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(Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
Alina Habba is dedicated to the bit.
Oh, sure, she may not know much about the rules of evidence. Or civil procedure. Or legal ethics. Or photoshop.
But she’s got that zealous advocacy thing down pat.
Here she is on Friday in high dander on the courthouse steps after doing “the proudest thing I could ever do,” i.e., losing her client $83 million dollars. Truly a tour de farce for the ages!
After patting herself on the back for not violating the New York Rules of Professional conduct with respect to trial publicity, she went on to complain that her client was being punished by a cabal that apparently included Carroll, her attorney Robbie Kaplan, and the New York Attorney Letitia James.
“And now we see what you get in New York, all because President Trump is leading in the polls,” she fumed, without bothering to explain how a lawsuit filed in 2019 and a fraud case which has been under investigation for five years are somehow a reaction to recent polling.
Then she laced into the court for violating her client’s First Amendment rights by … applying the rules of evidence and civil procedure. How dare the court refuse to permit evidence after the close of discovery? Why wouldn’t the court admit an expert witness who described his methodology as “educated feel” and admitted that he had relied largely on Google searches and “four or five” articles about the case? And what even is collateral estoppel anyway?
“We are seeing a violation of our justice system,” she railed, furious that the court wouldn’t simply allow her client — who did not testify in the first trial when he could have denied the assault to his heart’s content — to defame Carroll on the witness stand.
Imagine a point where a judge tells the lawyer before your client, the former president of the United States, the leading candidate and obvious nominee for the Republican Party, before he takes the stand to defend himself, Ms. Habba, tell me the questions you’re going to ask in open court, and tell me exactly what he’s going to respond.
Imagine!
But Habba was still going, because she hadn’t shit all over the jury yet, and she needed to get it all out before people packed up their cameras and went home.
“We will immediately appeal. We will set aside that ridiculous jury,” she vowed, adding scornfully that she wouldn’t have expected more from “a New York jury.”
“That is why we are seeing these witch hunts, these hoaxes as he calls them, be brought in New York, in states where they know they will get juries like this,” she went on, just a few miles away from the department store where the original assault took place, apparently forgetting that she forgot to ask for a jury in the civil fraud case.
“I will continue with Pres Trump to fight for everyone’s First Amendment right to speak,” she finished indignantly. And then Trump’s most ardent, least successful defender, went back to New Jersey, where the juries are good and no one looks at you like a crazy person if you wander around the streets shouting like a deranged escapee from a Real Housewives franchise.
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.
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