Former Trump lawyer Alina Habba has been fired from a lucrative gig that infuriated President Donald Trump, according to a new report.
Concord Partners, a Florida company set up by the daughter of a billionaire banker Trump pardoned, terminated Habba in a Nov. 4 letter that cited a “failure to perform duties,” The New York Times reported Tuesday. Habba, who now goes by Alina Habba Mildon, will forfeit most of a four-year contract worth $10 million annually, but she gets to hold on to the $6.5 million she’s already collected along with an $8 million signing bonus.
Habba started at the company on Jan. 1 as its general counsel while also serving as a senior adviser to the attorney general under a special government employee arrangement, which allows limited outside work. Weeks later, Trump issued a full pardon to Julio Herrera Velutini, the Venezuelan banking magnate who had been facing felony bribery charges in Puerto Rico before landing an unusually lenient plea deal that knocked the case down to a misdemeanor campaign finance violation. His daughter, Isabela Herrera, Concord’s founder, had poured $3.5 million into a pro-Trump super PAC.
A person close to the Herrera family told the Times that Habba’s focus seemed to drift away from Concord after she began dating Turhan Mildon, a 25-year-old Turkish investor she married in September.
The firing follows a furious reaction from Trump after the Times first revealed the deal last month. The president blasted the arrangement as “totally obnoxious and outrageous,” pressed the Herrera family to stop paying her and floated the idea that she donate to his future presidential library, the Times reported.
“I thought it was terrible,” Trump told reporters at the time. “I told her, and I said, ‘I don’t want her paid.’”
Habba has insisted she had nothing to do with the pardon. “Any insinuation that my employment…had anything to do with securing a pardon is false,” she said in a previous statement. She declined to comment on her firing, though a person close to her said she intends to take legal action. Representatives for the Herrera family also declined to comment to the Times.
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