Alina Habba Isn’t Going Anywhere

Welcome to All the President’s People, a new series of profiles documenting the ever-expanding list of characters who populate Donald Trump’s second term.

Alina Habba had a request. “Use a good picture, okay?” were her first words to me after hello. “One where I don’t look haggard, which is hard to find these days.”

Probably she was joking. Yet Habba, always direct, had cut to a central question in her rapid rise from low-profile northern New Jersey lawyer to glossy power player in President Donald Trump’s vast inner circle, and now to the job of US attorney for New Jersey: How much of Habba’s sudden prominence is about style, and how much is about substance?

“He hired her for his own amusement,” says Ty Cobb, an attorney who was a member of Trump’s White House legal team during the first-term Russian-election-interference investigation. “This is not somebody who you get a résumé and you go, ‘This person really deserves to be in a position of authority.’ I wish her well, but she’s so far out of her depth.”

Sergio Gor, director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office, has a slightly different view. “Alina Habba is a brilliant and fearless advocate, unwavering in her loyalty to the America First movement,” Gor says.

And there is no better advocate for Habba than Habba herself. She is funny, profane, nimble, and fierce. She responds to attacks about her being unqualified for the job by detailing her years of running successful law firms and of representing Trump as ample preparation for the role of US attorney. “You can’t last this many years in this world and be an idiot or lazy,” she tells me. “I can tell you, the president does not tolerate it either.” She also, after four intense years in the media glare, has a savvy suggestion for how to frame this story: Alina Habba may not be exactly who you think she is.

She was born 41 years ago in Summit, New Jersey, an upper-middle-class suburb about one hour west of Manhattan. Habba’s parents settled there in the early 1980s after leaving Iraq to escape the reign of Saddam Hussein. Their experience, Habba says, shaped her strong attachment to the United States. Her family’s history also makes Habba empathetic toward more recent immigrants—to a point. “They went through the front door,” she says of her parents. “The door works. You cannot come illegally. I don’t think I’m an extremist on this.”

When she was in middle school, a female attorney spoke to Habba’s class, inspiring her to become a lawyer, eventually. First, she spent roughly three years in the fashion industry, working in merchandising at Marc Jacobs. It ultimately took a nudge from her mom to pursue her dream. “Mothers’ guilt works every time,” Habba says. “Sometimes I curse her, some days I thank her.”

Habba earned her degree at Widener University’s Commonwealth School of Law, where she also met her first husband, Matthew Eyet. They eventually opened a firm together that handles tax litigation and real estate transactions, among other subjects; Habba was the managing partner and took on thorny cases, including settling a lawsuit on behalf of a Connecticut minor who alleged a years-long pattern of sexual abuse by a town official. “She’s the best attorney I’ve ever worked with. Even in the most high-pressure situations, she stays composed and often catches her adversary off guard,” says Michael Madaio, another of the firm’s partners, citing Habba’s cross-examination of former Trump fixer Michael Cohen in the New York state civil fraud case. “Her rise felt less like a surprise and more like an inevitability.”

Habba’s firm was located in Bedminster, the same town as Trump’s New Jersey golf club, and Habba became a member. In 2021, a club employee, Alice Bianco, was planning to sue a supervisor for sexual harassment. Habba’s involvement in the matter is disputed, but Bianco accepted $15,000 and signed a non-disclosure agreement. Bianco then claimed she was misled into signing the NDA and sued the club, which voided the hush money deal and agreed on a settlement. In August 2024, Bianco and Habba agreed to a separate out-of-court settlement. Nancy Erika Smith, a lawyer who now represents Bianco, says she has filed an ethics complaint against Habba with the state of New Jersey. Habba declined to comment regarding Smith, but has said she acted ethically at all times in her dealings with Bianco.

Not long after that episode, in the fall of 2021, Trump hired Habba to defend him in a defamation lawsuit filed by Summer Zervos, a former contestant on The Apprentice. Zervos had accused Trump of sexual assault, and on the campaign trail, Trump had referred to her allegations as “lies.” Zervos sued, but after nearly five years of pursuing the case, she abruptly dropped it without receiving any compensation or apology, after Habba moved to countersue her.

Habba, on Trump’s behalf, next sued The New York Times and Trump’s niece Mary Trump for $100 million, claiming that Times reporters had schemed to gain access to his tax records through Mary; a judge later dismissed the suit. She sued Hillary Clinton and dozens of former Justice Department and FBI officials over the Russia investigation. A Florida judge dismissed the suit as “completely frivolous” and ordered Trump and Habba to pay nearly $1 million in legal costs.

Yet Trump kept enlisting Habba in even bigger cases. She was part of his defense team during the penalty phase for E. Jean Carroll’s defamation lawsuit, and in the trial over New York state’s charges that Trump’s businesses had fraudulently inflated the value of its properties. Inside the courtrooms, Habba clashed with the judges and at one point seemed to struggle with basic rules of evidence. “The press wanted to paint me a certain way,” Habba says, arguing that it was Judge Lewis Kaplan who didn’t follow the standard rules: “Evidence was blocked that should have been introduced and in any other trial would have been.” (Judge Kaplan’s office has not responded to a request for comment.) Outside the courtroom, however, in press conferences and Fox News appearances, Habba fluently broadcast Trump’s narrative of political persecution. “Me screaming outside the court about what happened in those rooms, where there were no cameras allowed, was the only time people saw or heard the truth,” Habba says now.

