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?

• Alex Kozinski calls for investigation into his porn postings [LAT]

• Judge Kozinski's web site and Cyrus Sanai [Overlawyered]

And because the circle wouldn't be complete without them, of course the images contained pretty much all of the pervy leisure-time themes Isaacs was fond of featuring in his films. And that's not even all of it — wait until you hear about who made the jury.

The LA Times's Scott Glover dug up Kozinski's site on Tuesday, later getting an acknowledgment from the judge that the materials — "which included a photo of naked women on all fours painted to look like cows and a video of a half-dressed man cavorting with a sexually aroused farm animal" — indeed belonged to him:

Kozinski said he would delete some material from his site, including the photo depicting women as cows, which he said was "degrading . . . and just gross." He also said he planned to get rid of a graphic step-by-step pictorial in which a woman is seen shaving her pubic hair.

Kozinski said he must have accidentally uploaded those images to his server while intending to upload something else. "I would not keep those files intentionally," he said. The judge pointed out that he never used appeals court computers to maintain the site.

The sexually explicit material on Kozinski's site earlier this week was extensive, including images of masturbation, public sex and contortionist sex. There was a slide show striptease featuring a transsexual, and a folder that contained a series of photos of women's crotches as seen through snug fitting clothing or underwear. There were also themes of defecation and urination, though they are not presented in a sexual context.

It remains to be seen how or even if the revelations will affect the trial, which is set to kick off tomorrow morning at 9:30. But one confirmed juror is likely looking forward to the next few days out of the office: "a 27-year-old from West L.A. who works with the Motion Picture Association of America, the group that rates mainstream movies." Lord knows it beats deliberating whether or not the G-rating can contain the canine-sexual undercurrents of Beverly Hills Chihuahua.

• 9th Circuit's chief judge posted sexually explicit matter on his website [LAT]
• Jury Chosen for Ira Isaacs Trial [AVN News via Reverse Cowgirl]

In a statistic that some may find every bit as shocking as his work, Isaacs said he was selling about 1,000 videos per month at $30 apiece before being raided by the FBI early last year. The number has since dropped to between 700 and 800 per month, but they still generate enough money to pay the rent on a house with a pool in the Hollywood Hills.

Isaacs predicted that many jurors would not be able to stomach viewing the movies, some of which feature acts of bestiality and defecation.

"It's going to be a circus," he said of the upcoming trial. "I think I'd freak out if I had to watch six hours of the stuff."

Our question is that, besides Hollywood trial royalty Dominick Dunne and Allison Hope Weiner, what might the over/under be for gallery attendance? Isaacs already has one of the state's foremost freedom-of-speech judges on the bench; a packed house could influence a stirring constitutional benchmark and/or the most depraved happy hour in human history. One thing we know: You won't find us within a mile of it.

• Upcoming trial will see hours of hard-core fetish pornography [LAT]

Correspondent Susannah Breslin has Isaacs' noble and only mildly revolting story via Q&A, hopefully in a disinfected room or on a phone with a condom pulled over it:

ISAACS: I was one of the first to do this. Getting actresses to participate in this art venture is not the easiest thing in the world. Picasso had problems as well. And [Marcel] Duchamp with the toilet [Urinal, a signed urinal exhibited in an art gallery]. [James Joyce's] Ulysses was up for obscenity. I felt like I'm never going to be a great musician, I'm never going to be a great oil painter. Here, I had a chance to shock a lot of people. My movies that I make, there's a lot contrast, there's a lot of social commentary. How people deal with taboos. How people see something so mundane. The contrast between feces and a beautiful girl. Good and evil. ...

RADAR: Were you worried about getting busted?

ISAACS: January 17 [2007], I'm going to my office in Koreatown, and there's 20 to 25 FBI agents. They're in my office. They're in my hallway. There's these two big guys. "Are you Mr. Isaacs?" they say. "Come with me." They walk me down the hallway, into my office. There's FBI all over the place. But I'll tell you, they were very, very pleasant people. They were really nice. Those guys would rather be fighting terrorism than being the sex police. The FBI guy was as curious as you are. He asked me, "Off the record," he asked me, "How do you convince girls to do this kind of stuff?" I said, "I do it very well."

Transfixed as we are by the concept of "good and evil" as represented by a dump on someone's face, we're afraid we must sit this trial out at risk of our own standards-and-practices violation and/or years of nightmares. You are in luck, though, dear reader, as indefatigable Huffington Post legal correspondent Allison Hope Weiner will be moving on to this shitty case upon the end of jury deliberations in the Anthony Pellicano trial. Good luck to Mr. Isaacs; may we never know first-hand what a true master he is.

[Photo Credit: Getty Images]

• But Is It Obscene? [Radar]