The ethics cloud hovering over the state Attorney General’s office in the never-ending Hank Greenberg fraud case darkened Thursday, with Greenberg’s high-profile lawyer accusing the office of tampering with a witness: the lawyer himself.
Greenberg attorney David Boies revealed to The Post Thursday that in a recent phone call, an unnamed representative in the Attorney General’s office improperly asked him to downplay a controversial free plane ride from 2009.
The AG rep — described as a senior official close to AG Eric Schneiderman — asked Boies to claim in a press statement that David Ellenhorn, an assistant AG in the Greenberg fraud case, had done nothing wrong in accepting from Boies a free ride home on Boies’ private plane after a deposition in the fraud case in Omaha, Neb. in 2009.
Boies said he refused to alter the wording of his press statement, which he was then in the process of drafting, and in which he was planning to say only that Ellenhorn had done nothing wrong regarding the limited action of climbing aboard the plane.
“I declined to use the phraseology proposed by the representative of [Schneiderman’s] office for a number of reasons, including that it was my statement, [and] that I did not know whether Mr. Ellenhorn had done something wrong in failing to disclose the plane ride or in failing to make reimbursement,” Boies told The Post in a written statement.
Ellenhorn had agreed to fly home on “Air Boies” four years ago, after deposing Warren Buffet in the Greenberg case, so as to avoid the several-hour wait for a commercial flight, a source in Greenberg’s camp said. Greenberg, the former head of insurance giant AIG, was first sued for fraud by Schneiderman’s predecessor, Eliot Spitzer, in 2005, and the case is still sputtering along.
The controversial plane ride — which Ellenhorn never paid for — is one of several alleged AG ethics violations that Greenberg’s legal team is bringing to the state Joint Commission on Public Ethics, which is actively hearing testimony.
As the one who offered and shared the plane ride, Boies is a witness in that probe. It was highly improper — as well as plain odd, given the two sides’ adversarial relationship — for anyone from the AG’s office to try to put words in Boise’s mouth, his side is arguing.
“This is witness tampering, and the AG damn well had to know that — they’re prosecutors,” said one Greenberg legal source.
Greenberg’s camp is also claiming to state ethics probers that Ellenhorn lied to a judge in saying that Greenberg intends to take his Starr financial services companies public.
“No one is above the law, no matter how rich or powerful, and that is why three consecutive attorneys general have sought for nearly a decade to hold Hank Greenberg responsible for his role in a massive fraud,” Schneiderman spokesman Matt Mittenthal said in response to Boies’ allegations.
“For just as long, he has tried to evade responsibility through delay and by attacking his prosecutors. This is just the latest blatant effort to distract from the facts of the case, unworthy of a response, other than to say that Attorney General Schneiderman will not be deterred from seeking justice in this matter,” the spokesman said.