In a Monday appearance on MSNBC's "The Rachel Maddow Show," Shawn Crowley and Roberta Kaplan, the lawyers for longtime columnist E. Jean Carroll's defamation trial against former President Donald Trump, spoke candidly about defense attorney Alina Habba's behavior in court.
Maddow kicked things off by playing a clip of Habba responding to a reporter's questions, in which she alleged that she was not "having any second thoughts about representing President Trump. It is the proudest thing I could ever do."
Maddow then followed by asking Carroll's legal team, "How is President Trump's lawyering? Is he well represented in court?"
"I'm going let Crowley get to that," Kaplan said. "But I will say that what you heard just now in that tape of Alina Habba leaving the court and kind of yelling at the reporters, that's what we heard every single day, multiple times during this trial, but yelling at the judge. And it was unbelievably nerve-wrecking each time it happened, and it happened multiple times every day."
"Yeah. Thanks for handing that one over to me," Crowley chimed in. "I think that she had a hard job, and you could definitely see a difference between her sort of style when he was in the courtroom and when he was not there. She was much more disciplined and frankly acted more like a lawyer when he wasn't there. When he was, you could hear him telling her when to object and muttering things, and loudly being frustrated with her. And I think she felt like she had to say things to the judge and to us and sort of put on a performance, like you just saw, in front of the TV cameras."
