Trump's Howler Monkeys Attack Carroll's Lawyer
Dirty, dirty pool.
Donald Trump and his lawyers are still trying to drag E. Jean Carroll’s defamation suit into overtime — and drag her lawyer Roberta Kaplan down with it.
Last week, Judge Lewis Kaplan (no relation) granted Carroll’s motion to expedite briefing on her request to disburse the nearly $5.8 million the court has been holding for her since May of 2023, when the first jury found that he sexually assaulted and defamed her. At the time, the parties signed a stipulation agreeing that the $5 million verdict and statutory interest would be held in court escrow until the final disposition of the case. On June 29, the Supreme Court bounced Trump’s petition for certiorari with no known dissents. Now it’s time to pay up!
And yet …
On July 3, Trump’s lawyers filed what they styled as a “motion to amend/correct” Judge Kaplan’s order to expedite. And by amend, they mean “reconsider” — or, more precisely “reverse” — and “reinstate the normal briefing schedule to which President Trump is entitled under the Court’s Local Rules.” Their only justification appears to be that Trump has a new lawyer, Josh Halpern, since his former counsel, Justin Smith, was just confirmed to the Eighth Circuit. But Trump says he’s going to ask the Supreme Court to reconsider its denial of cert, so perhaps he needs more than a week to come up with a non-sanctionable argument that he’s entitled to stay his own stipulation because he wants to ask his six besties to do him a solid.
Carroll’s lawyer Roberta Kaplan was ready for that one.
Later that day, she noted that Trump himself nominated Smith to the judiciary back in February and so was clearly aware that he’d be down one attorney. But no matter, since Alina Habba’s hapless former partner Michael Madaio has been on the case since the beginning, so he’ll need no time to get up to speed.
But that’s just table stakes. Kaplan also flagged media reports that Trump’s own Justice Department has been trying to prosecute Carroll for her conduct in this very case.
“While we did not want to raise what might be unnecessary details to Your Honor, in light of Defendant’s continued gamesmanship, we believe it is only appropriate to bring certain developments to Your Honor’s attention, as they prove the wisdom of the Court’s decision to require expedited briefing and allow this case to finally come to an end,” she wrote.
Specifically, the DOJ is investigating whether Carroll lied in an October 2020 deposition during this colloquy:
HABBA: Are you presently paying your counsel’s fees?
CARROLL: This is a contingency case.
HABBA: So you’re not paying expenses or anything out of pocket to date; is that correct?
CARROLL: I’m not sure about expenses. I have to look that up.
HABBA: Is anyone else paying your legal fees, Ms. Carroll?
CARROLL: No.
On the eve of trial, Kaplan wrote to Habba explaining that, while Carroll had told the truth to the best of her memory in 2020, “she now recalls that at some point her counsel secured additional funding from a nonprofit organization to offset certain expenses and legal fees.”
Habba tried her best to make this a thing back in 2023, but all she managed to do was wring an additional deposition out of Carroll on the subject of litigation funding. But now the DOJ is (or was) trying to use that three-year-old deposition to take out not only Carroll but LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, a prolific Democratic funder whose nonprofit, American Future Republic, paid some of Carroll’s legal expenses.
That investigation appears to have foundered after massive public backlash, with US Attorney Andrew Boutros insisting that his office “has not opened—and has never opened—a criminal investigation into E. Jean Carroll.”
Notably he didn’t say that he’d never investigated Hoffman or his non-profit, which is the entity located in the Northern District of Illinois. But it’s just as well anyway, since Boutros currently has his hands full dismissing indictments and fending off the Broadview 6 after it was revealed that his staff regularly engaged in misconduct before the grand jury.
That should have been the end of the matter. But instead a conservative watchdog group, the National Legal and Policy Center, filed a bar complaint against Kaplan with the New York Attorney Grievance Committee.
From Carroll’s confusion about who was paying for her case, NLPC’s counsel Paul Kamenar infers that Kaplan must have lied to her own client. But then Kamenar, who has been practicing law since the 70s, affects to be confused about the difference between attorneys fees and expenses.
“Would those legal fees paid by Reid Hoffman be considered as a gift to Ms. Carroll and subsequently be accounted for as a payment by Ms. Carroll to Ms. Kaplan, in which case they would constitute taxable income to Ms. Kaplan?” he wonders. “While any contingency fee is taxable income to a lawyer, how were the legal fees paid by Reid Hoffman accounted for?”
He then demands “at a minimum” that the AGC, which is a part of the Supreme Court of New York, unseal the additional deposition testimony ordered by Judge Kaplan, of the Southern District of New York.
It’s a bit much from a guy who calls himself an “Overcriminalization Expert.” And it seems to have failed to impress Judge Kaplan.
On July 4, he denied Trump’s motion to “amend/correct.” The president will have to explain on Tuesday why he should be entitled to yet more delay in a case which has now dragged on for four years.
Lotsa luck.