Trump lawyer backtracks remark
NEW YORK — Donald Trump’s lawyer backtracked from her suggestion that a new trial may be warranted in writer E. Jean Carroll’s defamation suit against the former president because the presiding judge in the case worked at the same law firm as the New York writer’s attorney three decades ago.
Trump attorney Alina Habba changed course Tuesday two hours after Carroll’s lawyer Roberta Kaplan blasted her in a court filing for raising “utterly baseless” questions about her past ties to U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan, with whom she worked at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison for less than two years in the 1990s. Kaplan — who isn’t related to the judge — raised the prospect of seeking sanctions against Habba over her “false allegations.”
“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,” Habba said in her letter to the judge.
Habba questioned the relationship in a letter to the judge Monday, three days after a jury ordered Trump to pay Carroll $83.3 million in damages for defaming the former Elle magazine columnist in 2019 statements denying her claim that he sexually assaulted her decades earlier. Habba cited a New York Post article that said the lawyer had a “mentor” type relationship with the judge when they were at the law firm. Habba was quoted calling the relationship “insane” and “so incestuous.”
“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,” Habba, who frequently clashed with the judge during the trial this month, said in her first letter.
Trump denies wrongdoing and has said he’ll appeal the verdict.
Roberta Kaplan’s letter Tuesday accused Habba of cooking up a bogus controversy to back a likely appeal. Carroll’s lawyer, who joined Paul Weiss in October 1992, said she overlapped with the judge at the firm for less than two years, at a time when she was a junior litigation associate and he was a senior litigation partner. The judge left the firm to take the bench in August 1994. Kaplan said they did not work closely together on any case. She has since founded her own firm.
“From the very start of the recently concluded trial, Donald Trump and Ms. Habba have pushed a false narrative of judicial bias so that they could characterize any jury verdict against Trump as the product of a corrupt system,” Kaplan said in the letter. “While that strategy has now moved into its post-verdict phase, it is now time for Defendant’s false and vexatious claims of bias or impropriety to stop.”
Jennifer Rodgers, a former federal prosecutor who isn’t involved in the case, said the type of relationship described by Roberta Kaplan isn’t the kind that would require a judge to disclose it because they didn’t work closely together.
“And, in any case, even if the judge had disclosed the fact that he and Roberta Kaplan worked at Paul Weiss at the same time, and Trump had objected and asked for recusal, I suspect Judge Kaplan would have declined to recuse himself and would have been on solid ground in doing so, given that this tenuous a connection does not raise a conflict of interest requiring recusal,” Rodgers said.
Habba, who runs her own law firm in New Jersey, complained frequently about what she described as unfair treatment of herself and Trump during the trial. On the last day of trial, the judge threatened to throw Habba behind bars after she continued to press an argument about evidence after he’d shut her down, leaving her and Trump fuming.
“We believe, and will argue on appeal, that the court was overtly hostile toward defense counsel and President Trump, and displayed preferential treatment toward plaintiff’s counsel,” Habba said in the letter.
Roberta Kaplan said Habba’s earlier bias complaints are just like the new one: frivolous. Notably, Habba and Trump were hit with nearly $1 million in sanctions in a failed suit filed against Hillary Clinton.