Breaking news... appeals court rules on search of Jefferson's capitol office

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia has just declared that the FBI search of Congressman William "Dollar Bill" Jefferson's office was, at least in part, unconstitutional.

The court unanimously ruled that the FBI could legally obtain a search warrant for a Congressman's office, but that the search as conducted failed to provide the Congressman with an opportunity to claim a legislative privilege on some documents before the FBI actually viewed them.

This isn't necessarily good news for Dollar Bill, though. The court only ruled that:

The Congressman is entitled to the return of documents that the court determines to be privileged.

I'm still looking for the text of the ruling, but it appears that the court basically found that the "filter team" process established by the FBI was unconstitutional, because legislative privilege would be violated by any agent of the executive branch reviewing privileged documents, even if those agents didn't participate at all in the criminal investigation.

The AP story says it will be up to the trial court to determine whether non-privileged documents must also be excluded from any trial of Jefferson. This is a point I'll want to get clarity on when I find the opinion itself. Further updates will follow.

Update 1: Skimming around the internet for the immediate reactions, I see some claiming that this is total vindication for Jefferson's (and former Speaker Dennis Hastert's) position that the FBI can't search Capitol Hill offices of Congressmen, that the court ruled that the FBI "trampled" on the Constitution. Not so much, really. The bad part was not the search and seizure (as best I can tell from the news articles), but the review of the documents by the filter team. The FBI and DOJ were very careful to ensure that the filter team had no connections, no conversations with any member of the team actually investigating Jefferson, so none of those agents or prosecutors have been tainted by exposure to the fruits of an improper search. Jefferson doesn't get ALL the documents back, just ones that are actually privileged, and it will be the trial judge who makes that determination. Things will be delayed while the judge reads all of that paper, but most of the incriminating documents will probably still be admissible. And there will now be a precedent that the FBI can seize the contents of a Congressman's office; they'll just have to box up everything and take it straight to the judge without looking at it.

UPDATE 2: Jonathan Adler at Volokh has substantial excerpts from the opinions. Judge Henderson merely concurred in the judgment, stating that she did not agree with its reasoning and "distancing" herself from "much of its dicta."

UPDATE 3: The opinion itself is available here [pdf].