Last week, as part of the emerging ‘Layla Coda’ moment around President Trump, I flagged this story about a nasty feud between Alina Habba and her erstwhile pal and Trump fixer Ric Grenell. Habba went to the White House with the explosive charge that her now-husband, a Turkish nepo-oligarch named Turhan Mildon, had given $6 million to Grenell for the Kennedy Center, then Trump’s top vanity/legacy project. But Grenell, she claimed, had siphoned the money off, presumably for himself. At the time Grenell was running the Kennedy Center. Mildon first came into the Trump orbit because he had major ties to the Maduro regime and major holdings in Venezuela. So he needed to get juice in Trump world so he didn’t lose his toys when MAGA started to dividing up the spoils after the US invasion. But now it seems Habba, now Alina Mildon after her marriage last month, may have bitten off way more than she and Turhan can chew.
After making the initial accusation, the Turhans have been talking much less than Grenell. Her story had also shifted around a bit, according to the initial Times report. The $6 million, or possibly $5.6 million, was to be carved out of a $17.6 million check for some other unspecified business deal. But when Habba, or rather her husband’s lawyers, presented the White House with the evidence for this transaction the source of cash was redacted.
This seems like an astonishingly silly move. If you’re going to level an accusation like this against a top Trump loyalist, I don’t think they’re going to let you be cute about holding some information back. And let’s be real: it’s the White House! They have the ability to ferret out maybe any financial information in the world? Treasury, IRS, FBI … it’s not going to stay secret. And as a Times follow up reports, “the transfer was made from a bank account affiliated with the Congolese government,” where Mildon also has extensive business holdings, just like in Venezuela. And there’s more: The 29 year old nepo-garch, Mildon, is an “advisor” to the President of Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and even holds a Congolese diplomatic passport. So this relationship involves much more than some occasional advice.
Here it’s important to note that the DRC has a long history of being riddled with corruption. The current President, Félix Tshisekedi, took office in the first peaceful transfer of power in the country’s history. But he succeeded Joseph Kabila who had been in power since 2001 when he succeded his father Laurent Kabila who took power from notorious dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. The election was rife with irregularities and reported vote-rigging and many suspect that Tshisekedi came to power through a deal with Joseph Kabila. The point is, almost $18 million dollars from a bank account controlled by the Congolese government to a clutch of Trump cronies sounds bad. Probably really bad.
Now, what about Grenell? As I noted last week, Grenell’s as nasty as they come. But he’s not an idiot. So I was and remain skeptical that the Habba/Mildon’s really have the goods on him. But it’s not clear he’s totally out of the woods. The money was sent from the DRC to a TX-AT, a security and defense firm in Texas. But Grenell conceded to the Times that he had consulted for TX-AT in 2024 though he said he was no longer involved with them by the time this transaction took place.
We basically don’t know what happened here. What was the business deal that was supposed to take up the other $11 million? What was TX-AT’s role? Did Grenell siphon the money? And if he didn’t, where is it? Remember: Habba isn’t some outside hanger-on. She’s currently the Senior Advisor to the Attorney General for US Attorneys. Was this Congolese money a bribe? I think the best way to understand this is that the details don’t really matter that much in terms of where this might go as a story in news and politics. What we have here is a good example of the kind of unrestrained and egregious corruption we’ve known is happening basically everywhere in the Trump world. Trump and his family have done tons of this. But Trump won’t get in the way of Trump getting his money. As President he can operate at a high level. Mohammad bin Salman can just “invest” in Jared’s fund. A UAE royal can buy a 49% stake in the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial. I’m sure there’s tons more worse stuff by the Trump family we don’t know about yet. My point is that the Trumps can operate near the head of state level, more or less in the open. As President, in the perverse system Trump has created, his actions as President create a bubble of impunity that follows him everywhere and in everything he does.
There’s no law, no rules for anyone else either. But the second and third tier players have to go dirtier and more in the shadows. It’s always detail that gives a story legs, that generates a succession of new questions that want to be answered. The fact that you have two Trump cronies at war with each other here makes this more difficult to contain. And, critically, these revelations all come at a moment when Trump seems to have basically zero patience for bad sleaze publicity. And that in itself invites more press attention because stories gain momentum when there’s an accountability moment they might be building toward. This isn’t legal accountability – though perhaps there’s some chance of that in the future. But the prospect of getting tossed off MAGA island can have the same effect in press terms.
Perhaps there was some reason driving Habba to take these charges to the White House that truly gave her no choice. But it sounds more like it was a grudge match she was hungry to escalate without realizing it might spin out of her control and take on a life of its own.