The verdicts went against Trump: In the Carroll case, he was ordered to pay $83.3 million (and lost his appeal to overturn the verdict), and in the New York state case, $454 million. But Habba’s star client appears to have been happy with her work. Trump, after being reelected, made Habba counsel to the president before installing her, in March, as New Jersey’s interim US attorney.

Habba may have felt haggard, and she certainly had good reason. Her schedule on the day we spoke included leading meetings in her Newark office to review active prosecutions and investigations, ranging from homicides to gang activity to fraud to child pornography, and visiting the FBI’s New Jersey headquarters. At home, she’s raising a daughter and a son from her first marriage and a stepson from her second to Gregg Reuben, the chief executive of a parking garage company. “She has children she loves. People don’t necessarily see that side of her,” says Erica Knight, a Republican media strategist and a friend of Habba’s. “In her Republican convention speech, she said, ‘I’m a feisty Jersey girl.’ She’s pretty tough. She has to be.”

Indeed, Habba did not sound remotely stressed. Quite the opposite—she seemed fired up. She was also staunchly loyal to Trump, though insistent she provided the president unvarnished advice. “I always said no when I needed to say no. I said yes when I believed the answer was yes,” Habba says. “I’m not a yes person. I’m a tough cookie and direct. I’ve endured and stood by him through a tremendous amount of fight—most of which was unfair and coordinated in an effort to hurt him, his family, and his campaign.”

Habba’s allegiance to Trump has never been in question. It’s at the root of many of the complaints about her—and the fears that Habba, who had no prior experience as a prosecutor, will use the US attorney job to pursue a partisan political agenda. Her critics see Habba as epitomizing what it takes to get ahead in Trump’s orbit: looking the part, and a willingness to relentlessly defend the president, especially on TV. “It’s not a question of hating her,” Cobb says. “It’s a question of her being grossly unfit for the job.”

Habba is a naturally magnetic presence, which she amplifies with snug clothes and a bejeweled crucifix necklace. At a 2024 Trump campaign rally in Madison Square Garden, she shimmied onto the stage wearing a sequined jacket whose red and white letters spelled out MAGA. Yet she sounds genuinely surprised at the arena in which she has become famous, claiming she had little interest in politics and wanted to stay under the radar. “It was a decision [to represent Trump] that I took really seriously, and I had a feeling it would change my life,” she says. “But I didn’t really understand the gravity, in hindsight, of how much it would.”

Somehow Habba has become quite comfortable in the partisan fray. “She has been at President Trump’s side for years; he trusts her implicitly,” says Gor. “She will deliver in spades as US attorney because, similar to the president, she prioritizes winning.”

How Habba defines winning is the controversial part. Three days after Trump announced her appointment as top prosecutor, she told Jack Posobiec, a conservative podcaster, “We could turn New Jersey red…. Hopefully, while I’m there, I can help that cause.” Shortly afterward, her office filed trespassing charges against Newark mayor Ras Baraka and assault charges against New Jersey congressperson LaMonica McIver related to a confrontation outside a Newark ICE facility (to which McIver has pleaded not guilty), and in July, she said she was launching an investigation into New Jersey governor Phil Murphy after he made remarks suggesting he would house a migrant. The three elected officials are Democrats.

“Her nomination should have been dead in the water the minute she said that on the podcast,” says Joyce White Vance, a former federal prosecutor and an MSNBC legal analyst. “It is absolutely disqualifying. Nominations have died for far less. If you’re looking for single points of failure in the Republican Party that demonstrate how badly they’ve been corrupted by Trump, that’s one of them.”

The Baraka charges have since been dropped, and Habba tells me she does not plan on using the judicial system to make New Jersey more Republican. “If I wanted to do that, I would have run myself,” she says. “There’s a governor’s race happening right now, and I did not run.”

Instead, Habba is deep into an equally bruising campaign: to retain her job. In early July, Trump nominated her to a full term as US attorney, but the US senators from New Jersey, both Democrats, signaled they would block her confirmation. Then, federal judges ruled Habba had to vacate the job and appointed an experienced federal prosecutor as an interim replacement. Trump’s team countered by firing the replacement, withdrawing Habba’s nomination to take the post permanently, and deeming Habba the first assistant US attorney…who, because the US attorney seat is vacant, is automatically promoted. At least temporarily. The wrangling has resonance beyond New Jersey, because the Trump administration has used similar maneuvers to appoint prosecutors in offices from upstate New York to Los Angeles. It’s part of an effort to exert greater control over the criminal justice system that recently saw the president push out a Virginia US attorney, Erik Siebert, after Siebert reportedly declined to file charges for mortgage fraud against New York attorney general Letitia James and former FBI director James Comey, due to insufficient evidence.

The contours and stakes may be new, but life around Habba is rarely dull. On a single day in late August, a New York appeals court tossed out the $454 million civil fraud judgment against Trump (though it declined to overturn the fraud case), handing Habba a large measure of vindication; three hours later, a federal judge in Pennsylvania ruled that Habba is holding the US attorney’s job illegally. The Department of Justice is appealing the latter ruling. At the center of a storm, though, Habba is unfazed, even floating a headline for this story: “‘Alina Habba isn’t going anywhere.’”