Bad representation is rarely so catastrophic that it threatens collateral damage to trust in the Supreme Court. That is Alina Habba’s unique achievement.
Some of you may recall the early 2000s comedy classic Arrested Development, the saga of the dysfunctional Bluth family, whose plush world falls apart when patriarch George Bluth Sr. is revealed to have perhaps committed some “light treason” in his real-estate dealings with, uh, Saddam Hussein. One of the many problems dogging the Bluths is their serial inability to hire competent legal counsel, which leads to situations in which, for example, George Sr., in prison, laments that he acted on destructively bad legal advice: “I got the worst f***ing attorneys.”
This of course makes a man’s mind turn to thoughts of Donald Trump, currently represented most publicly by one Alina Habba, a small-time practitioner with a tiny Bedminster, N.J., firm. You may have seen the striking blonde on the cable news shows, at press conferences, and (curiously) at a UFC MMA fighting match as Trump’s guest and legal avatar. The obvious joke made by all is that Trump chose her as his spokeswoman in his cases because of her good looks — and since it’s Trump, I doubt he minds the eye-candy — but that’s not the real reason.
No, the real reason Alina Habba is now Donald Trump’s attorney is that, as Dan McLaughlin said with typically blunt accuracy three years ago, Donald Trump is the Client from Hell. His willfulness, history of near-criminal dishonesty toward his attorneys, and inability to stop shooting off at the mouth in public about the cases against him is at this point so predictable that no major law firm or high-profile defense attorney is willing to sign up for the privilege of being serially sandbagged and undermined in public by his own self-defeating client. (And then: left with an unpaid bill.)
This means the pool of available talent for someone with Trump’s history of submarining his legal representation and failing to pay the bills has shrunken considerably, to the point where it’s basically a nettle for young chancers to grasp in the hopes that either the public attention will have been worth it (maybe a side-gig in commentary someday?) or that you might shoot the moon and make a name for yourself by winning several longshot cases despite it all. In other words, the real pros want nothing to do with this; nowadays, when the legal profession sends its people to Trump, they’re not sending their best.
Lest you think I am being a legal snoot, I judge Trump’s attorneys strictly on their performance, not on politics or what law schools they went to. (I’m sure there are many fine graduates of Widener Law.) They’ve been sanctioned by the New York court twice already during Trump’s civil-fraud trial, and even more inexcusably — as Dan recently pointed out — failed to raise multiple serious defenses in their brief to the major federal case in D.C. court about Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election, thus losing them forever on appeal owing to sheer laziness and/or incompetence.
So here we are the day after Alina Habba’s appearance on Fox News’ Hannity, on which she stuffed her foot straight into her mouth and so far down her throat that she’s better off just giving it one last push if she wants to walk on two legs again more quickly. I’ve never seen anything quite so destructively stupid as Habba’s musings to Sean Hannity on how the D.C. case would play out in the Supreme Court: “I think it should be a slam dunk in the Supreme Court. I have faith in them. You know, people like Kavanaugh, who the president fought for, who the president went through hell to get into place. He’ll step up.”
That’s a direct quote and not ripped out of context. The absolute vulgarity of suggesting that a Supreme Court justice would tip the scales of justice in favor of Trump because Trump appointed him and “fought for him” is almost beyond comment in its rancidness. I’ve seen some speculate that Habba was merely repeating the sort of language that she regularly hears from her client. That’s dangerous wish-fulfillment as far as I’m concerned, but my entire point here is that it doesn’t matter if it’s her own strategic view or merely a parroting of Trump’s: If you are a professional representing the former president of the United States in one of the highest-profile cases in the history of the Republic, it is your job to be smarter than your idiot client. By speaking this insulting nonsense out loud she has played (almost as if she were a double agent for the Left) into the hands of progressives already in the midst of a long-term campaign to delegitimize the “Trumpist” 6–3 conservative majority on the Court. I have written about few topics more often than I have addressed the Left’s coordinated assault on the judiciary post-Dobbs, and here is Donald Trump’s attorney, handing the Left’s propaganda machine an inestimable gift to be wielded disingenuously against the Court for years to come.
But of course, that sort of argument assumes Trump’s attorneys are committed to the independent judiciary and the long-term health of the country, which perhaps gives too much credit to a team of attorneys I’m not even sure is entirely committed to getting paid. A more relevant argument is that this has caused needless harm to their client’s prospects. Already there have been (utterly spurious) calls for conservative justices to recuse themselves from the Trump case, and when lefties made those cynical arguments their proffered logic was always “because Trump’s appointees will be loyal toadies to him!” Now here comes Alina Habba speaking for Team Trump saying, well, pretty much the same. How goddamned dumb can a lawyer be, to go out there and kneecap her own client like this? As a matter of professional competence alone, it’s simply appalling.
But then again, I find myself in a position much like my colleague Dan. As he wrote to angrily conclude his piece mentioned earlier, “I’m not getting paid to defend Donald Trump. I don’t particularly care what happens to Donald Trump. I’m making these arguments because I care about the law and bothered to do my homework. . . . But sometimes, bad clients end up getting the representation they deserve.” I can do little better to improve upon that karmic observation, except to note that bad representation is rarely so catastrophic that it threatens to do collateral damage to belief in the trustworthiness of the entire Supreme Court. That is a unique achievement, one that Alina Habba can justly claim as her own.