Alina Habba Fired From $50M Gig After Trump Outburst

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Alina Habba, the former Trump lawyer and New Jersey US attorney who now goes by Alina Habba Mildon, has been fired from the general counsel job that guaranteed her more than $50 million over four years, cut loose by a company set up by the daughter of a billionaire banker President Trump pardoned in January. Concord Partners, the Herrera family's Florida firm, ended her contract in a Nov. 4 letter citing a "failure to perform duties," The New York Times reported Tuesday.

Alina Habba attends her swearing-in ceremony as interim U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey, in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., March 28, 2025. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein/ File photo

The firing came four days after Trump turned on her in public. She still walks away with $14.5 million: about $6.5 million in salary collected since January and an $8 million signing bonus, according to the Times' reporter on the story.

A person close to the Herrera family told the Times that her focus drifted from Concord after she began dating Turhan Mildon, the 25-year-old Turkish investor she married in September. Habba Mildon declined to comment on the firing, and a person close to her said she intends to take legal action. Representatives for the family also declined to comment.

Asked about the deal by reporters at a Halloween party at Mar-a-Lago on Oct. 31, Trump said he had told her he didn't want her paid, as we reported at the time. "She used her relationship to do that and it was far too much," he said. "I thought it was totally obnoxious and outrageous and it's not acceptable. Not acceptable at all." Asked whether she should donate to his presidential library, he answered, "No, not her."

The deal itself surfaced in an Oct. 20 Times investigation. Isabela Herrera, the 27-year-old daughter of Venezuelan banker Julio Herrera Velutini, registered Concord Partners in Florida in late October 2025, and Habba finalized a $10 million-a-year contract with it days later, while she was still New Jersey's acting US attorney. The company has no public profile, and what it does is unclear. Isabela Herrera has also given $3.5 million to a pro-Trump super PAC.

Habba resigned as US attorney on Dec. 8 after the courts ruled she was serving unlawfully, as we reported when an appeals court ruled against her and when she stepped down. The same day she became a senior adviser to Attorney General Pam Bondi as a special government employee, a status that allows outside work, and she started at Concord on Jan. 1 while still holding the Justice Department post.

Herrera had been charged in 2022 with a scheme to bribe then-Puerto Rico Gov. Wanda Vázquez into removing a regulator who was investigating his bank, and he pleaded guilty in August 2025 to a single misdemeanor campaign finance charge. Weeks after Habba went to work for his daughter's company, Trump signed "a full and unconditional pardon" for him in the case, according to the clemency grant posted by the Justice Department. Vázquez was pardoned at the same time.

Habba Mildon has said she was never paid for a pardon and did no work toward one, calling any suggestion that her employment had anything to do with it "false and defamatory." The Justice Department has said she never discussed a pardon with anyone, and a White House official has said the family's donations had nothing to do with it.

Her new husband's money is the subject of a separate fight. As we reported on Nov. 1, Habba told Trump in the Oval Office that Richard Grenell never delivered roughly $5.6 million of a $17.6 million payment Mildon wired at his direction, a claim Grenell denies. White House counsel Will Scharf has been told to look into it. Habba Mildon now faces both fights at once: a possible lawsuit against the family that hired her, and a White House review of her husband's money.

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