(CNSNews.com) - The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia has heard oral arguments in a case examining whether the Justice Department acted lawfully in raiding the congressional office of a lawmaker under investigation for alleged bribery and fraud.

The FBI in May 2006 searched the Washington, D.C., office of Rep. William Jefferson (D-La.), as part of a 16-month investigation related to his business deals with technology companies in Nigeria and Ghana.

Jefferson allegedly accepted $100,000 from a telecommunications businessman - $90,000 of which was later recovered from a freezer in his Louisiana home.

The raid on the Capitol Hill office spurred bipartisan outrage, with lawmakers accusing the executive branch of overstepping its bounds and violating the Constitution.

Jefferson argued that documents seized during the search violated the "speech or debate clause" of the Constitution, which states that members of Congress "shall in all cases, except treason, felony and breach of the peace, be privileged from arrest during their attendance at the session of their respective houses, and in going to and from the same, and for any speech or debate in either house, they shall not be questioned in any other place."

He sued the Justice Department to return all materials seized during the raid. The criminal investigation against him has been put on hold pending the legal battle.

"The speech or debate clause is absolute," Robert Trout, Jefferson's attorney, told Cybercast News Service.

"While we're not saying that a congressional office can never be searched, we are saying that the search should be conducted in a manner consistent with the speech or debate clause," he said. "The search in this case was not."

Paul Orfanedes, director of litigation at Judicial Watch, a conservative government watchdog group that filed a brief supporting the Justice Department, said, "When [the speech and debate clause privileges] apply they are absolute, but their focus is narrow."

"A party that is asserting a privilege ... has the burden of demonstrating the applicability of those privileges to whatever materials are at issue ... in this instance, the stuff that was taken out of Jefferson's office," he added.

"Jefferson didn't make that showing. He didn't satisfy his burden of showing that all of that stuff was subject to speech and debate clause privileges," Orfanedes argued.

"The scope of this search was fairly broad," Orfanedes told Cybercast News Service. "Documents were seized. Hard drives were seized, and in the course of that, the government even appeared to concede that at least some legislative materials were likely swept up in that," he said.

But, Orfanedes said, "it seems that there is no dispute that some of that [confiscated material] was not covered under speech and debate clause privileges.

"To have the congressman or some representative of the congressman have a first go at deciding which documents should not be taken in a search warrant, is already putting not an insubstantial burden on law enforcement," he said.

Trout cautioned that the outcome of this case will have lasting effects.

"If the search in this case was approved, it would erode legislative independence and harm the constitutional structure of separate but coequal branches of government," he said.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, opposing the Justice Department in this case, has also filed a brief.

"This is not about members of Congress being above the law - they are not," Gingrich's press secretary Rick Tyler told Cybercast News Service.

He said the brief had been filed "for the purpose of protecting the carefully constructed balance of powers among the three branches of government created by our founders."

In a statement, Gingrich said "an executive branch-directed raid on legislative branch offices - even with a judicial warrant - is fundamentally different because, unlike a home or private office, a legislative branch office serves governmental duties that were designed to be constitutionally independent from - and in some cases, in opposition to - the powers of the executive branch."

Melanie Sloan, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a liberal government watchdog group, said the raid may undermine the criminal case against Jefferson.

"I certainly believe that the Justice Department had the right to search the congressional office - that congressional offices are not sacrosanct," National Public Radio quoted Sloan as saying.

But, she added, "It was clearly an unwise decision in this case, because it is in fact holding up the prosecution of a sitting congressman who is very likely a criminal."

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