Lawyer Defends Remarks About Judge : Courts: In a contentious hearing, attorney Stephen Yagman describes how he formed his opinion that a federal judge is ‘anti-Semitic.’

Civil rights lawyer Stephen Yagman said Friday that he called a Los Angeles federal judge “anti-Semitic” because he had a good-faith belief that the accusation was true.

The Venice attorney was testifying in a virtually unprecedented hearing at which an obscure disciplinary committee is seeking to bar him from practicing in federal court in seven Southern California counties because he accused U.S. District Judge William D. Keller of being anti-Semitic, a buffoon and “probably one of the worst judges in the United States.”

Yagman, 48, said he formed his opinions about Keller, a conservative 58-year-old Ronald Reagan appointee, by observing the judge in court, reading some of his decisions and talking to about a dozen attorneys.

During a contentious hearing at the Los Angeles federal courthouse Friday, Yagman said one of the bases for his accusation was a sanction Keller issued against him that described Yagman as “pestiferous.”

Yagman said he was greatly offended by the word, which means “diseased.” He said it was frequently used by Nazis to describe Jews.

The attorney also said the fact that the judge had hired Jewish law clerks did not prove that Keller was not anti-Semitic. “It’s well known, at least in my family, that Hitler used Jewish doctors,” he said.

Keller was not in court for the hearing, which is being conducted by three of his fellow federal court judges--Edward Rafeedie, John G. Davies and David W. Williams. At a hearing in the case last month, West Los Angeles criminal lawyer Robert K. Steinberg said Keller was distraught about Yagman’s charges.

Steinberg testified in August that Yagman told him two years ago that he had leveled the charges at Keller in an attempt to force the judge to disqualify himself from cases that Yagman files on behalf of police brutality victims. Yagman denies having said that.

Yagman attacked the credibility of Steinberg, the sole witness who has offered testimony for the disciplinary committee on Yagman’s alleged improper motives.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Larry Longo, who prosecuted Steinberg in 1985 for filing a false police report, testified that Steinberg had a poor reputation for telling the truth and said he was “very deranged” at the time of the earlier case. American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Paul Hoffman said Steinberg had said things that were untrue when they worked on a case last year.

In a highly unusual move, Yagman called another federal trial judge, J. Spencer Letts, to the witness stand. Letts testified that he had presided at three of Yagman’s trials and that the attorney had never tried to mislead him.

The judges refused to allow Yagman’s attorney, former U.S. Atty. Gen. Ramsey Clark, to call presiding federal Judge Manuel L. Real to ask about how he selected the members of the special disciplinary committee that filed the charges against Yagman.