President Donald Trump’s favorite attorney, Alina Habba, made an embarrassing gaffe on live TV while trying to nail Kamala Harris.
Habba, Trump’s former personal lawyer, was speaking being interviewed on Newsmax on Monday when she mixed up former baseball player Reggie Jackson with Rev. Jesse Jackson, the civil rights giant who died last month at 84.
Her flub was made all the more embarrassing because she was trying to land a punch on Harris, the former vice president and Democratic nominee.
“If you look at Kamala Harris’ comments of desperation at Reggie Jackson’s funeral, and she didn’t even know him, if you look at this, they’re reaching so far,” she said.
Habba managed to make quite a few mistakes in just a few seconds. For one, her Jackson flub was double-barreled, as the baseball legend she accidentally mentioned is still alive. Also, Harris did know the person Jesse Jackson, having appeared with him at public events and worked in civil rights networks.
Habba, whose appointment as acting U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey was struck down by a judge, was rattled by Harris’s comments at the funeral in Chicago last Friday.
“Let me just start out by saying: I predicted a lot of what is happening right now,” Harris said, with a laugh. “I hate to say I told you so, but we did see it coming.”
Continuing, she noted, “But what I did not predict is that we would not have Jesse Jackson with us right now to help us get through this.”
Three former presidents, Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and Bill Clinton, also spoke at the memorial service.
Obama also took a swipe at Trump—and like Harris did not mention him by name. “Each day we wake up to some new assault on our democratic institutions, another setback to the idea of the rule of law, an offense to common decency. Every day you wake up to, to things you just didn’t think were possible,” he said.
Trump himself seized on Jackson’s passing to take cheap shots at Obama, America’s first Black president. “Jesse was a force of nature like few others before him. He had much to do with the Election, without acknowledgment or credit, of Barack Hussein Obama, a man who Jesse could not stand,” Trump wrote on Truth Social last month.
Trump framed his own relationship with Jackson as one of mutual respect and admiration.
