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The twists just keep on coming in the now-suspended Obscenity Trial of the Century, in which defendant and celebrated poo-vid helmer Ira Isaacs has taken a back seat to the trial's own judge — Alex Kozinski, himself recently revealed (by a grudge-holding lawyer, natch, but we'll get to that) to be a connoisseur of impeccable barnyard porn and transsexual slidshows on his publicly available Web site. This obviously isn't sitting well with the judiciary or even with Kozinski himself, a Supreme Court short-lister who said Thursday he would cooperate with an investigation of his own alleged wrongdoing:

Kozinski suspended until Monday the obscenity trial of a Hollywood adult filmmaker after the prosecutor requested time to explore "a potential conflict of interest concerning the court having a . . . sexually explicit website with similar material to what is on trial here."

Although Kozinski requested an investigation, it's unclear what, if any, discipline he could face. Circuit judges are appointed for life and can only be fired by Congress, though they can be censured by fellow jurists.

The "fired-by-Congress" angle got a slight nudge Thursday from Senator and Judiciary Committee member Dianne Feinstein, who told the Times that "[i]f this is true, this is unacceptable behavior for a federal court judge." Meanwhile, the very NSFW photos in question are linked at Patterico.com, including the one of two naked women on all fours painted as cows, a man fellating himself and a tranny-or-not? slideshow quiz.

It gets better: All were provided by a Beverly Hills lawyer named Cyrus Sanai, who's apparently nursed a long-standing grudge against Kozinski after the judge called him out for abusing his 9th Circuit Court of Appeals as payback for abstaining from a Sanai clan divorce saga:


Mr. Sanai has been trying for years to get the federal courts to intervene in his family's state-court dispute, an effort referred to by a highly respected district judge as "an indescribable abuse of the legal process, ... the most abusive and obstructive litigation tactics this court has ever encountered. ..." Nor would the reader — unless he happened to enter Mr. Sanai's name in the Westlaw CTA9-ALL database — realize that, as part of the same imbroglio, he and certain members of his family have hounded a state trial judge off their case; been held in contempt and sanctioned under 28 U.S.C. §1927 and had their ninth sortie to our court in the same case designated as "frivolous" and "an improper dilatory tactic" by the district court. A detached observer, Mr. Sanai is not.

Yowza! And all this time, all we thought we'd get out of this was a free look at Hollywood Scat Amateurs No. 7. Did we hit the jackpot, or what?