Trump lawyer Alina Habba makes, then backs off, 'conflict' allegation against E. Jean Carroll judge
Former President Donald Trump's attorney Alina Habba on Tuesday backed off of a conflict of interest claim against the judge who presided over the E. Jean Carroll defamation trial after Carroll's lawyer threatened to pursue sanctions.
Former President Donald Trump's attorney Alina Habba on Tuesday backed off of a conflict of interest claim against the judge who presided over the E. Jean Carroll defamation trial after Carroll's lawyer threatened to pursue sanctions.
Habba on Monday filed a letter with the court citing a New York Post story that said U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan and Carroll attorney Roberta Kaplan, who are not related, had worked at the major law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison in the 1990s. An unidentified former partner at the firm, which employs around 1,000 lawyers, told the Post that Lewis Kaplan had been “like her mentor."
Habba told the New York Post that the situation was "insane and so incestuous."
"This is news to us,” Habba told the paper on Saturday, a day after the jury in the case hit Trump with an $83.3 million verdict. “We are going to include this in our appeal and take appropriate measures. The fact it wasn’t disclosed is an ethics violation.”
The article included a quote from Roberta Kaplan's spokesman Zak Sawyer, who said while they'd worked at the same large law firm, they “overlapped for less than two years in the early 1990s." The now-judge "was a senior partner and she was a junior associate and she never worked for him,” Sawyer said.
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