Habba had complained after a report alleged that U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan was a “mentor” to Carroll’s lawyer 30 years ago. Carroll’s lawyer called the claim "utterly baseless.”
Former President Donald Trump’s attorney Alina Habba on Tuesday backed off of a conflict of interest claim against the judge who presided over the E. Jean Carroll defamation trial after Carroll’s lawyer threatened to pursue sanctions.
Habba on Monday filed a letter with the court citing a New York Post story which said that U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan and Carroll attorney Roberta Kaplan, who are not related, had worked at the major law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison in the 1990s. An unidentified former partner at the firm, which employs around 1,000 lawyers, told the Post that Lewis Kaplan had been “like her mentor."
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In a letter on Tuesday, Roberta Kaplan called it “utterly baseless” to suggest there had been such a relationship, and said she might seek sanctions if Habba kept making “false accusations of impropriety.”
Habba indicated that Kaplan’s letter appeared to settle the matter.
“The point of my January 29 letter was to verify whether the information contained in the New York Post article is accurate,” she wrote. “Since Ms. Kaplan has now denied that there was ever a mentor-mentee relationship between herself and Your Honor, this issue has seemingly been resolved.”
“The purpose of the letter was simply to inquire as to whether there is any merit to a recently published New York Post story which reported on the alleged existence of such a relationship”
Aha, the time honored “I’m just asking the question…” defense…
Seems to he their specialty since they’re doing the same thing to Fani Willis, but hey it’s not like one of Trump’s best buddies is David Pecker, of the National Enquirer, a tabloid, so these people traffic in sleeze, rumor, and gossip.