Alina Habba: Who is Trump's new presidential counsellor?
- Published
US President-elect Donald Trump says that a lawyer who represented him in his various legal battles will serve as his presidential counsellor after he returns to the White House.
He wrote in a statement that Alina Habba, 40, had been "unwavering in her loyalty" and a "tireless advocate for justice".
Ms Habba, 40, was previously a little-known litigator who came to represent Trump in some of his most perilous cases, notably clashing with a judge during a defamation trial.
She was also part of Trump's legal team during his historic hush-money trial in New York earlier this year, when he was convicted on 34 counts of falsifying business records.
The role of presidential counsellor - a separate role to the White House counsel, the president's top legal adviser - was filled in Trump's first term by Kellyanne Conway.
A New Jersey native, Ms Habba was born to two Chaldean Catholics who fled persecution in Iraq in the early 1980s.
This was highlighted by Trump, who wrote in his statement: "As a first generation American of Middle Eastern heritage, she has become a role model for women in law and politics."
After graduating from university, Ms Habba took a job in the fashion industry, working at Marc Jacobs - one of America's premier brands.
She returned to college after several years in the industry, earning her law degree from Widener University, a small school in Pennsylvania, in 2010.
Ms Habba briefly served as a clerk for then-New Jersey Superior Court Judge Eugene Codey Jr, before entering private practice, where she worked for several years before starting her own firm in 2020.
The mother-of-three joined Trump's personal legal team in 2021 after reportedly meeting him at his country club in Bedminster, New Jersey - where her law firm is also based.
The former president, still seething after his defeat in the 2020 election and facing a mounting pile of lawsuits, plucked her from her relatively small law firm to serve as his most high-profile lawyer.
Ms Habba emerged as one of the Republican's most vocal defenders, and would later join him on the campaign trail ahead of the presidential election.
During her legal work for the billionaire, she quickly earned Trump's praise after her work for him led Apprentice contestant Summer Zervos to drop her sexual assault case.
As well as the hush-money case in New York, Ms Habba represented Trump in a $100m (£79m) lawsuit he brought against the New York Times and his niece Mary Trump, who he accused of an "insidious plot" to obtain his tax records. The case was ultimately dismissed, and Trump was ordered to pay nearly $400,000 in legal fees.
Ms Habba also worked with Trump in the New York civil fraud case against him and his children - a case that again culminated in Trump being told by a judge to pay hundreds of millions of dollars after he was found to have fraudulently inflated property values.
It was during the civil lawsuit brought by E Jean Carroll - whomTrump was found to have assaulted in the 1990s - that Ms Habba hit the headlines for frequently quarrelling with Judge Lewis Kaplan.
The judge went so far as to threaten her with jail time during closing arguments in the case, when she tried to introduce social media tweets that were not already in evidence. After a fiery back-and-forth, Judge Kaplan warned: "Ms Habba, you are on the verge of spending some time in the lock-up, now sit down."
During other clashes, the judge reprimanded Ms Habba for failing to correctly introduce evidence, admonished her for not getting out of her chair while addressing the court and asked whether or not she grasped the meaning of the word "none".
Ms Habba clashed with other jurists too, labelling Judge Arthur Engoron - the veteran 74-year-old who oversaw Trump's civil fraud case - "unhinged".
But her demeanour did not trouble Trump, who lavished her with praise after she managed to get his former fixer, Michael Cohen, to admit he had previously committed perjury on the stand.
After emerging as his chief legal aide, Ms Habba was drawn more deeply into Trump's orbit. She has been known to make frequent appearances at his clubs in New Jersey and Florida.
On her 39th birthday in 2023, she posted a photo of herself seated beside her cake with Trump, who she predicted would become president again.
She is also a senior adviser for MAGA Inc, a political action committee that supported Trump's re-election.
North America correspondent Anthony Zurcher makes sense of US politics in his twice weekly US Election Unspun newsletter. Readers in the UK can sign up here. Those outside the UK can sign up here, external.
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