Attorneys at the public corruption trial of ex-Sheriff Terry Maketa on Friday clashed over circumstances behind the 2013 firing of a woman who had crossed him.

At issue is whether the embattled lawman committed extortion when he told top officials at a jail healthcare contractor that he would yank a $5 million medical services contract unless they terminated Wendy Habert.

“It threw us into a bit of a tailspin and we didn’t know how to respond to it,” Carl Anderson, a former a former administrator at Correctional Healthcare Companies, Inc., said during the second day of testimony in the case.

Habert, a CHC employee who worked at the jail, was fired soon after.

During testimony Thursday, Habert framed her termination as act of revenge by Maketa – partly because she accused a top-ranking sheriff’s commander of sexual harassment and partly because she refused to help Undersheriff Paula Presley, a close Maketa ally, mount a political run to succeed him as the county’s elected sheriff.

The defense, which described her as a “problem employee” during opening statements, hammered on what they portrayed as grave performance problems, including episodes in which she used obscene language during tense confrontations with both Maketa and Presley.

On Thursday, Maketa attorney David Kaplan repeatedly invoked Habert’s insult to Presley, in which she admitted calling the undersheriff a “train wreck bitch.”

He also asked about a phone call she placed to Maketa in which she said “F- you” before hanging up.

Anderson, who said he wasn’t aware of those claims at the time, agreed both incidents would raise concerns from CHC’s perspective.

But he and a second CHC official told the jury they had no reasonable grounds to terminate Habert prior to Maketa’s threat – except to save the multimillion dollar contract. Then-CHC Vice President Richard Hegstad said that even as he was notifying Habert she would be fired, he was also asking her for clues as to why.

Hegstad said he personally called Maketa for an explanation. Maketa didn’t provide one, but issued a second ultimatum, he said.

“(Maketa) stated that he wanted her fired and that we needed to do it in 48 hours.”

During cross-examination, Maketa’s attorneys suggested other explanations, including problems with accreditation at the jail and gaps in how medications were administered in the sheriff’s detoxification facility, also run by CHC.

The jury also heard from a witness who described circumstances behind the disappearance of the so-called Elder file – an internal affairs file said to contain a record of misdeeds of then-sheriff’s candidate Bill Elder during his earlier stint with the sheriff’s office.

The file was discovered missing from a file cabinet in a locked room at the Sheriff’s Office, leading Maketa to order an investigation in who took it.

Authorities allege that Presley had the file all along and that the hunt for the file was a pretext to derail Elder’s candidacy and tar his supporters inside the office.

Testimony continues this afternoon.