Exactly what any lawyer showing up to a $250 million fraud case against a former US president might bring.

Interesting Choices

Yesterday, former US president and current presidential candidate Donald Trump showed up to his $250 million fraud trial, which kicked off yesterday in New York City, with a lot of words to say about the prosecution and a self-inflicted lack of jury.

And one of his lawyers, Alina Habba, showed up with a garish, light-changing gamer's laptop, as any attorney representing a former US President in a multimillion-dollar fraud suit might.

As Kotaku reports, the laptop was first noticed by an X-formerly-Twitter user named Ryan Rigney, who helms marketing for a sports anime game dubbed Omega Strikers. Referring to Habba as "gamer lawyer," Rigney took to X to speculate on the make of the device, which appears to be one of consumer electronics manufacturer Asus' ROG — short for Republic of Gamers — models.

Doing the Math

It's unclear which specific model Habba's laptop is, but Kotaku speculates that it could be the ROG Strix G17 G712 model, which features a 17-inch screen and retails for roughly $1,700. It also boasts the color-changing Asus logo, which flashed from blue to orange during the hearing.

Habba, whose other hobbies have included threats to sue the Pulitzer committee over awards given to The New York Times and The Washington Post, has yet to confirm whether she indeed plays videogames — and if so, which ones — or if she just likes the laptop for aesthetic or functional reasons.

But if she is a gamer, it wouldn't be entirely shocking, considering that she was recently accused of being wildly racist, a trait often associated with the worst parts of the gaming universe. In a civil lawsuit filed in June of last year, a former employee accused Habba, who is Assyrian-American, of constantly dropping the N-word in the office while listening to rap music and yelling "I hate that Black b****!" after losing a case to New York Attorney General Letitia James, a Black woman. (The case was settled out of court in September 2022.)

James, it's worth noting, also brought the current fraud case against the former president, with Trump calling James a "deranged lunatic" on his social media platform, Truth Social, yesterday evening.

We're not saying that everyone needs to rock uniform Macbooks in court. But bringing a color-cycling gaming laptop to court — to represent one of the most divisive figures in modern American history, no less — is an undeniably weird move, and one that certainly hasn't gone unnoticed.

Anyway. If any gamers out there find themselves in conversation with a user who loves the term "witch hunt," drops the N-word with abandon, and is more or less obsessed with New York's AG, be wary.

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