On Monday night, AIG filed a motion to stay its $7 billion securities fraud case claiming that Countrywide duped the insurer into purchasing mortgage-backed securities.

That motion went a long way toward explaining a maneuver AIG's lawyers at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan pulled Friday, when they filed a declaratory judgment suit in New York State Supreme Court asking for a New York judge to rule whether AIG lost its right to assert securities fraud claims when it sold its MBS portfolio to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in 2008.

But AIG's latest tactic raises questions of its own.