Habba Dabba Don't

The funniest story of the day yesterday was probably when Trump parking garage attorney Alina Habba filed a letter with the court to Judge Lewis Kaplan – the judge in E. Jean Carroll’s defamation suit against Trump – suggesting an improper, unreported, supposedly conflict-of-interest relationship between the judge and Ms. Carroll’s lead attorney, Roberta Kaplan (no relation to the judge).  It related to an article in the New York Post that suggested from an unnamed source how he had mentored Ms. Kaplan at a law firm over three decades earlier.  Clearly, the hope was to help get the $83 million judgement against her client overturned on appeal.
 
The problem is that this brought a scathing rebuke from Roberta Kaplan, from which you could almost see the flames soaring out.  It referred to baseless claims and that “While both the New York Post and Ms. Habba purport to cite the recollections of an 'unnamed partner'... that partner (if he even exists) clearly has a very flawed memory about events that occurred three decades ago."
 
Roberta Kaplan noted that "The length of our overlap was less than two years. During that relatively brief period more than thirty years ago, I do remember the partners I worked with and none of them was [Judge Lewis Kaplan]."  Most damning was her adding that she reserved the right to seek sanctions against Ms. Habba.
 
It's worth mention that an attorney filing what he or she knows is a false claim against a judge faces huge problems.  For starts, such an action can get them sanctioned or conceivably disbarred.
 
It is no shock, then, to learn that faster than it’s likely taken you to read this fair, so fast that it was like watching feet spin in Roadrunner cartoon, Alina Habba wrote a letter back to the judge along the lines of, “Oh, no, Your Honor, I didn’t mean that at all.”  She tried to explain that she wasn’t making accusations at all.  Just raising questions that should perhaps be looked into.  Really, Your Honor, honest.
 
Of course a problem with her response is that rather than refer to what was written in the Post article as “allegations” or “unsupported rumors,” instead she kept calling it “information.”  But, of course, if what was written was untrue, it is not information at all but rather…well, lies.

Legal expert Elie Hoenig said on CNN that “This is a bogus motion by the Trump team.”  He noted how “Every judge in that courthouse knows, socializes with, has worked with, maybe mentored, dozen dozens, hundreds of attorneys in the city. I used to practice in that courthouse in front of judges who used to be my colleagues and supervisors. That is not enough for a conflict of interest."  To which he then added, “"They have their appeal issues. This ain't one of them."

And all this from the woman who only a couple weeks ago said during a podcast interview that she’d rather be pretty than smart, because you can “fake being smart.”
 
Perhaps she’d have been better served by going for “smart,” because apparently it’s difficult for some people to even fake being smart.