Was Alina Habba Fired From Her $50 Million Contract?

Yes. Alina Habba Mildon was fired from the contract, and the firing came in a letter dated November 4 from Concord Partners, the company that hired her, citing a "failure to perform duties." The New York Times reported the dismissal on Tuesday, and the loss is real — the four-year deal that would have paid her $10 million a year plus bonuses, more than $50 million in total, is gone. But the firing did not leave her with nothing: she keeps the $8 million signing bonus and the $6.5 million she was already paid, $14.5 million in all.

The plain reality is the sequence. Habba signed the agreement in late 2025 while she was still the acting United States attorney in New Jersey — an appointment a federal court had ruled unlawful — and she started at Concord on January 1 as its general counsel. The company was set up by Isabela Herrera, the daughter of Julio Herrera Velutini, a billionaire Venezuelan banker who was facing felony bribery charges in Puerto Rico. Two weeks after Habba started work, on January 15, President Trump pardoned Herrera. The deal was worth $50 million; the pardon was worth a man's freedom; and the woman who connected the two was the president's former lawyer, working for the family of a man the president pardoned. That is the gap people are staring at, and it is why the question is being asked.

Habba's claim is that there was no connection at all. She has said she played no role in getting the pardon, and her statement, reported by the Times, was plain: "Any insinuation that my employment — all of which has been vetted and disclosed to the DOJ — had anything to do with securing a pardon is false." She was a special government employee at the time of the pardon, a status that allowed her outside work for up to 130 days, and she says everything was disclosed. The company, for its part, gave no pardon reason for the firing at all — only "failure to perform duties" — though a person familiar with the situation told the Times her priorities had shifted after she began dating the Turkish investor Turhan Mildon earlier this year; they married in September.

Trump's claim is the other side of it. He turned on the deal in public at a Halloween party at Mar-a-Lago on October 31, calling it, as we reported at the time (read our coverage), "totally obnoxious and outrageous." According to the Times, he told his aides that the Herrera family should stop paying her. Four days later, the letter ending her contract was dated.

"I thought it was terrible. I told her, and 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. And it was far too much."

The common-sense principle is that a pardon cannot be a favour bought with a job. When a president's former lawyer is hired for $50 million by the family of a man facing federal charges, and the president then pardons that man two weeks later, the appearance alone is enough to demand a clean answer — and a clean answer is not "she used her relationship," as Trump himself put it. The money does not have to be a bribe to stink; a lawyer who served the president taking $50 million from the family of a man the president then set free is the kind of thing that makes people stop trusting pardons altogether.

The consequence is already moving in three directions. Habba has lost the contract but keeps $14.5 million, so the firing cost the family the future payments, not the fortune already paid. Congressional Democrats are investigating the circumstances of the pardon. And the timing — a public outburst from the president on October 31, a termination letter dated November 4 — leaves the question that follows standing on its own: if the deal was clean and the firing was really about her performance, why did it take the president calling it "terrible" in public for the company to decide she was failing?

The details that matter are these. Herrera's team was already working to secure a pardon when Habba was hired, and he made a $3.5 million donation to a super PAC connected to the president, according to the Times reporting. Habba resigned her acting U.S. attorney post in December after the courts ruled she was serving unlawfully, shortly before her Concord work began in January. And the firing, for all its noise, was not the end of the money — $14.5 million stays with her. If a $50 million contract can be signed in late October, a pardon can arrive in mid-January, and the only public price paid is a firing letter after the president complains — then who, in the end, is actually punished when a deal like this one comes apart?

Trump said it himself, at that Halloween party, and his words are the strongest line in the story: "I thought it was terrible. I told her, and I said, 'I don't want her paid.'"