Trump Loses His Mind Over Alina Habba Leaving Him Out of Pardon Deal

President Donald Trump slammed his former personal lawyer Alina Habba Mildon’s pay-to-pardon scheme.

Speaking to reporters at a Mar-a-Lago Halloween Party Saturday, Trump gave a surprising rebuke of Mildon reportedly receiving a $50 million contract to secure a pardon for a billionaire family.

“I thought it was terrible. I told her, I said, ‘I don’t want her paid.’ I thought we had somebody speak to the people that did it, and she used her relationship to do that,” Trump said. “And it was far too much. You know, it’s one thing for a person to get paid legal fees, or whatever, she’s a lawyer—

“I thought it was totally obnoxious and outrageous, and it’s not acceptable, not acceptable—at all,” he said.

Mildon inked the lucrative deal with a company started by the daughter of Julio Herrera Velutini, a Venezuelan national who was looking for a presidential pardon. The New York Times reported last week that Trump was angered by the size of Mildon’s contract, and said that she should donate some of that money to his presidential library or another entity related to him.

Speaking to reporters Saturday, he claimed that she wasn’t the one he was expecting a donation from. “No, not her. I expect maybe the people—I don’t know, if anybody wants to make it,” Trump said, leaving the door open for anyone to fill his pockets.

It appears that Trump is less mad about the size of the payout than he is about the fact that he wasn’t cut in on the deal to begin with. I mean, he’s already openly admitted that he’s served up a pardon in return for political support.

Representative Haley Stevens’s friends and colleagues are concerned by her fiancé Jason Turkish’s alarming behavior surrounding the Democrat’s last-minute endorsement of Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers.

Last week, with just days until the midterm election, Turkish, a Jewish Democrat, announced his intention to vote for Rogers. The disabilities and civil rights attorney claimed he was convinced that Democratic candidate Abdul El-Sayed’s criticism of Israel posed a threat to Jews in Michigan. 

After Stevens surprised everyone Sunday with her support for Rogers, her friends and colleagues have begun speaking out about what they consider Turkish’s concerning behavior, suggesting that he may have influenced her decision.

Former Michigan Governor Jim Blanchard told Gongwer News Service Sunday that Turkish had openly admonished Stevens ahead of her scheduled appearance at a Souls to the Polls event with El-Sayed and Representative Jim Clyburn—which she ultimately ditched to support Rogers.

“He was working her over. The way he was saying it was, ‘Everyone is disappointed in you, they did everything they could to help you and then immediately after you lose the primary, you endorsed him,’” Blanchard recounted from a dinner Thursday night. 

Blanchard said he’d defended Stevens for being a “team player.”

Turkish replied, “‘I know, but they’re really disappointed in her,’” the former governor recalled. 

Blanchard told GNS that Turkish was “all distraught” and “strung out” about El-Sayed. When the former governor raised his concerns to Stevens, she replied: “I’m fine.”

Blanchard described the sudden change in his longtime ally, saying several times, “This is not the Haley I know.”

“Something snapped in her. And it snapped in 24 hours,” he told GNS.

One of Stevens’s friends, Michigan University regent Jordan Acker, wrote on X Monday that he had become “deeply troubled” by Turkish’s behavior.

“I’ve heard serious concerns about his treatment of Haley’s staff, friends, and allies. My own experiences have only deepened those concerns,” he wrote. “It is painful to watch someone you care about go through something like this. It is even more painful to worry about the influence of those closest to her.”

Acker wrote that he’d been unable to contact Stevens in the wake of her controversy. “Her fiancé took her phone away,” he wrote on X. (Turkish denied the accusation, saying Stevens had simply turned off her phone.)

Former Stevens spokesperson Caitlin Legacki blamed Turkish for Stevens’s primary campaign failing. She claimed the couple got engaged in secret, and that Turkish began wielding outsize influence over the campaign. She accused him of bullying junior staffers and pressuring Stevens to be more vocal in defending Israel.

Former Representative Susan Wild, who said she’d known Stevens from coming up on Capitol Hill, also voiced concerns about Turkish following her friend’s sudden flip-flop.

“So many people in the Democratic Party have shown so much support to Haley over the years, and she has betrayed them all. If this is because of her new relationship (about which many of us were so happy for her after she lost the primary), all I can say is that any woman who abandons her friends when a new guy comes along is no friend at all,” Wild wrote on X Monday.

All of this is compounded by the fact that Stevens cannot muster any defense for her own defection. Her shameful endorsement of a MAGA Republican may yet prove to be a unifying moment for the Democratic Party. Her senseless defection has earned widespread condemnation from progressive and establishment Democrats alike, and El-Sayed’s campaign has seen a late funding surge.  

At a rally in Dubuque, Iowa, Sunday night, President Trump rambled about Republican Senate nominee Ashley Hinson’s weight before being interrupted by a protester.

“I knew Ashley for a long time, and she was a little bit heavier, OK?” Trump told the crowd. “She was. And she put herself—she knew what she was doing. She knew the weight that was on her—really, literally, the weight. And she knew the importance of what she was doing, and she went out—the old-fashioned way, too. Not with, you know, give me a shot.”

Then a protester decided to start heckling the president, who was annoyed.

“Don’t bother, they’re paid protesters, they go away quickly,” Trump said. “They’re like a gnat, they’re like a little fly.”

As the crowd booed and the protester was removed, Trump added, “There’s usually two or three of them per rally. They get paid $250. They’re paid by [George] Soros. And they’re losers.” He complained “that they always do it right in the middle of my punch line!”

