NY probes att’y ‘judge chat’ boast
A controversial Manhattan lawyer — whose license was once suspended for telling a tenant to “commit suicide” — has sparked a state investigation after he claimed to have given the judge in Donald Trump’s civil fraud trial unsolicited advice.
Adam Leitman Bailey — whose law license was suspended for four months in 2019 over the caught-on-tape tirade — claimed to NBC New York that he spoke with Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron about the case three weeks before the judge issued his $455 million ruling against Trump in February.
“I actually had the ability to speak to him three weeks ago,” Bailey told the outlet in a Feb. 16 interview. “I saw him in the corner [at the courthouse] and I told my client, ‘I need to go.’ And I walked over and we started talking . . . I wanted him to know what I think and why . . . I really want him to get it right.”
The conversation sparked a probe by the New York judicial watchdog organization, the State Commission on Judicial Conduct, a source told NBC New York.
A judge can’t “initiate, permit or consider” communications about cases outside the presence of all parties in the matter.
Bailey said he told Engoron his view of the case’s fraud statute: that it can’t be used to take a major company, such as the Trump Organization, out of business.
Al Baker, a state courts spokesman, denied to NBC that Engoron and Bailey spoke about the case: “The decision Justice Engoron issued February 16 was his alone, was deeply considered, and was wholly uninfluenced by this individual.”