Anyone who has tried to get information out of the FBI via the Freedom of Information Act might appreciate a ruling rendered Tuesday by an impatient-sounding U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly.

Ralph Schoenman, who is described as a political activist and author, has been seeking documents from the FBI and other federal agencies concerning Lord Bertrand Russell and an assortment of organizations with names like the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation. This is a classic, long-running FOIA battle, with Schoenman having filed his first requests back in 2001.

The FBI has argued, in part, that Schoenman isn't eligible for a fee waiver because some of the documents didn't originate with the government. These are newspaper clippings and the like. On Monday, Judge Kollar-Kotelly sided with Schoenman; she noted:

"In this case, the materials at issue were collected by the FBI because they originate from third-party entities and individuals—i.e., the very organizations and individuals the FBI was investigating. The Court is persuaded that, in this instance, information targeted and collected by the FBI as part of its investigations into the “peace/anti-war movement of the 1960’s... can provide insight into the manner in which the FBI conducted its investigations of these various organizations and entities."

The judge further spanked the FBI for its "utterly inadequate" Vaughn Index, which is a listing of what documents are being denied under FOIA. The FBI's previous efforts, the judge added, "unnecessarily confused and complicated" the matters at hand. Consequently, a comprehensive new index must be prepared.

North Dakota resident Denise K. Hastings has a system, a way to beat the slots. The Internal Revenue Service, too, has a system. It's a way to collect taxes. Guess which is more reliable?

In a U.S. Tax Court ruling Monday, Ms. Hastings lost a tax fight with the IRS that illuminated, as such cases often do, a little slice of life. Gaming, in this case. A trained accountant, Ms. Hastings reported gambling a total of 63 days in 2003 and 65 days in 2004. Generally, she would play for at least eight hours at a time. She often gambled over $10,000 a day, pumping in $5 and $10 at a time.

She studied the slots, and thought she had them figured out. Noted the Tax Court Judge Stephen J. Swift:

(Hastings) believed that the best time to play the slot machines was in the evenings because of the money put in the machines throughout the day by other gamblers. (She) believed that slot machines generally pay out in cycles--when one slot machine pays out other slot machines also are likely to pay out. (She) also believed that she had higher success playing the slot machines on the first day of each month because it was a “better pay cycle day than any other day”."

Her results? In 2003, Ms. Hastings claimed gambling winnings of $151,162 and gambling expenses of $151,162. In 2004 she claimed gambling winnings of $445,738 and gambling expenses of -- well, what do you know -- $445,838. A perfect wash!

Thereupon the IRS and Ms. Hastings commenced a dispute, in part over whether she was a professional gambler or simply one who played for pleasure. The answer to this question affects how gambling earnings are reported and handled. On Monday, Judge Swift sided with the IRS, concluding that Ms. Hasting "did not carry on her gambling activity in a businesslike manner."

The Transportation Security Administration lost a computer hard drive containing private information on 100,000 employees, but it still dodged a big bullet Monday.

Two years after the highly sensitive hard drive went missing, a U.S. District Court judge on Monday rejected a bid by four disgruntled TSA employees to have their lawsuit certified as a class action. Had they succeeded, the TSA employees would have been seeking $1,000 per class member, or at least $100 million.

The hard drive discovered missing from agency headquarters in May 2007 contained names, social security numbers, birth dates, payroll information, financial allotments, and bank account and routing information. Which is pretty bad; on the other hand, the TSA does do a really good job of making people take off their shoes before boarding an airplane.

The TSA employees said the agency violated the Privacy Act and other laws in losing the precious data. But in his six-page opinion, U.S. District Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr. concluded that the lawsuit's remaining demands -- parts were dismissed earlier -- amounted to a predominantly monetary damage claim for which class action status is unsuitable. Suits & Sentences doesn't really understand what that means, but could figure it out given enough billable hours.

Jayne A. Briseno calls herself a recreational gambler.

And how. The casinos at which she played slot machines reported paying Briseno $139,714 in 2001 and $459,397 in 2002. That's a lot of recreation. But because she was playing the slots, the California resident was also losing. The issue for U.S. Tax Court Judge Harry Allen Haines, in his opinion issued Thursday, was figuring out what those losses were.

Briseno did not keep contemporary records making note of how much she was losing. Bad for her. The government's position seemed to be that since Briseno couldn't prove her losses, she would owe taxes on her entire take. Her gross became her net, so to speak. Judge Haines, though, reasoned otherwise. Noted the judge:

"She gambled frequently and when she won she would often “reinvest” those winnings in the slot machines, losing much or all of what she hadwon.  We regard it as a virtual certainty that petitioner, playing a game of chance frequently over the course of several years, placed many losing bets in addition to her winning ones."

