BREAKING: BOO F’ING HOO, BABY! Alina Habba's massive payday COLLAPSES amid explosive questions about a billionaire's presidential pardon.
Former Donald Trump attorney Alina Habba’s $50 million payday just came crashing down, and we can’t say that we’re upset that her apparent grift is falling apart. The story behind her reversal of fortunes naturally involves Donald Trump and why he was angry when he discovered the size of her now greatly diminished windfall.
According to The New York Times, Concord Partners fired Habba, who now goes by Alina Habba Mildon, in a letter dated Nov. 4, citing a “failure to perform duties.” Concord is the company set up by the daughter of Venezuelan billionaire banker Julio Herrera Velutini. It hired Habba weeks before Trump pardoned Herrera.
Here’s the backstory. Herrera was facing felony bribery charges and had already gotten an unusually lenient plea deal that cut them down to a misdemeanor. His daughter gave $3.5 million to a super PAC tied to Trump. Then Habba, who at the time was a senior adviser to the attorney general, signed a contract worth $10 million a year for four years, plus bonuses. She started on Jan. 1. A few weeks later, Herrera got a full and unconditional pardon.
A person close to the Herrera family told the Times she was hired partly to help with his criminal case. Habba has denied having any role in the pardon.
Now look at Trump’s reaction. After the Times reported on the contract last month, he didn’t say the arrangement looked like a pay-to-pardon scheme. He said it was too much money. “I told her, and I said, ‘I don’t want her paid,’” Trump told reporters. “It was far too much.” He called the deal “totally obnoxious and outrageous.”
According to the Times, he also told aides the Herrera family should stop paying her and suggested to some people that she donate the money to his future presidential library.
So, the president’s objection was that the cash was going to his lawyer and not to his library. The pardon itself still stands.
Habba isn’t walking away with nothing. She keeps the $6.5 million she was already paid and her $8 million signing bonus, which adds up to $14.5 million. A person close to her says she plans to sue. Of course she does!
The family says her priorities changed after she started dating Turhan Mildon, a 25-year-old Turkish investor. The couple married in September at a lavish New York wedding attended by senior Trump officials. The Times has since found that Mildon made misleading, exaggerated, or disputed claims about his businesses, his influence with world leaders, his marriages, and even his age.
It gets stranger. Habba accused Ric Grenell of skimming from a Kennedy Center donation she said her husband made. The White House investigated and found that the $17.6 million in question didn’t come from Mildon at all. It came from a government account in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
So far, the account includes a pardon, a $50 million contract, money from a Congolese government account, and a president whose main complaint was that he didn’t get a cut for his library.
Democrats will have a lot to ask about when they take control of Congress in January, and you can bet that Alina Habba and Trump’s pardon-for-pay policy will be high on the agenda.
