On Wednesday, JD Vance did the one thing JD Vance knows how to do with full commitment: lie through his teeth about something he fully knows is bullshit. In this case, claiming that Donald Trump “hates the idea of people enriching themselves fraudulently over access to the government.”
Remember, this is the same Donald Trump who dismantled the FBI and DOJ teams that handled public corruption because they had been involved in investigating himself. That alone appears to already be letting politicians off the hook in bribery cases. It’s the same Donald Trump who personally profited by over $2 billion in his first year in office. There are widespread reports of insider trading based on knowledge from his position as president. There are the sketchy settlement deals he gets to do with himself to take taxpayer money. The corruption is so blatant it would be hard to believe if we weren’t watching it happen.
Perhaps JD Vance means that Trump is fine with Trump enriching himself via public office… but “hates the idea” of others taking money that should be going directly to Trump himself.
And there’s now a story that can be used to test Vance’s claims. It involves Trump’s former personal lawyer, Alina Habba, who he tried and failed to appoint as a US Attorney (she held the position temporarily until a court said she was illegally appointed) and who was accused in a lawsuit of conning a former Trump golf club worker into signing an illegal NDA by posing as a neutral ally rather than someone looking out for Trump. A bombshell NY Times report reveals that the family of Julio Herrera Velutini, a billionaire desperate for a pardon, gave Habba a $50 million contract, and the pardon soon followed. Not surprisingly, Habba insists the two things are unrelated, but come on.
We’ve talked in the past about the idea of “soft corruption,” where even the mere appearance of potential corruption massively diminishes trust in government. Here, it’s difficult to see how the “soft” modifier even applies.
The article points out that he hired a different former Trump lawyer, Chris Kise, as well as donated $3.5 million to a Trump PAC directly, but it wasn’t enough to secure a pardon (he did get a very light plea deal — dropping federal bribery, conspiracy, and wire fraud charges in exchange for pleading guilty to a campaign finance violation — from the Trump DOJ, but he wanted a full pardon). So then the family turned to Habba, who was still occupying the US Attorney’s office in New Jersey (despite a court having ruled she was doing so illegally) when she signed the deal:
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.
Under the agreement, Ms. Habba would become general counsel at Concord Partners, a company that Ms. Herrera set up in late October 2025 in Florida. The company has no public profile and its business remains unclear even to some people associated with the Herrera business empire. Ms. Habba finalized her deal days after the company was registered, while she was still serving as U.S. attorney in New Jersey.
Even if you want to argue that the contract itself is legitimate, the fact that she took it while serving as the US Attorney should ring all sorts of alarm bells.
So should this:
She formally began her work for Concord Partners on Jan. 1. Weeks later, Mr. Trump granted Mr. Herrera a full and unconditional pardon.
By then, Ms. Habba was a senior adviser to Attorney General Pam Bondi, overseeing U.S. attorneys. She had an office at the Justice Department and a protective detail from the U.S. Marshals, a holdover from her time serving as the U.S. attorney in New Jersey.
The sequence of events raises questions about how Mr. Herrera secured the pardon and who might have helped him. People familiar with Ms. Habba’s contract said they believed that she was brought in to help with Mr. Herrera’s push for a pardon and expressed surprise at the scale of the compensation.
When a sitting US Attorney lands a $50 million contract from the family of a man seeking a pardon, and the pardon shows up weeks after she starts that new made up job (while still working for the DOJ in an advisory role!), that’s about as blatant as corruption gets.
Part of the problem with not cracking down on corruption is that it invites ever more blatant corruption, while destroying whatever trust the public has left in government. When the public sees that people are going into public service to effectively get massively lucrative deals from criminals, it makes the entire government suspect.
There has always been some corruption in the US government, but it was limited, and those involved at least tried to hide it. Those days are over, and the Trump/MAGA movement seems to be looting everything it can get its hands on while it can. But sure, JD, tell us again how much Trump “hates the idea of people enriching themselves over access to the government.”