DOJ News: Alina Habba Faces Ethics Charges Over Bedminster

The latest doj news is a formal ethics complaint against one of President Donald Trump's best-known former lawyers, and it reaches back to a deal struck years before she ever represented him. Alina Habba Mildon, who served for half of 2025 as the Trump administration's acting United States attorney for New Jersey, is facing discipline from the New Jersey Supreme Court's Office of Attorney Ethics over a settlement she brokered at Trump National Golf Club Bedminster in 2021. The complaint, filed on Tuesday and obtained exclusively by The Washington Sun, calls for her to be punished and puts her license to practice law at risk.

The case centres on a restaurant server at the Bedminster club, Alice Bianco, who had alleged that she was sexually harassed by her manager at work. According to the ethics complaint, Habba Mildon stepped into the middle of that dispute, befriended the young server, and steered her toward a settlement that included a nondisclosure agreement New Jersey law does not allow in workplace harassment cases. Investigators say the agreement was worth far less than the claim it extinguished, and that Habba Mildon created the impression she was acting as Bianco's own lawyer while she was, in fact, a dues-paying member of the club on the other side of the table.

The ethics complaint does not concern her work for Trump directly. It concerns what she did in the weeks before Trump hired her firm, and the questions it raises about whose interests she was serving when she did it.

The $15,000 Settlement at the Center of the Case

Bianco began working at the Bedminster club in 2021. She was 21 years old. According to the complaint, she hired a lawyer and pursued a claim against the club on the grounds that her manager had sexually harassed her at work. That lawyer was pressing the case when Habba Mildon entered the picture.

Text messages reviewed by The Washington Sun show that Habba Mildon befriended Bianco and encouraged her to drop her lawyer and work with Habba Mildon instead. The complaint describes Bianco as a young woman who was unfamiliar with the law and lacked meaningful support and sophistication in matters of work, education and life experience. Habba Mildon, by contrast, was an experienced lawyer and a member of the very club Bianco was accusing.

The complaint says Bianco sought 10,000 dollars from the club, while Habba Mildon was privately in talks with the club for more than that, a gap investigators say deepened Bianco's impression that Habba Mildon was acting as her counsel. On August 8, 2021, the club agreed to pay Bianco 15,000 dollars to settle the matter. Three days later, Habba Mildon's law partner, Michael Madaio, prepared the settlement paperwork and a nondisclosure agreement, even though New Jersey does not allow such agreements in workplace harassment cases.

The agreement's terms were the heart of the problem. The complaint says the document contained provisions that violated New Jersey law by attempting to subject Bianco to significant monetary penalties if confidentiality were breached. Earlier reporting on the case put the penalty at 1,000 dollars for every day Bianco spoke about the underlying events. The ethics officials allege that the settlement devalued Bianco's case, trading away a harassment claim for a sum that bore little relation to what it might have been worth.

A Club Member Acting as Counsel

The complaint's central accusation is that Habba Mildon was engaged in a concurrent conflict of interest when she brokered the deal. The phrase captures the ethics office's view of what went wrong: she was acting for both sides of a dispute at once, and the side she appeared to be helping was the one that lost out.

State investigators found that Habba Mildon paid more than 156,000 dollars in club membership dues between 2020 and 2025, meaning she was an active member of Trump's club when she brokered the deal between Bianco and Trump's company. The complaint argues that her actions created an implied attorney-client relationship with Bianco, even though she had never formally taken Bianco on as a client. In the ethics office's account, Bianco believed Habba Mildon was her lawyer, and Habba Mildon did nothing to correct that belief while the settlement was being arranged.

The complaint says Habba Mildon's conduct did exactly that, and that the result was a settlement that served the club far better than it served the server.

Habba Mildon has offered a different account of her role. According to the complaint, she told ethics officials during an October 10, 2024 interview and in written submissions that, from her point of view, she was a neutral third party whose job was to make everybody happy and move the matter along so that everyone could get along with their lives. In previous interviews with The Washington Sun, Bianco made clear that she was operating with the understanding that Habba Mildon was her lawyer. The gap between those two accounts is, in effect, what the disciplinary case is about.

How the Complaint Reached This Point

The ethics complaint is the product of a multiyear investigation that largely remained under wraps. The Washington Sun reported in 2025 that Habba Mildon had been under investigation by New Jersey state ethics officials for over a year. The case appeared to be going nowhere until the complaint was filed on Tuesday, transforming a quiet inquiry into a public disciplinary action.

The underlying dispute had already produced two further settlements before the ethics office acted. After the 2021 agreement, Bianco hired another New Jersey lawyer, Nancy Erika Smith, who sued Trump's golf club and won an 82,500 dollar settlement that left Habba Mildon out of the deal and exposed her to further legal liability. The club's settlement with Bianco did not release Habba Mildon, leaving room for Bianco to pursue claims against her personally. In 2024, The Washington Sun broke the news that Habba Mildon had quietly settled the matter with Bianco. The complaint now reveals that the golf club and Habba Mildon ended up paying Bianco a total of 400,000 dollars.

