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Alina Habba (headshot from Habba Madaio LLP)
Alina Habba is saying the quiet part out loud. Again.
Here’s Trump’s “legal spokeswoman” on Sean Hannity’s show last night explaining that Justice Brett Kavanaugh should do Donald Trump a solid and make this election interference prosecution disappear.
Asked about previous reporting by the New York Times’s Maggie Habberman that Trump lacks confidence that the high Court will ride to his rescue on the immunity appeal, Habba insisted that the case “should be a slam dunk in the Supreme Court.”
“I have faith in them,” she insisted gamely.
That position is rather undercut by the desperate scrabbling by Trump’s other lawyers to ensure that the Supreme Court did not grant certiorari before judgment and put this slam dunk case out of its misery already. Just two weeks ago, they cautioned the justices that “haste makes waste” and tut-tutted that “Novel, complex, sensitive, and historic issues—such as the existence of presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts—call for more careful deliberation, not less.”
This isn’t the first time Habba urged the court to take up a case while her colleagues were begging them to do just the opposite. But Counselor Gaffe Machine was still going.
“You know people like Kavanaugh, who the president fought for, who the president went through hell to get into place, he’ll step up,” she gabbled. “Those people will step up. Not because they’re pro-Trump but because they’re pro-law. Because they’re pro-fairness, and the law on this is very clear.”
Once again, this appears to be out of step with the thinking of the rest of Trump’s lawyers, who do not, in fact, expect Justice Brett Kavanaugh to “step up” in deference to Trump’s Herculean effort to get him through the Senate confirmation process.
Rolling Stone reports that the legal team views the election interference case as a “suicide mission.” And New York Times Trump whisperer Maggie Haberman says that the former president’s lawyers expect to win their challenge to the ballot disqualifications in Colorado and Maine, but lose on the supposed “slam dunk” immunity argument.
“I don’t think that his folks — or he — are particularly optimistic that they’re going to win on the presidential immunity,” Haberman told CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Wednesday. “He has been very angry, as you know, at the justices he appointed that they haven’t gone his way. They’ve gone his way on policy matters on a number of cases. They have not on his election-related cases.”
Ughhhh. Don’t you hate it when you go out of your way to get a guy credibly accused of sexual assault on the high court, and then all he does is get rid of abortion and he won’t lift a finger to help you steal an election, much less beat a rap?
Maybe if you send your emissary out on TV to remind him that he owes you …
EDIT: A previous version of this article misattributed language from Ms. Habba to Ms. Haberman.
Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes the Law and Chaos substack and appears on the Opening Arguments podcast.
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