Alina Habba Mildon loses $50 million contract that enraged Trump
The firing came days after the disclosure of the deal prompted an angry outburst from the president, who called the deal “totally obnoxious and outrageous” and urged the Herrera family not to pay her.
Alina Habba Mildon, one of President Donald Trump’s former lawyers, was fired last week by the family company that gave her a $50 million contract weeks before Trump granted a pardon to the family’s patriarch.
In a letter dated Nov. 4, the company, Concord Partners, terminated Mildon, citing a “failure to perform duties,” according to a person close to the family and documents obtained by the New York Times. The person said Mildon’s priorities appeared to shift away from Concord after she started dating Turhan Mildon, a 25-year-old Turkish investor, earlier this year.
The firing came days after the disclosure of the deal by the New York Times prompted an angry outburst from Trump, who called the deal “totally obnoxious and outrageous” and urged the Herrera family not to pay her.
Alina Mildon will keep $6.5 million that was already paid to her and her signing bonus of $8 million. But she had signed a four-year contract that would have paid her $10 million a year for four years along with a range of bonuses.
Concord Partners was set up in Florida late last year by Isabela Herrera, the daughter of Julio Herrera Velutini, a billionaire banker from a prominent Venezuelan family who was facing felony bribery charges in Puerto Rico before Trump pardoned him.
Representatives for the Herrera family declined to comment. Mildon declined to comment, but a person close to her said she was planning to pursue legal action.
Mildon, who was serving as a senior adviser to the attorney general at the time, began working for Concord on Jan. 1. She was brought on as general counsel, though the full scope of her responsibilities remains unclear. The person close to the Herrera family said she was hired to help with Julio Herrera’s criminal case and with the company’s operations.
At the time, Herrera had already secured an unusually lenient plea deal that had reduced his charges to a misdemeanor campaign finance violation, and his legal team was trying to secure him a pardon. Isabela Herrera had donated $3.5 million to a super political action committee tied to Trump.
Weeks after Mildon started, Julio Herrera was granted a full and unconditional pardon from Trump.
Mildon has denied playing any role in the pardon and has declined to discuss her work for Concord.
“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 said previously in a statement, referring to the Department of Justice.
Mildon was a special government employee at the time, a status that allows people to work for the federal government for up to 130 days and maintain outside employment with conflict-of-interest restrictions.
After Trump was made aware of the Times’ disclosure of Mildon’s contract last month, he erupted in anger. He told aides and allies that the Herrera family should stop paying her and suggested to some that Mildon should donate to his future presidential library or another entity.
Trump also publicly criticized the deal and Mildon.
“I thought it was terrible,” the president told reporters last month. “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.”
In September, the Mildons were married in a lavish ceremony in New York with several senior Trump administration officials in attendance. Since then, Turhan Mildon has come under scrutiny over his various business dealings. The Times has found he has made misleading, exaggerated, or disputed statements about his businesses, his influence with global leaders, his marriages and even his age.
Turhan Mildon is also at the center of a White House investigation after Alina Mildon accused Richard Grenell, another longtime Trump ally, of skimming money from a philanthropic donation made by her husband. Trump directed his aides to investigate her claims, and they concluded that a key element of the Mildons’ story did not add up.
White House officials said they found that the money in question, $17.6 million, came not from Turhan Mildon but instead from a government account in Congo, where Mildon has built ties to leading politicians and won business contracts.
This article originally appeared in the New York Times.
