Alina Habba (headshot from Habba Madaio LLP)
Alina Habba is better on TV than Michael Cohen. Whether this season’s lawyer-fixer winds up in the same place as Cohen is an open question. Although Habba did manage to get her client a million dollars in sanctions for filing an offensively stupid lawsuit against Hillary Clinton for doing THE RICO to poor, innocent Donald Trump. So … she’s got that going for her!
Also, Habba tends to lose the plot, as she did last night on Fox Business channel with Larry Kudlow, where she demanded that the Supreme Court hurry up and do something about the gross injustice of a former president being prosecuted for crimes.
“We need the Supreme Court to step in and stop this,” she fumed. “This has become complete mayhem. And if they don’t start looking at these decisions and — as the highest court in this country, as the arbiter of law, the ultimate arbiter of the Constitution, the people that are supposed to enforce our bedrock — if they don’t start doing it, which … thank goodness, they are, hopefully we’ll have some law and order soon.”
To be fair to Habba, she did start the interview by claiming that the government was seeking to expedite the case and get immediate SCOTUS review solely as a response to Trump’s good polling numbers — not because her client just filed an appeal grounded in the doctrine of presidential immunity, and then turned around and said all deadlines in the DC election interference case must be stayed indefinitely. And perhaps presidential immunity is a touchy topic for Habba, since yesterday the Second Circuit ruled that her failure to raise it for three straight years in the E. Jean Carroll defamation case had waived the issue. Whoopsie!
Lucky for Habba, no one at Fox Business would be reminding her of that unpleasantness. Or the other unpleasantness. Or the unpleasantness before that.
“People should understand the Constitution, even if Jack Smith and Merrick Garland don’t,” agreed Kudlow, who knows all about the Constitution thanks to his BA in history. University of Rochester class of ’69, REPRESENT!
Habba seems to have missed the memo from her boss that Supreme Court review is not the goal here.
See, the Special Counsel knows he’s going to lose at the DC Circuit, which just yeeted Trump’s civil immunity claims into the sun, and where Smith has drawn two Biden appointees for his three-judge panel. And so he’s rushing to get to the Supreme Court, so they can hurry up and … dismiss this whole case on grounds of “Presidential Immunity, something which is so basic to America that it should be automatic.” Why didn’t Smith bring this prosecution three years ago, instead of waiting to be appointed as special counsel when Trump declared his candidacy?
Note that Trump has foregone his usual rhetoric about Smith having a terrible record at the Supreme Court because in 2016 the court decided that former Virginia governor Bob McDonnell hadn’t traded any official act for all the Ferraris and Rolexes, so his conviction by Smith had to be overturned. Trump never mentions that Smith’s conviction of former congressman Rick Renzi held up, and so Trump had to pardon the guy.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has given Trump eight days to explain why it shouldn’t grant cert before judgment and decide the threshold issue of immunity right now. And if that doesn’t happen, the DC Circuit has ordered a blistering briefing schedule to conclude on January 2.
So, good luck getting the high court to hold back and simultaneously put a stop to all this mayhem in time for a Merry Mar-a-Lago Christmas.
Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes the Law and Chaos Substack.
