Judge in Trump case rips Adam Leitman Bailey

It all started very innocently, when the real estate lawyer Adam Leitman Bailey inadvertently walked into a hornet’s nest.

The Feb. 16 TV spot, on NBC New York, was about Donald Trump’s trial, at which Judge Arthur Engoron had just slapped Trump with a $355 million penalty and a three-year ban on doing business in New York. In a comment to the NBC reporter that was not used in the segment, Bailey mentioned that three weeks earlier he had seen the judge at the courthouse, dashed over and began discussing the case.

“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,” Bailey said.

Problem: Judges are forbidden from discussing cases without all of the parties involved present.

Bailey later clarified that he was just discussing the law at the heart of the case, not the case itself, and that he believed the interview had ended and he was off the record. But it was too late: NBC disclosed the comment, the state launched an investigation, and the Trump Organization’s lawyers filed a motion claiming Engoron, who found Trump guilty of fraud, had been compromised and should recuse himself.

The judge was not amused. He delivered a blistering response, describing the incident as an unwelcome, 90-second “tirade” and a “nothingburger” that had no influence on him or his understanding of the law in question, which he had thoroughly studied.

“I did not initiate, welcome, encourage, engage in, or learn from, much less enjoy, Bailey’s tirade,” Engoron wrote. “I would have forgotten all about it by now had Bailey not attempted [by discussing it on television] to burnish his reputation as someone who could influence judges (which would be unethical, and possibly illegal, but of which Bailey nonetheless publicly boasts).”

Engoron is at the mandatory retirement age for judges in New York and would surely not want his career to end on a tossed conviction of the highest-profile defendant ever to appear before him. When he does leave the bench, the real estate industry, which has had to go to the Appellate Division repeatedly to get Engoron’s rulings overturned, certainly won’t miss him.

Bailey, for his part, is a complicated figure who is not afraid to stir up trouble to gain leverage for landlords or tenants he is representing. He is media savvy but sometimes it backfires. In this case, he is powerless to rebut Engoron’s statement because lawyers cannot go to war with judges.

Bailey declined to comment for this story, but previously told The Hill in an email that he only talked to Engoron about a decision the judge had made last fall in the case.

“I did not think that speaking to Judge Engoron about my own personal views of his already published decision was wrong in any way,” he wrote.

There is no courthouse video footage to dispute Engoron’s depiction of the episode as a minute-and-a-half monologue and not a longer dialogue. It’s the judge’s word against the essentially muted ALB’s, so it seems unlikely that the uproar will disrupt New York Attorney General Letitia James’ conviction of Trump.

Trump’s lawyer, Chris Kise, told the Post that if Engoron and Bailey indeed talked about the case, it would “call into question the integrity of the entire case and further undermine public confidence in a New York legal system already the subject of international ridicule.”

Now, how did that ever happen?

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