Further noting that "we are not aware of a case in which a taxpayer received winnings from a game of chance of the magnitude petitioner received, but was not entitled to a penny of offsetting loss."

Judge Haines determined he would have to estimate Briseno's losses. Without fully explaining his methodology, the judge then assigned losses of $83,828 for 2001 and $275,638 for 2002. In both cases, as it turns out, the losses amount to 59 percent of the earnings.

A conservative estimate, if Suits & Sentences' experience with the slots is any measure.

CNET posts a fascinating and, perhaps, alarming story about an FBI sting operation targeting online child pornography. Reporter Declan McCullagh writes:

"The FBI has recently adopted a novel investigative technique: posting hyperlinks that purport to be illegal videos of minors having sex, and then raiding the homes of anyone willing to click on them.
    Undercover FBI agents used this hyperlink-enticement technique, which directed Internet users to a clandestine government server, to stage armed raids of homes in Pennsylvania, New York, and Nevada last year."

The sting bait certainly was grotesque: according to a March 27, 2007 filing in the indictment of Pennsylvania resident Roderick Vosburgh, accessed through PACER, the FBI agents concocted the following lure:

"here is one of my favs - 4yo hc with dad
(toddler, some oral, some anal) - supercute!
Haven't seen her on the board beforeif
anyone has anymore, PLEASE POST"

As McCullagh notes, the operation also raises questions about potential entrapment; although, in the post-trial filings for acquital filed by Vosburgh's current attorney Anna M. Durbin, and reviewed by Suits & Sentences via PACER, the entrapment issue doesn't appear to arise.

The perennial dispute over an Armenian genocide recognition is now taking place in multiple arenas.

President Barack Obama is weighing whether to antagonize Turkey by issuing a genocide commemorative statement; or, in the alternative, he could antagonize Armenian-American voters by breaking his apparent** campaign pledge and avoiding use of the term.

Meanwhile, in U.S. District Court this week, the Turkish American Legal Defense Fund is battling it out with the Southern Poverty Law Center. Led by attorneys Bruce Fein and David  Saltzman, the  Turkish American group has filed a defamation suit on behalf of author Guenter Lewy. An 85-year-old emeritus professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, Lewy says the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Report libeled him when it wrote, in part:

“Lewy is one of the most active members of a network of American scholars, influence peddlers and website operators, financed by hundreds of thousands of dollars each year from the government of Turkey, who promote the denial of the Armenian genocide….”

The wrangling this week, before U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, is procedural. Some of the questions, in part, appear to deal with what kind of media the Intelligence Report is and whether the District of Columbia is the right place for this legal action. Stated the Southern Poverty Law Center:

"The 'act' complained of – publication of an allegedly libelous article – occurred in Alabama and Georgia. SPLC publishes the Intelligence Report in Alabama and Georgia."

Beyond the Southern Poverty Law Center lawsuit, Fein said the Turkish American Legal Defense Fund is preparing for a potential defamation lawsuit against one-time Ohio congressional candidate David Krikorian. Krikorian evidently declared that his GOP opponent, Rep. Jean Schmdt "has taken $30,000 in blood money to deny the genocide." Stated Krikorian:

"Both sets of my grandparents are survivors of this first Holocaust of the 20th century...most of their family members at the time were murdered...The only deniers of this great tragedy which led to the Holocaust of the Jews by Nazi Germany are the Turkish government and certain members of the United States Congress like Jean Schmidt."

In preparation for the upcoming defamation suit, Fein has already filed a complaint with the Ohio Elections Commission; in an interview, he said this complaint was designed to flesh out the facts that will be the underpinning of the defamation suit.

"We want to try to send a signal to Armenian-Americans that the time for bullying has come to an end," Fein said.

**But see the appended material in the comments section, showing clearly that candidate Obama made a definitive pledge to issue an Armenian genocide commemoration.

It takes a confident man to crack a joke at the Supreme Court.

And former Solicitor General Theodore Olson showed Tuesday that he is just that man.

Usually, it's safest to leave the humor to the justices. After all, they're the ones in the black robes. Some entertaining studies have been done on humor during oral argument, generally involving counting the word "laughter" in the argument transcript. The first of these laughter studies was apparently done by Jay Wexler, published in the Green Bag, and it's still worth a look.

But when the opportunity presented itself Tuesday, during arguments in the case Citizen United v. Federal Election Commission, Olson let fly. He was being pressed on whether a company like, say, General Electric or General Motors might be permitted to produce a campaign film just like Citizens United, the conservative group Olson represents.

