Colleen Kollar-Kotelly

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Colleen Kollar-Kotelly (born 1943 in New York) is a judge for the United States District Court for the District of Columbia and the presiding judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC).

Kollar-Kotelly obtained her J.D. from The Catholic University of America's Columbus School of Law in 1968. From 1969 to 1972, Kollar-Kotelly was an attorney for the Department of Justice, after which she became chief legal counsel for St. Elizabeths Hospital.

In 1984, Kollar-Kotelly was appointed as an associate judge of the D.C. Superior Court. She served as deputy presiding judge from 1995 until her appointment to the federal bench by President Bill Clinton was confirmed in March 1997. In May 2002, Chief Justice William Rehnquist appointed Judge Kollar-Kotelly to serve as the presiding judge of the FISC.

In August 2001, Kollar-Kotelly received national attention when she was assigned the United States v. Microsoft anti-trust case after Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson was removed from the case. The decision was reversed in part and upheld in part.

Judge Kollar-Kotelly has recently received attention via a Washington Post article describing her administration of the FISC and in particular what weight evidence taken from warrantless searches should be given to issuing subsequent search warrants for suspects of terrorism and espionage.^[1]

Kollar-Kotelly recently denied a last-minute appeal by Saddam Hussein's legal team, stating that the United States has no right to interfere with the judicial processes of another nation's courts. In August 2007, in a rare move, Judge Kollar-Kotelly ordered the administration of George W. Bush to give its views regarding records requests by the ACLU on the National Security Agency's wiretapping program. ^[2]

On October 1, 2007, U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly reversed George W. Bush on archive secrecy, (38-page) ruling that the U.S. Archivist's reliance on the executive order to delay release of the papers of former presidents is "arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion and not in accordance with law." National Security Archives, at George Washington University alleged that the Bush order severely slowed or prevented the release of historic presidential papers. ^[3]

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