Trump calls former lawyer’s $50 million deal ‘obnoxious and outrageous’

By TYLER PAGER

President Donald Trump on Saturday strongly criticized his former lawyer, Alina Habba Mildon, saying it was “totally obnoxious and outrageous” for her to enter into a $50 million deal for work with a billionaire Venezuelan family seeking a pardon from the president.

Mildon, while working as a senior adviser at the Justice Department, signed on last year as an extraordinarily well-compensated general counsel for a company started by the daughter of Julio Herrera Velutini, who was granted the pardon by Trump weeks later.

At a Halloween party Saturday at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida, Trump tore into Mildon when asked about the contract, calling it “not acceptable.”

“I thought it was terrible,” he told reporters. “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.”

Mildon, who served as a personal lawyer to Trump and then briefly as the U.S. attorney in New Jersey, signed a four-year contract to represent the family. It is unclear if the deal can be terminated early.

When Trump first learned about Mildon’s arrangement from an article in The New York Times, he erupted and told aides and allies that Mildon should donate a portion of the money to his future presidential library or another Trump-related entity.

Trump said Saturday that he did not necessarily expect Mildon to make a donation to the library but suggested that someone should.

“I expect maybe the people,” he said of the Herrera family. “I don’t know if anybody wants to make it. But it’s unacceptable what she did.”

The contract calls for the Herrera family to pay Mildon $10 million a year for four years, along with a variety of bonuses. In total, she was guaranteed more than $50 million, according to interviews and documents obtained by the Times.

Mildon formally began her work for the family Jan. 1. Weeks later, Trump granted Herrera a full and unconditional pardon for a misdemeanor campaign finance violation. Herrera had faced felony bribery charges but struck an unusually lenient plea deal in 2025. Mildon previously said she played no role in Herrera’s pardon.

She did not respond to a request for comment about Trump’s criticism Saturday.