FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (AP) — President-elect Donald Trump has announced that he is appointing one of his lawyers in the New York hush money case as an adviser to the president.
Alina Habba, 40, defended Trump earlier this year and also served as his legal spokesperson. Habba has been spending time with the president-elect at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida since the election.
“She has been steadfast in her loyalty and unparalleled in her determination – she has stood by me through countless ‘trials’, battles and countless days in court,” Trump posted on his social network Truth Social. “Few understand the weaponization of ‘injustice’. System better than Alina.”
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Trump became the first former US president to be convicted of a crime when a New York jury found him guilty in May of all 34 charges in a scheme to illegally influence the 2016 election through a hush money payment to a porn actor who said the two had done so. sex.
During Trump’s first term, the adviser position was held by Republican strategist Kellyanne Conway. Habba is of Iraqi descent and is Chaldean, Iraq’s largest Christian denomination and one of the Eastern Rites of the Catholic Church.
Habba regularly accompanied Trump on the campaign trail and was one of the speakers at the rally at the end of October in Madison Square Garden in New York.
On Sunday, Trump also announced that he is bringing back former aide Michael Anton as director of policy planning at the State Department. Anton was spokesperson for the National Security Council from 2017 to 2018.
Trump said he will also appoint Michael Needham, former chief of staff to Senator Marco Rubio, as a State Department adviser. The senator from Florida was chosen by Trump as his next secretary of state.
