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.”
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The article included a quote from Roberta Kaplan’s spokesman Zak Sawyer, who said while they’d worked at the same large law firm, they “overlapped for less than two years in the early 1990s."
In her letter on Monday, Habba said, “If Your Honor truly worked with Ms. Kaplan in any capacity—especially if there was a mentor/mentee relationship—that fact should have been disclosed before any case involving these parties was permitted to proceed forward.”
Roberta Kaplan called the allegation part of the Trump team’s scheme to discredit the judicial system and suggested that she might seek sanctions against Habba.
“While Ms. Habba ends her letter by characterizing this as a ‘troubling matter,’ what is actually troubling is both the substance and timing of her false accusations of impropriety,” she wrote.
While that strategy has now moved into its post-verdict phase, it is now time for Defendant’s false and vexatious claims of bias or impropriety to stop."
“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,” she wrote.
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