An attorney hoping to overturn a rent freeze for tenants in roughly 1 million stabilized apartments is asking a judge to order top city officials and members of the Rent Guidelines Board to sit for interviews after communications they turned over to the court failed to produce clear evidence that they colluded to reach the decision not to raise rents.

Attorney Randy Mastro, who served as a deputy mayor under previous Mayor Eric Adams, is representing a group of landlords suing to block the rent freeze for new two-year leases, which took effect Thursday. The landlords accuse the nine-member Rent Guidelines Board of conducting a “sham” process meant to deliver on Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s campaign pledge to “freeze the rent.” They have asked a judge to block the freeze and require the board to vote again.

The mayor appoints the members of the nine-person Rent Guidelines Board, but the panel is supposed to function as an independent body that considers data on landlord and tenant expenses and listens to public testimony before making its decision.

The rent freeze took effect Thursday, Oct. 1.

Manhattan Judge Brendan Lantry last week ordered 13 top city officials, including Mamdani, nine members of the Rent Guidelines Board and four board staff members to turn over email and text communications to Mastro and landlords who filed the lawsuit.

Mastro submitted several email and text communications as exhibits in the case Thursday. They largely show officials from the mayor’s office coordinating with prospective members about their appointments to the board and confirming board meeting times and agenda items.

In one text message exchange, Mamdani greets a new member of the board, Brandon Mancilla. In another, the director of Mamdani’s Office to Protect Tenants, Cea Weaver, encouraged Mancilla to take a position on the board in February.

“I’m saying yes,” Mancilla responded to Weaver.

Other messages show City Hall staff members arranging times to present a report on the “True Cost of Living” to the board — material the board had not considered as part of its data reviews in prior years. Another shows a board member invited the Mayor’s Office of Equity and Racial Justice to give a presentation.

But in a letter to Judge Lantry, Mastro said the emails and text messages showed “the contacts between City Hall and the RGB were not only substantial, but also shocking, in that they show coordination and collaboration throughout the RGB’s process.” He asked the judge to force officials to be interviewed as “central witnesses” involved in the text and email exchanges.

Mastro did not immediately respond to a request to comment on what he hoped to learn by deposing Mamdani officials.

Mamdani commented on the lawsuit in response to questions at an unrelated press conference on Thursday, where he cited reporting by Gothamist about Mastro’s own exchanges with the Rent Guidelines Board when he served as first deputy mayor last year.

Former Board Chair Doug Apple told Gothamist that Mastro had spoken with him by phone and “advocated for a low vote” as the board considered a one-year increase up to 4.75%.

The board voted to raise rents by 3%.

“It was ironic to read the reporting in Gothamist that the man who is suing our administration on the basis that we have influenced the independent Rent Guidelines Board is now being accused of having influenced the rent guidelines board when they raised rents,” Mamdani said.

Mastro confirmed he did have conversations with Apple, but said there was “a world of difference between conveying to the board chair that the mayor disagreed with the board’s decision and orchestrating what he called “a sham process with a preordained outcome to do exactly what the mayor dictated and promised in his campaign.”

Mamdani named six of the board’s members after he took office at the beginning of the year. His pledge to “freeze the rent” formed a key pillar of his successful mayoral campaign in 2025, but he stopped publicly calling for the freeze after taking office in January.

The Rent Guidelines Board approved the first-ever freeze on new two-year leases at its annual meeting in June, inciting fury among landlords who said the board ignored data on rising owner costs.

Mamdani also urged tenants who are unsure whether the rent freeze applied to them to call 311 and speak to the city’s tenant helpline. The freeze applies to all one-year and two-year leases for New Yorkers in rent-stabilized apartments.

“If you are in a rent stabilized apartment whether you’re here or watching from home any lease renewal starting today must remain at the same rent that it was last year,” he said at Thursday’s press conference.