A federal appeals court has thrown out most of the verdict against James O'Keefe, a win for broad press protections and a loss for the Democratic consulting firm that sued him.

• The DC Circuit ruled that lying to someone in a bar to get them to say incriminating things is protected speech, and publishing it is fair game.
• All three judges, two of them Democratic appointees, sided mostly with O'Keefe, so an appeal looks unlikely.
• The court was murkier about the fake intern who filmed inside the firm's office — that part stayed closer to fraud, partly because the firm never made her sign an NDA.
• The firm lost major clients after the footage came out, including over the embarrassment of never vetting the intern.
• The wider stake: if courts define "deceptive" too narrowly, ordinary reporting can be punished as fraud, no matter what anyone thinks of O'Keefe's ethics.

Separately, a much-hyped FBI case in New York — an alleged ISIS-inspired plot to bomb the state capital in Albany — involved informants who supplied the bomb recipe and the $200 to buy the materials at Home Depot, then waited two weeks before the arrest.

Outlook: Related lawsuits against O'Keefe over his operatives' undercover dating tactics now look far weaker, though their lawyer says he is pressing ahead.