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Alina Habba (headshot from Habba Madaio LLP)
Why can’t Donald Trump commit some cool, interesting crimes, that’s what Alina Habba wants to know. Maybe he could smuggle ferrets into Australia, or grow hallucinogenic mushrooms in the rumpus room at Mar-a-Lago! She should probably take it up with Trump, since she’s his lawyer.
But instead, she went on conservative shit-talker Charlie Kirk’s podcast this morning to complain that her boss is only being investigated for violating mundane statutes, like the Espionage Act. Yawn!
The interview starts with Habba and Kirk commiserating on the sad shame of the FBI “photo op” of the pictures of the framed Time magazine covers and the multiple classified documents found during the August 8 search of the former president’s club for unlawfully retained government documents. What they fail to mention is that no member of the public would have seen this picture if it weren’t for the disastrously bad judgment displayed by Trump’s legal team, who got goaded by Laura Ingraham into filing that clownsuit against the Justice Department seeking to get a special master to review documents seized three weeks ago.
“They say themselves in these papers that they filed that this is under the Presidential Records Act,” Habba blithely asserts to Kirk, confident that neither the anti-college crusader nor his audience will ever read the document to find out that she is totally full of crap.
“What they did to try and criminalize Donald Trump, as they always do, they found these three mundane statutes, espionage and the two others, obstruction, and they’re trying to claim that there was some sort of criminal activity. But their papers say it’s under the Presidential Records Act,” she chuckles.
Here on Planet Earth, the Presidential Records Act is one reason, among several, which the government cites as proof that Trump can’t win a Rule 41 motion for return of personal property. Because the documents seized are, in fact, property of the US government under the PRA. But that law wasn’t the basis for the warrant, as we’ve seen thanks to the partial unsealing of the underlying affidavit.
In fact, US Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart found probable cause to believe that there was evidence on the premises of violations of 18 U.S.C. §§ 793(e), 2071, or 1519. The first is the Espionage Act, which relates to the mishandling of national security documents. And other other two statutes pertain to destruction, concealment, or theft of government documents.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but these are hardly “mundane” statutes, which Habba, as an officer of the court, certainly understands. Nevertheless, she nods along with Kirk as he describes “a clerical dispute over the return of a potential library book.”
“If they’re declassified, as he has the right to do, then he has the right to have them,” Habba went on, conveniently skirting the reality that none of these three “mundane” laws rest on the classification status of the documents in question. Also she seems to think Donald Trump is still president and can declassify documents at will.
You can watch the long version of the interview here, if you’re a glutton for punishment. But suffice it to say that Alina Habba is a lucky, lucky woman. What an absolute privilege to have an audience who will believe literally any horseshit you want to shovel at them!
It didn’t work with New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron. Or US District Judge Brenda Sannes. Or US District Judge Lewis Kaplan. And it doesn’t appear to be working with US District Judge Donald Middlebrooks. But in the court of righteous idiocy, before Grand Marshall Charlie Kirk, it’s a big winner.
Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.
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