President Trump criticized his former personal lawyer, Alina Habba, on Saturday night, calling her $50 million deal with the family of a Venezuelan banker he later pardoned “totally abhorrent 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 that he had come dressed like him.
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 for legal fees or whatever. They’re a lawyer,” Trump said. “I thought it was totally abhorrent and outrageous, and it’s not acceptable. Not acceptable at all.”
Julio Herrera Velutini’s family guaranteed Habba more than $50 million over four years in exchange for his role as general counsel at Concord Partners, a family business registered just days before his arrival, The New York Times reported last week.
Herrera, a billionaire banker, has previously been charged with corruption by the federal government. By August 2025, his case had been reduced to a guilty plea to a single misdemeanor campaign finance violation.
The family put Habba on a princely retainer of $10 million a year, plus bonuses, according to the Times. The 42-year-old attorney began the job while still on the Justice Department payroll.
Habba was barely two weeks on the job at Concord Partners when Trump pardoned his boss’s father.
The lawyer, for her part, insists that the timing chosen was pure chance.
“Any insinuation that my employment — which was verified and disclosed to the DOJ — had anything to do with receiving a pardon is false,” Habba told the Times.
The White House also denied any connection, the outlet reported.
Trump “blew up” when he learned about the contract, according to the Times, then told aides and allies that some of the money should go to his future presidential library or another Trump-linked organization.
On Saturday, the president said he didn’t necessarily expect Habba herself to pay. However, he did not let her get away with it: “what she did was unacceptable.”
The rebuke marks a stunning fall from grace 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 served a brief stint as an advisor to the president. From there, she rose to the top job in the New Jersey U.S. attorney’s office, which she left last December.
News of his deal ends a dramatic few weeks for Habba. She married Turkish billionaire Turhan Mildon on September 26 at the Waldorf Astoria. One source put the cost of the party at around $10 million, and guests included FBI Director Kash Patel, Attorney General Todd Blanche and boxer Mike Tyson.
Less than two weeks later, during an Oval Office meeting on October 9, Habba accused Ric Grenell — the former executive director of the Kennedy Center — of failing to deposit the $5.6 million her new husband had set aside for the center. The money was allegedly part of a $17.6 million wire transfer that Mildon sent to Texas Armament & Technology, a defense software company, in May 2025.
Trump then turned the matter over to 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 reported that the $17.6 million came not from Mildon but from the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Ministry of Finance.
Grenell has denied any wrongdoing and reportedly denied sending the text.
“Absurd. I never asked for a penny to be sent anywhere else claiming it was for the Kennedy Center and never received any payment from them,” Grenell wrote on X.
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