President Trump tore into his former personal attorney Alina Habba on Saturday night, calling her reported $50 million contract with the family of a Venezuelan banker he later pardoned “totally obnoxious and outrageous.”
“I thought it was terrible,” Trump told reporters as he arrived at a Halloween party at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida, where he joked he had come dressed as himself.
The president said he told Habba he didn’t want her to be paid.
“You know, it’s one thing for a person to get paid legal fees or whatever. She’s a lawyer,” Trump said. “I thought it was totally obnoxious and outrageous, and it’s not acceptable. Not acceptable at all.”
The family of Julio Herrera Velutini guaranteed Habba more than $50 million over four years in exchange for serving as general counsel of Concord Partners, a family company registered just days before she signed on, the New York Times reported last week.
Herrera, a billionaire banker, once faced federal bribery charges. By August 2025, his case had been whittled down to a guilty plea on a single misdemeanor campaign finance violation instead.
The family put Habba on a princely retainer of $10 million a year, plus bonuses, according to the Times. The 42-year-old attorney teed the job up while she was still on the Justice Department’s payroll.
Habba was just two weeks into her new gig at Concord Partners when Trump pardoned her boss’ father.
The lawyer, for her part, insists the timing is pure happenstance.
“Any insinuation that my employment — all of which has been vetted and disclosed to the DOJ — had anything to do with securing a pardon is false,” Habba told the Times.
The White House has also denied any connection, the outlet reported.
Trump “erupted” when he learned of the contract, according to the Times, then told aides and allies that some of the money ought to find its way to his future presidential library or some other Trump-linked outfit.
On Saturday, the president said he didn’t necessarily expect Habba herself to pay up. He did not, however, let her off the hook: “it’s unacceptable what she did.”
The rebuke marks a stunning fall from favor for a woman who, until recently, was among the most mulish loyalists in Trump’s orbit. Habba rose to prominence as the president’s personal attorney in 2021 and parlayed that into a short stint as counselor to the president. From there, she took the top job at the New Jersey US Attorney’s Office, which she left last December.
The news of her deal caps a dramatic few weeks for Habba. She wed Turkish billionaire Turhan Mildon on Sept. 26 at the Waldorf Astoria. One source pegged the cost of the bash at around $10 million, and FBI Director Kash Patel, Attorney General Todd Blanche and boxer Mike Tyson were among the guests.
Less than two weeks later, at an Oct. 9 Oval Office meeting, Habba accused Ric Grenell — the former executive director of the Kennedy Center — of failing to deposit $5.6 million her new husband had earmarked for the center. The money was allegedly part of a $17.6 million wire Mildon sent to Texas Armament & Technology, a defense software company, in May 2025.
Trump then foisted the matter onto White House Counsel Will Scharf.
Mildon’s lawyers have since produced a text in which Grenell allegedly promised Mildon access to the president. Axios later Axios later reported that the $17.6 million came not from Mildon but from the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s finance ministry.
Grenell has denied any wrongdoing and reportedly denied sending the text.
“Absurd. I’ve never asked for one cent to be sent somewhere else pretending it was for the Kennedy Center and I’ve never received any payment from him at all,” Grenell wrote on X.