The “punch line” was basically Trump praising Hinson for “putting herself in shape,” which is undoubtedly the most important thing to Iowa voters. Trump is holding these midterm rallies because even safe Republican Senate and House seats are in jeopardy thanks to his record-low popularity over the Iran war and struggling economy. These disasters are of his own making, and his rants aren’t reassuring the public, inviting hecklers even in deep-red sections of the country.

Hinson is polling almost dead even with her Democratic challenger, disability activist and Iowa state Representative Josh Turek. Iowans watching Trump’s rally likely won’t be voting Tuesday based on Hinson’s weight but on the large, unpopular, and incompetent president standing with her.

A federal judge on Monday tossed the Justice Department’s latest attempt to punish two former FBI officials who were involved in the Hunter Biden laptop investigation.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Zia M. Faruqui said that the government’s case was tantamount to “weaponization,” and slammed its error-riddled arguments as “slapdash,” according to MS NOW’s Ken Dilanian.

The DOJ attempted to prosecute former intelligence analyst Nikki Floris, who ran the intelligence division at the Washington Field Office, and Bradley Benavides, a former deputy assistant director for counterintelligence. Both were charged with lying to Congress regarding Biden’s laptop contents, and surrendered on arrest warrants last month.

“This does not feel like an investigation. It feels like a broken one-wish willow obsession,” Faruqui said, comparing the case to the hit horror blockbuster Obsession.

Faruqui noted that he was “deeply troubled by what has happened here in this case,” and that the government’s procedure “cannot be described as anything other than weaponization.”

“It was a rush to charge, and that was a mistake,” Faruqui said.

The laptop scandal began in December 2019, when a Wilmington, Delaware–area computer repair shop owner gave an abandoned laptop purportedly belonging to Biden to Donald Trump’s former personal attorney Rudy Giuliani. Giuliani then handed a copy of the laptop’s hard drive to local law enforcement, which handed over the contents to the FBI.

In the years that followed, Republicans leveraged the laptop’s myriad contents to escalate scrutiny and speculation surrounding the Biden family’s business dealings with Burisma, a Ukrainian natural gas and energy company.

Giuliani and Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist, insisted that the laptop contained evidence that the Biden family made millions of dollars after former President Joe Biden and a Burisma adviser held a meeting. (The New York Post, which ran the original story on its front page, later said that the contents of the laptop were mixed with fake material and that most of the data could not be verified.)

The alleged meeting became central to an impeachment probe against the elder Biden. Republicans claimed at the time that Biden had engaged in corruption, and had peddled the influence of his vice presidency to rake in cash.

Floris and Benavides briefed Republican lawmakers in 2020 about the contents of the laptop as part of a congressional investigation. Senator Chuck Grassley has since claimed that the pair gave the briefing in order to cast the probe as Russian disinformation.

But the entire laptop investigation fell apart in 2024 after its star witness, Alexander Smirnov, admitted the conspiracy was in fact Russian disinformation. Smirnov admitted to Justice Department prosecutors that “officials associated with Russian intelligence were involved” in fabricating the Hunter Biden narrative. In the ensuing fallout, Smirnov told investigators he was in contact with “four different [top] Russian officials,” two of whom were the “heads of the entities they represent.”

This story has been updated.

Democrats from Representative Debbie Dingell to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tried to talk to Haley Stevens in the days after her fiancé, Jason Turkish, announced he’d be endorsing Republican Senate nominee Mike Rogers, frantically trying to ensure that she wouldn’t do the same. It didn’t work.

Politico’s Playbook reported Monday that Ocasio-Cortez spoke to the Michigan representative on the phone for 25 minutes last Wednesday, the same day Turkish made his announcement. Stevens also reassured the New York congresswoman over text message that she would not be voting against Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed, whom she endorsed after losing to him in the primary.

“Thank you so much for talking to me and hearing me,” Stevens texted. “It means the world. Now back to the productive stuff.”

“You really did and thank you for talking to me too,” Ocasio-Cortez replied. “I’m sorry again and I’m really glad we got to connect and talk and I hope we are able to more. Sending you a big hug.”

Dingell spoke to Stevens the night before she endorsed Mike Rogers, and Stevens reportedly reassured her that she would do no such thing.

Representative Jamie Raskin also spoke with Stevens for 25 minutes on Saturday night, he told The Washington Post. She assured him as well that she would be celebrating with Democrats on election night.

All this outreach apparently meant nothing, as Stevens stood up members of her own party on Sunday in order to publicly endorse Rogers.

Stevens seems to have changed her mind because she felt excluded. Last week, she complained to Politico about not being invited to an event with Ocasio-Cortez in Michigan, saying, “Nobody wants the Democratic Party to feel like an exclusive club.… It’s starting to feel like AOC comes in and it’s exclusive.” She also complained about not getting a text back in 2025, though another source reported it was Stevens who said text messages weren’t the best way to get in touch with her.

Stevens’s own staff tried getting through to her too, texting her in alarm after Turkish’s endorsement, asking if she would endorse Rogers. Her response: “Omg, why would you think I would do that?!!” She also spoke to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, and others—telling all of them she remained all in for El-Sayed. She confirmed her appearance with Representative Jim Clyburn and El-Sayed at a church in Detroit on Sunday, only to stand them up to appear with Rogers.

“I’m dumbfounded by this turn of events,” Raskin told the Post. “Something doesn’t compute about this whole sequence of events.”