The ethics referral itself was part of Bianco's original case. Her lawsuit had asked the court to refer Habba Mildon to the New Jersey Office of Attorney Ethics for inducing Bianco to give up her rights and enter into a settlement that was illegal and unconscionable. That request set in motion the investigation that has now produced a formal complaint, five years after the settlement was signed. Ethics investigations are conducted in private, and the public typically learns of them only when a complaint is filed.

The June Interview and the Admission

The complaint contains one detail that is likely to dominate the case: during a June 10, 2026 interview with state ethics officials, Habba Mildon acknowledged that her actions violated New Jersey's rules of professional conduct. The admission, as described in the charging document, is the closest thing to a concession the ethics office has obtained in five years of investigating the matter, and it sits at the centre of the complaint's argument that discipline is warranted.

The complaint also points to what it describes as multiple conflicting statements by Habba Mildon about how she came to be involved in the Bedminster dispute. Her lawyer, Thomas Quinn, provided a statement on March 15, 2023, saying that Trump had asked her to handle an internal employee dispute for the club, which she successfully did. Three years later, Habba Mildon disavowed that account. The complaint pointed to the conflicting statements, and to her decision to approve the release of that letter, assertedly without review, as a reflection of her cavalier attitude toward the disciplinary process.

The charging document adds a further accusation that goes beyond the Bianco settlement. It accuses Habba Mildon of failing to properly maintain records at her law firm, including client ledger cards and documents pertaining to attorney trust accounts. Taken together, the complaint paints a picture of a lawyer who treated the rules as flexible: she acted for both sides of a dispute, used an agreement the law forbids, gave conflicting accounts of her role, and failed to keep the records the rules require.

A Career Built on Trump's Legal Fights

The settlement at Bedminster came just before Habba Mildon's career changed completely. Less than a month after the club agreed to pay Bianco, Trump hired her New Jersey law firm to provide general legal services, including representing him in various litigation matters. The timing of that deal would not become public for years. She went on to represent Trump in a bank fraud case brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James, as well as in journalist E. Jean Carroll's rape and defamation trials against the president.

Those cases carried her into the second Trump administration. For half of 2025 she served as the acting United States attorney for New Jersey, a position that several courts eventually deemed she held unlawfully. By the time the ethics complaint was filed, she had left that role and was serving as a senior adviser to the attorney general, a post she held while also taking on private work that would itself become a separate controversy.

New Jersey and New York state bar records still list Habba Mildon, using her maiden name, Alina Habba, as an actively licensed attorney in both states, although they currently show her based in Palm Beach, Florida. The ethics complaint now threatens that standing.

The complaint arrives in the middle of a difficult stretch for Habba Mildon. She made headlines in September with her wedding to Turkish investor Turhan Mildon, and subsequent reporting by The New York Times revealed that she was embroiled in a lucrative deal with Julio Herrera Velutini, a prominent Venezuelan financier seeking a pardon from the Trump White House. The Times reported on Tuesday that she was fired last week and lost her 50 million dollar contract with the Herrera family's company, a development covered separately by TrendSignal. The ethics complaint is a separate matter, arising from a different episode, but it lands on top of a career already under intense scrutiny.

What Happens Next

The immediate question is what punishment the ethics office will seek, and what the disciplinary process will produce. The formal complaint calls for punishing Habba Mildon, including putting her law license at risk. In New Jersey, attorney discipline cases are heard by a disciplinary board and ultimately decided by the state Supreme Court, which can impose sanctions ranging from a reprimand to suspension or disbarment. The process is not quick, and Habba Mildon will have the opportunity to answer the complaint and contest the charges.

Habba Mildon did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the complaint. She has previously defended her conduct, telling CNN in 2023 that she always conducted herself ethically and acted no differently in this circumstance. That statement was made before the ethics office filed its complaint and before the June interview in which she acknowledged the violations. Whether she maintains that position now, and how she answers the specific charges, will shape the case in the months ahead.

The broader significance of the case extends beyond one lawyer. New Jersey's ban on nondisclosure agreements in workplace harassment cases was designed to prevent exactly the kind of settlement at issue here: a worker pressured into silence for a small sum, with the threat of financial penalties hanging over her if she spoke. If the disciplinary board agrees, the case will stand as a warning to lawyers who step into disputes where their loyalties are divided. For now, the complaint stands as the most serious professional threat Habba Mildon has faced. The contract she lost last week cost her tens of millions of dollars. The ethics case could cost her something harder to replace: the license that made her a lawyer in the first place.

Source: The Washington Sun