Welcome to All the President’s People, a new series of profiles documenting the ever-expanding list of characters who populate Donald Trump’s second term.
Alina Habba had a request. “Use a good picture, okay?” were her first words to me after hello. “One where I don’t look haggard, which is hard to find these days.”
Probably she was joking. Yet Habba, always direct, had cut to a central question in her rapid rise from low-profile northern New Jersey lawyer to glossy power player in President Donald Trump ’s vast inner circle, and now to the job of US attorney for New Jersey: How much of Habba’s sudden prominence is about style, and how much is about substance?
“He hired her for his own amusement,” says Ty Cobb, an attorney who was a member of Trump’s White House legal team duri