On Tuesday, Trump lawyer Alina Habba abruptly dropped a push to the judge who handled two trials covering claims against the former president by writer E. Jean Carroll after a threat from a lawyer for Carroll of sanctions.
Habba had raised complaints about what she clearly took as at least second look-worthy suggestions of a mentorship-like relationship between the judge and that lawyer for Carroll around the two of them working for a brief period at the same, large law firm decades ago. Roberta Kaplan, the Carroll lawyer, responded in a letter to the judge, writing that she had no recollection of ever even interacting with the judge in those days and lambasting the general push from the Trump team as without basis. Kaplan, for instance, cited one case insisting that alleged grounds for recusal — meaning the withdrawal of a judge — be raised earlier than this Trump-Carroll dispute’s current stage after jurors reached a verdict.
Habba both accused Kaplan of taking her earlier letter too far and indicated she herself was no longer interested in pursuing the matter. Notably, Habba was implicated alongside Trump in a nearly $1 million sanctions judgment — meaning that’s how much they were directed to pay — after failure in a lawsuit alleging some kind of vast conspiracy against the Trump campaign around the 2016 presidential election, in which he was victorious, mind you. Habba could have been remembering how poorly that previous sanctions push turned out for her side when suddenly abandoning her previously evident concerns about a non-existent scandal here!
“The point of my January 29 letter was to verify whether the information contained in the New York Post article is accurate. 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 told the judge about two hours after Kaplan’s rebuttal that day.
