Judge who hopped the bunny trail

THE JUDGE hearing the legal fight between federal investigators and the President Trump lawyer who inked a hush agreement with a porn star knows her way around Playboy Playmates and a steamy scandal.

Judge Kimba Wood (inset), who has served in Manhattan Federal Court since 1988 and was once nominated for the U.S. attorney general post, briefly worked at a Playboy casino in 1966.

The Harvard Law grad also became tabloid fodder in the 1990s. Wood was dubbed the “Love Judge” in 1995 when the soonto-be exwife of a multimillionaire Wall Street financier found his diary, which was filled with passionate prose about his trysts with the jurist.

The illicit romance with moneyman Frank Richardson began in the spring of that year with dinners at ritzy restaurants and weekend getaways at Wood’s country home. At the time, Wood was married to a Time magazine columnist but the two were about to divorce.

Richardson — who was worth an estimated $157 million at the time — and Wood tied the knot in 1999.

Wood is highly regarded as a judge — she’s presided over numerous big cases with high-profile defendants, including the case of “Junk Bond King” Michael Milken in the late 1980s and the corruption trial of former state Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos.

Her career nearly took a different turn.

In 1993, President Bill Clinton nominated her to become the first female attorney general. But she withdrew from the nomination after the White House learned she had hired an undocumented immigrant as a baby-sitter.

Wood hadn’t broken the law employing the nanny and had paid the woman’s taxes, but the White House asked her to step aside because of similar problems with an earlier nominee.