Breyer: Now, suppose it's General Motors. Can they?
Olson:  Well, General Motors may be smaller than the client we're representing.

In these recessionary times, it's funny because it's true!

There is another class of oral-argument humor, centered around the infallibility of the justices themselves.  An example occured Tuesday, when Justice John Paul Stevens asked about a prior case:

Stevens: Do you think the chief justice's opinion in that case correctly stated the law?
Olson:    Of course.
(pause for laughter.)
Olson:    By definition.
Scalia:   Good answer

Yale Law School Dean Harold Hongju Koh will be rotating back to Washington, D.C. to serve as the legal adviser to the State Department. On Monday, the White House announced President Obama's intention to nominate Koh to the position.

Dean Koh previously served between 1998 and 2001 as Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor. In addition to serving as Yale Law School dean, Koh is the school's Gerard C. and Bernice Latrobe Smith Professor of International Law.

This is one intriguing pick; not least, for what it might say about the future of Guantanamo Bay. Dean Koh has a long history of legal activism; his work on behalf of Haitian refugees during the first Bush administration -- a fight in which he faced off against then-Solicitor General Kenneth Starr -- is explored in the true-life legal thriller Storming the Court by Brandt Goldstein.  An excerpt can be found here.

Dean Koh summed up his assessment of the Bush administration this way, in testimony last September before the Senate Subcommittee on the Constitution. He stated:

"Seven years ago, our country was properly viewed with universal sympathy as the victim of a brutal attack. Tragically, the current Administration chose to respond with an series of unnecessary, self-inflicted wounds, which have gravely diminished our global standing and damaged our reputation for respecting the rule of law. The infamous list includes: Abu Ghraib; Guantanamo; torture and cruel treatment of detainees; indefinite detention of “enemy combatants;” military commissions; warrantless government wiretapping and datamining; evasion of the Geneva Conventions and international human rights treaties; excessive government secrecy and assertions of executive privilege; attacks on the United Nations and its human rights bodies, including the International Criminal Court; misleading of Congress; and the denial of habeas corpus..."

The Democratic Republic of Congo could be on the hook for contempt-of-court fines amounting to $80,000 a week unless it starts to comply with a judge's order to cough up documents.

In what strikes Suits & Sentences as a pretty clear sign of judicial impatience, U.S. District Judge Richard Leon has ordered the country to deliver the documents demanded within 30 days. Failure to do so could subject the DRC -- as it is commonly referred to in the March 20 order -- to contempt fines starting at $5,000 a week. The fines will then double every four weeks, up to the $80,000-a-week match.

The order is the latest twist in a long-running case denoted FG Hemisphere Associates v. Democratic Republic of Congo. The underlying demand for documents goes back at least to September 2005, and it involves an even-older dispute concerning the country's failure to pay for an electric power transmission facility. Suffice it to say, there is a long and tangled litigation history. Google it yourself!

Fox & Friends co-host Steve Doocy skates, following the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals' decision last week upholding dismissal of a defamation suit brought by a Maine educator mocked by Doocy and his pals.

Still, the case brought by Maine Public Schools' Superintendent Leon Levesque did shed some light on how Fox & Friends works. We learn, for instance, from Doocy's Jan. 30, 2008 affidavit that:

He likes Google News! Stated Doocy: "I rely on Google News in my daily practice as a broadcast journalist  because the service searches only bona fide news outlets. In my experience, Google News is a very useful and reliable tool for researching other news outlets’ coverage of the news items that I would like to discuss on Fox & Friends."

He trusts the Associated Press! Stated Doocy: "In my thirty years of experience as a broadcast journalist, I have learned that the Associated Press sets the standard for reliable journalism. The reliability of the Associated Press is so well-established that journalists, myself included, frequently report the facts contained in Associated Press articles without needing to corroborate its reports with other news sources."

He's got 30 years of broadcast experience! Doocy's past works includes hosting the daily entertainment and information series "House Party with Steve Doocy," the kids' show "Not Just News" and the parents' show "Parents Helper."

He's just a good guy! States Doocy, apropos of something or other: "I have also served as the national spokesman for the March of Dimes’ “Walk America” campaign."

It's all about the fun! States Doocy: "My co-hosts and I like to give our opinions of the day’s headlines, often using humor as a way to express our views, in order to make the news more interesting and to give our viewers the feeling that, in addition to just hearing about the news, they are interacting with their friends. To this end, the tone of much of our show is conversational and irreverent, rather than strictly reportorial."