On December 3, Judge Denise Cote of the Southern District of New York denied a joint motion by all defendants across fifteen related RMBS actions brought against major financial institutions by the Federal Housing Finance Agency, as conservator for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (“GSEs”).  The claims in the case arise out of certificates purchased by the GSEs from 449 different securitizations backed by roughly 1.1 million mortgage loans.  The FHFA plans to reunderwrite a sample of those loans and seeks to extrapolate the results of that sample to the entire loan pools; the defendants’ motion sought an order excluding the results of the sampling from evidence at the trial of the actions, challenging the methodology that the FHFA intends to use to select the sample.  The Court rejected the defendants’ arguments, finding that at most they raised questions about the evidentiary weight that should be assigned to the samples, rather than the question whether they should be admitted into evidence.  Order.