Roberta Kaplan (Courtesy photo)
Donald Trump and his lawyers are still trying to prolong E. Jean Carroll – and to bring with him his lawyer, Roberta Kaplan.
Last week, Justice Lewis Kaplan (no link) granted Carroll’s motion to expedite the briefing on her request to disburse the nearly $5.8 million the court has held for her since May 2023, when the first jury found he sexually assaulted and defamed her. At the time, the parties had signed a stipulation agreeing that the $5 million verdict and statutory interest would be held in court until the final disposition of the case. On June 29, the Supreme Court bounced Trump’s petition for certiorari without known dissent. Now it’s time to pay!
And yet…
On July 3, Trump’s lawyers filed what they called “motion to amend/correct” Judge Kaplan’s order to expedite. And by modify, they mean “reconsider” – or, more precisely “reverse” – and “restore the normal briefing schedule to which President Trump is entitled under the Court’s local rules.” Their only justification appears to be that Trump has a new lawyer, Josh Halpern, since his previous lawyer, Justin Smith, was just confirmed to the Eighth Circuit. But Trump says he’s going to ask the Supreme Court to reconsider his certificate denial, so maybe it will take him more than a week to make a non-sanctionable argument that he has the right to maintain his own stipulation because he wants to ask his six best friends to do him right.
Carroll’s attorney, Roberta Kaplan, was ready for this one.
Later in the day, she noted that Trump himself had nominated Smith to the bench in February and was therefore clearly aware that he would need a lawyer. But it doesn’t matter, since Alina Habba’s former partner, Michael Madaio, has been on the case since the beginning, so he won’t need time to get up to speed.
But these are just table stakes. Kaplan also reported media reports that Trump’s own Justice Department attempted to prosecute Carroll for his conduct in this very matter.
“While we did not want to raise unnecessary details with Your Honor, in light of the Defendant’s continued shenanigans, we believe it is entirely appropriate to bring certain developments to your attention, as they demonstrate the wisdom of the Court’s decision to require an expedited briefing and allow this matter to finally come to an end,” she wrote.
Specifically, the DOJ is investigating whether Carroll lied during an October 2020 deposition at this symposium:
HABBA: Are you currently paying your lawyer’s fees?
CARROLL: This is an emergency.
HABBA: So you’re not paying any expenses or anything out of your pocket to date; is this correct?
CARROLL: I’m not sure about the expenses. I have to look that up.
HABBA: Is anyone else paying your legal fees, Ms. Carroll?
CARROLL: No.
On the eve of the trial, Kaplan wrote to Habba explaining that, although Carroll had told the truth to the best of her memory in 2020, “she now remembers that at one point her attorney obtained additional funding from a nonprofit organization to offset certain expenses and legal fees.”
Habba did his best to do this one thing in 2023, but all she managed to do was get an additional deposition from Carroll about litigation funding. But now the DOJ is trying (or trying) to use that three-year-old deposition to take out not only Carroll, but also LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, a prolific Democratic funder whose nonprofit, American Future Republic, paid part of Carroll’s legal fees.
That investigation appears to have failed following a massive public backlash, with U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros insisting that his office “has not opened – and has never opened – a criminal investigation into E. Jean Carroll.”
Notably, he did not say that he never investigated Hoffman or his nonprofit, which is an entity located in the Northern District of Illinois. But that’s just as well either way, since Boutros currently has his work cut out for him in dismissing indictments and fending off the Broadview 6 after it was revealed that his team routinely engaged in grand jury misconduct.
That should have been the end of the matter. But instead, a conservative watchdog group, the National Legal and Policy Center, filed a lawsuit. complaint at the bar against Kaplan with the New York Attorney Grievance Committee.
From Carroll’s confusion over who was paying for his case, NLPC attorney Paul Kamenar infers that Kaplan must have lied to his own client. But Kamenar, who has been practicing law since the 1970s, seems confused about the difference between a lawyer’s fees and expenses.
“Would these legal fees paid by Reid Hoffman be considered a gift to Ms. Carroll and would then be counted as a payment by Ms. Carroll to Ms. Kaplan, in which case they would constitute taxable income to Ms. Kaplan? he asks himself. “Although contingency fees constitute taxable income for an attorney, how were the legal fees paid by Reid Hoffman accounted for?
It then demands “at a minimum” that the AGC, which is part of the New York Supreme Court, unseal the additional deposition ordered by Justice Kaplan, of the Southern District of New York.
That’s a bit too much coming from a guy who gets called an “expert in overcriminalization”. And it seems that failed to impress Judge Kaplan.
On July 4, he rejected Trump’s motion to “amend/correct.” The president will have to explain on Tuesday why he should be entitled to a new delay in a case which has now dragged on for four years.
Lots of luck.
Liz Dye produces Law and Chaos Substack And podcast. You can register by clicking on the logo:
