Today is the first day of former president Donald Trump’s $250 million fraud trial in New York. A case brought by the state’s attorney general accuses the Republican primary frontrunner of lying about his net worth by billions of dollars to try to secure more favorable loan terms. One of his attorneys, Alina Habba, showed up with what appears to be an Asus ROG gaming laptop. Its RGB logo changed colors during the hearing.
Update 10/5/2023 11:54 a.m. ET: Habba did not respond to a request for comment but did tweet about this story three days after it was published to clarify that the laptop actually belonged to the court and was used for the live transcript feed. She just happened to be the person seated in front of it.
“When the world thinks you’re a gamer because the court’s live transcript feed computer is placed in front of you #fakenews #notagamer,” she tweeted.
Original story follows.
The laptop was spotted by Ryan Rigney, marketing director for the recently released anime sports game, Omega Strikers. “Gamer lawyer brought the 2070ti asus laptop with the blue underglow to the court hearing,” he tweeted. Various pictures taken at different times during the hearing appear to show the Asus ROG emblem on the front of the laptop, as well as the underglow, cycling from blue to orange.
The laptop in question looks like it could be the ROG Strix G17 G712 model. Originally released in 2021, it sports a 17-inch screen, an RTX 2070 Super GPU, 2.3 GHz Intel i7, 16GB of DDR4 memory, and of course, an RGB keyboard and light bar with Asus’ Aura Sync. It currently sells for about $1,700.
Habba did not immediately respond to a request for comment about what the exact model of the laptop was, how often she games on it, or if Trump has ever watched her play on it.
During today’s court poceedings, Habba, who is also a senior advisor for Trump’s Super Pac, MAGA Inc., told the judge in the case that, “There was no intent to defraud, period, the end.” The ex-president, who was also indicted in August on four criminal counts related to alleged attempts to overthrow the government, tried to delay the current fraud case and get it thrown out but was ultimately unsuccessful.
Habba didn’t get her law degree until 2010, and didn’t meet Trump for the first time until 2019. She was previously accused of racist behavior in a 2022 lawsuit by a former employee at her law firm, including saying “I hate that Black b*tch” about New York Attorney General Letitia James, who brought the current fraud case against Trump. There were also allegedly recordings of her loudly “dropping ‘N’ bombs” while rapping along to music in her New Jersey law office. The lawsuit was settled out of court later that year.