Multiple legal experts brushed off Habba’s attempt to overturn the Carroll verdict. “This is a bogus motion by the Trump team. There’s nothing here,” CNN legal analyst Elie Honig said Monday night. “Every judge in that courthouse knows, socializes with, has worked with, sometimes maybe mentored, dozens, hundreds of attorneys in this city.”
“I used to practice in that courthouse in front of judges who used to be my colleagues, my supervisors,” Honig continued, citing his career as an assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. “If anything, they were tougher on me as a result of it. That is not enough for a conflict of interest.”
Attorney Andrew Fleischman noted on X (formerly Twitter) that it could be argued that the judge would have had a conflict of interest if Carroll had sued Trump in 1992, “and then the lawsuit languished for 32 years, and one of the original lawyers who filed that suit was still with the firm.” But Carroll didn’t bring her first lawsuit until 2019.