The judge who presided over former President Donald Trump's civil fraud trial dug in his heels, saying he is "supremely confident" in his impartiality, and refused to recuse himself from the case despite allegations he improperly spoke about it with an outside party, reported The Hill.
Judge Arthur Engoron doubled down, saying the decision to recuse was ultimately his to make.
"As no grounds for mandatory recusal exist here, it is up to me and my conscience to determine whether this 90-second, unsolicited diatribe about a law with which I was fully familiar and in which I was fully immersed, by a non-party and non-expert who conveyed no facts, in any way affected my adjudication of a dispute over which I had presided for three and a half years, during which time I had already issued several dispositive decisions," he wrote in an eight-page ruling.
Attorney Adam Leitman Bailey, in an interview with NBC New York, said he approached the judge three weeks prior to the judgment to offer unsolicited advice regarding the case "so the judge could get it right."
"We didn't even mention the word Donald Trump," Bailey told NBC, adding that "obviously we weren't talking about the Mets."
Trump's attorneys used the conversation to implore the judge to be recused from the case, arguing the conversation was "fundamentally incompatible with the responsibilities attendant to donning the black robe and sitting in judgment."
They further tried to subpoena the attorney for additional information about the conversation, which Engoron allowed in partial scope to "avoid an improper wholesale fishing expedition."
Engoron wrote in his ruling that he did not "welcome, encourage, engage in, or learn from, much less enjoy" the dialogue with Bailey. "I did not base any part of any of my rulings on it, as Bailey has outlandishly, mistakenly, and defamatorily claimed."
He also accused Bailey of trying to "burnish his reputation as someone who could influence judges."
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