Donald Trump’s lawyer, Alina Habba, did a “minor league job” on behalf of her client Thursday in a civil defamation trial brought by writer E. Jean Carroll (whom Trump has already been found liable for sexually assaulting), former Trump lawyer Ty Cobb said Wednesday.
Cobb, who worked for the then-president during Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, said on CNN’s Erin Burnett Out Front that Habba did “some shocking things.”
During Thursday’s proceedings, Habba seemed to anger Judge Lewis Kaplan from the very beginning, after she once again requested an adjournment in light of the funeral of Trump’s mother-in-law.
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Once Kaplan denied her request and said he would “hear no further argument on it,” Habba kept talking about it, and was cut off.
“None. Do you understand that word?” he told her. “Sit down.”
Habba pressed the issue. “I don’t like to be spoken to that way, your honor,” she said, prompting Kaplan to once more tell her to have a seat.
In addition to Habba not standing up to speak at a later point, for which she was castigated, she seemed to have a hard time with other basic procedural rules.
“You should refresh your memory about how it is you get a document into evidence,” Kaplan told her.
Cobb called this moment “embarrassing.”
“That’s not the type of lawyering that [Judge Kaplan] is used to seeing, and I’m sure that frustrates him because demands a lot of the lawyers who show up in his courtroom, not the least of which is respect, not only for the judge, but for the judicial system. And he’s not getting that from her,” he said.
“This is a very serious judge who believes that lawyers should understand that it’s a privilege to be a lawyer and that they need to follow the rules and that their duty is to help things proceed honorably, fairly and expeditiously,” he added, noting that Kaplan is a “well-seasoned judge” who has “handled many, many cases that are a much heavier lift for a judge than this particular case.”
Trump’s own behavior while beside Habba, meanwhile, also drew rebukes from Kaplan, who told him he might have to throw him out because of his outbursts.
