President Trump sharply criticized his former personal attorney, Alina Habba, on Saturday night over her reported $50 million contract with the family of a Venezuelan banker he later pardoned, calling the arrangement “totally obnoxious 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. He joked that he had come dressed as himself.
The president said he had told Habba that he did not want her to receive the money.
“You know, it’s one thing for a person to get paid legal fees or whatever. She’s a lawyer,” Trump said. “I thought it was totally obnoxious and outrageous, and it’s not acceptable. Not acceptable at all.”
The family of Julio Herrera Velutini guaranteed Habba more than $50 million over four years for serving as general counsel of Concord Partners, a family company registered only days before she joined it, The New York Times reported last week.
Herrera, a billionaire banker, had previously faced federal bribery charges. By August 2025, however, the case had been reduced to a guilty plea on a single misdemeanor campaign finance violation.
According to the Times, the family agreed to pay Habba a $10 million annual retainer, along with bonuses. The 42-year-old attorney helped arrange the position while she was still working for the Justice Department.
Habba had been at Concord Partners for only two weeks when Trump pardoned her boss’s father.
Habba has insisted that the timing was merely coincidental.
“Any insinuation that my employment — all of which has been vetted and disclosed to the DOJ — had anything to do with securing a pardon is false,” Habba told the Times.
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The White House has also denied that the employment agreement was connected to the pardon, the newspaper reported.
The Times reported that Trump “erupted” after learning about the contract and told aides and allies that some of the money should go toward his future presidential library or another organization connected to him.
On Saturday, Trump said he did not necessarily expect Habba to make the payment herself. But he continued to condemn the arrangement, saying, “it’s unacceptable what she did.”
The president’s comments represent a dramatic fall from grace for a woman who until recently ranked among Trump’s most fiercely loyal allies. Habba became nationally known as Trump’s personal attorney in 2021 before serving briefly as counselor to the president. She later became the top federal prosecutor at the New Jersey US Attorney’s Office, a position she left last December.
The reported contract comes after a turbulent few weeks for Habba. She married Turkish billionaire Turhan Mildon on Sept. 26 in a ceremony at the Waldorf Astoria. One source estimated the wedding cost at roughly $10 million. FBI Director Kash Patel, Attorney General Todd Blanche and boxer Mike Tyson were among the reported guests.
Less than two weeks later, during an Oct. 9 meeting in the Oval Office, Habba accused Ric Grenell, the former executive director of the Kennedy Center, of failing to deposit $5.6 million that her new husband had designated for the center. The money was allegedly part of a $17.6 million wire transfer Mildon sent to Texas Armament & Technology, a defense software company, in May 2025.
Trump then referred the dispute to White House Counsel Will Scharf.
Lawyers for Mildon have since produced a text message in which Grenell allegedly promised Mildon access to the president. Axios later reported that the $17.6 million did not come from Mildon, but from the finance ministry of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Grenell has denied wrongdoing and reportedly denied sending the text message.
“Absurd. I’ve never asked for one cent to be sent somewhere else pretending it was for the Kennedy Center and I’ve never received any payment from him at all,” Grenell wrote on X.
