Alina Habba Gets Her Bag

No corruption no corruption OH SHIT that’s some corruption!

A sign with Trump’s face on it and the word “NOPE” beneath it. Photo by Leo_Visions on Unsplash

There’s a lot of real shitbirds who are part of the Trump administration, but Donald Trump has a plan for that, I guess. Can you guess what it is? One guess!

If it was anything other than “using his power to do lots of corruptions,” you are totally wrong and also congratulations on waking up from your decades-long coma, kinda.

So here’s what we’re contending with this week: the existence of a pardon racket, revealed (again we mean) by Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer Alina Habba, a name that I block out every time as I hear it and then have to learn all over again, and a Venezuelan billionaire dope named Julio Herrera Velutini, who wanted a pardon for his convictions on conspiracy, federal program bribery, and wire fraud.

But Herrera didn’t just want a pardon. He really, really, really super wanted it. And he’s a billionaire, so suck it, plebes!

So [Julio Herrera Velutini] deployed his lawyer, Christopher M. Kise, the former Florida solicitor general who was on President Trump’s personal legal team, to help with a plea for clemency. His 27-year-old daughter, Isabela Herrera, who is an American citizen, donated $3.5 million to a super PAC tied to Mr. Trump. But as of last fall, the pardon remained elusive.

Then the Herrera family hired Alina Habba, who had been one of Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers and at the time was an adviser at the Justice Department. They offered her $10 million a year for four years along with a range of bonuses. In total, including bonuses, she was guaranteed more than $50 million over four years, according to interviews and documents obtained by The New York Times.

If you’re rich and you really really want something, you can just throw money at it until it’s yours, and that is why being a billionaire is like being kicked in the head by a horse, every single day, with apologies to whomever I stole that phrase from.

According to Salon, Trump hired Habba because he saw her on TV (Fox News, of course) defending some fucked-up thing he had done. Soon, she was a busy little bee, working her way up the ranks because boots don’t just lick themselves!

And then the Herrera family hired Habba because they saw her on TV defending some fucked-up thing Trump had done, and you’ll never believe what happened next! Herrera got that pardon.

Should Habba be worried about jail, seeing as how she was working for the Justice Department when she got that fuckin SWEET fifty mil to suborn justice? Actually, she should!

She finalized the deal while still acting U.S. attorney for New Jersey. And she started work as “general counsel” for the company on Jan. 1—when she was still a senior adviser to the attorney general.

Jay Kuo walks you through the various statutes in that link back there, which is good, because that is not our bag! Alina Habba got her bag though, and oh would we love to see that bag IN JAIL!

But Herrera’s just one out of many, many corrupt people who have been paying off the President of the United States for official pardons. There’s a whole international industry of warlords, ghouls, fuckwits, shitlords, and other assorted filth circling around Trump like so many vultures, except that vultures actually perform beneficial services for the environment and have an important place in local ecologies.

So sez the New York Times:

In Mr. Trump’s second term, a pardon industry has sprouted up, with wealthy criminals paying well-connected lawyers, fixers and lobbyists to appeal to the administration and its allies in an effort to secure pardons. Many pardon seekers have come to the conclusion that supporting Mr. Trump and his political agenda is the fastest way to secure clemency.

Some people looking for pardons have reported paying hundreds of thousands of dollars or even $1 million to hire people promising access to the president or influence over the pardon process.

All sorts of filth has been lining up to pick over the corpse of our once-vibrant, if unevenly applied, justice system. It’s pretty disgusting and disturbing to see all these assholes walk around free. However, the Trump administration keeps a handy list of the pardonees online, which has been archived quite a lot and which will be very helpful when the next administration of the United States, or whatever we will have left after this shit, has to go back and un-pardon them so that they can be re-convicted!

Here’s just a tiny smattering of the hundreds of presidential pardons and clemencies, in no particular order:

George Santos, former member of Congress and all-around enemy of good aesthetics
Rod Blagojevich, former Illinois governor and murderer of good hairstyles
Brian Kelsey, former senator
Juan Hernández, former president of Uruguay and convicted drug trafficker
Jason Galanis, election conspiracist and defrauder of Oglala Sioux
Changpeng Zhao, that Binance guy with an unsettlingly lightbulb-shaped head
Thomas Edward Caldwell, a January 6th insurrectionist, but there are like 1,500 more!
Michele Fiore, who used public funds intended for a slain police officer memorial to pay for cosmetic surgery
HDR Global Trading Ltd., a crypto company (come ON, you can’t fucking pardon a corporation, but I guess you can, if you’re corrupt as fuck)
Ozy Media, Inc. and Carlos Watson, (hahaha, there are so many corporations in this pardon list)
a whole bunch of other assholes, and, of course,
Herrera.

So many of them are frauders, and guess who gets to keep their stolen funds once they’re pardoned? ALL OF THEM!

I would offer more names, but seeing too many of them together is way too depressing, so I guess you can just check the rest of that list for yourself!

I’m old enough to remember the good old days, when there was a controversy that went on for months and months and years and decades about Bill Clinton pardoning Marc “Fugitive Financier” Rich without going through the proper channels. Back then, I thought it might be in good faith, but I was young and naive, and everyone involved back then hadn’t yet shown themselves to be fully corrupted by decades of unearned power, so that’s on me.

Then again, it’s not like the president has unlimited reach, despite what this administration and its nearly completely captured Supreme Court would have you believe. There are limits to these commutations and clemencies, and they don’t vacate convictions so the people who received them aren’t running around completely free and clear. According to ProtectDemocracy.org, presidential pardons have to be in the public interest and can’t allow for more criming!

Pardons cannot be used to obstruct justice or as part of a bribery scheme. Such pardons would violate certain federal criminal laws enacted by Congress and would thus be unlawful. […]

Additionally, obstruction laws prohibit corruptly motivated actions to hinder a criminal investigation “by means of bribery” or by “corruptly persuad[ing] a witness or potential witness to withhold information about the commission of a federal offense.” Promising a pardon to prevent a witness from cooperating with an investigation would thus constitute obstruction. Consider how President Trump’s counsel discussed the possibility of pardons with Paul Manafort’s counsel. After Manafort’s counsel was told by Trump’s to “sit tight” and that he would be “taken care of,” Manafort refused to cooperate with a grand jury and investigators.

The president cannot exempt himself from criminal laws. And in the event that the president violates the law, he is not immune from liability by virtue of having used an official act to commit the violation.

Ah, to be back in the heady optimistic days of March 2024, when this was published and we still sort of had a government.

Here’s some more literal reprobates who we are going to need to track down and scoop up with butterfly nets, when the time comes. This is from the first Trump administration, so no one can say in 2026 that there weren’t signs. These are people (and corporations) who were convicted of very bad things for very good reasons! The best thing I can say, which is sort of damning with faint praise, is that at least these fuckers are losing a lot of money to Trump to get their stupid corrupt bullshit pardoned, I guess.

The abuse of clemency is one of those things that was a big deal during Trump’s first term, and now everyone is so exhausted by all the fuckery that we’re just, like, of course this is going on, of course it is, but we’re all just trying to stay alive over here under the Super-Duper El Niño’s looming skies, thank you very much.

But it’s important to remember this, because we may be in the utter shit as a country right now, but there will come a time that we will need to remember it, and put things right by perp-walking their asses right back to prison, hopefully as they are screaming their heads off in front of news cameras.

In conclusion, fuck these people!