that young woman who follows Trump around with a wireless printer. And Habba will happily go on friendly media and say stupid things day in and day out, without regard for their truth or legality. Maybe she can break Conway’s Hatch Act record!

Yes, I know it is terrible for America’s president to be surrounded by feckless idiots who encourage his worst impulses. But at least with this feckless idiot, there will be hilarious, bitchy leaks for dessert after we’ve spent all day slogging through the nightmare assault on democracy.

It’s gonna be a shitshow. But it will have its moments of hilarity.

P.S. — Please don’t be gross and sexist in the comments. Be best, for real.