Opinion ID: 6500514
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: investigation issues

Text: Pelullo makes two claims of error arising out of the government’s investigation. First, he says that the government 14 All record citations, except where otherwise indicated, are to the combined District Court docket in No. 1- 11-cr-0740. All citations to the docket in this appeal are to the docket in No. 15-2826. 27 violated his Fourth Amendment rights by tracking cell site location information from his cellphones without obtaining a warrant. Second, he criticizes the government’s procedures for processing communications intercepted from wiretapped phones and for reviewing potentially privileged documents seized from his attorneys’ offices. Neither claim entitles him to relief.
Information15 The Stored Communications Act (“SCA”) allows government investigators to collect suspects’ cell site location information (“CSLI”).16 18 U.S.C. § 2703(c). Investigators can obtain a court order to that end by submitting “specific and articulable facts showing that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the [data] are relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation.” Id. § 2703(d). In 2007 and 2008, prosecutors in this case repeatedly sought authorization to gain 15 We review a “denial of a motion to suppress for clear error as to the underlying factual findings and exercise plenary review over its application of the law to those facts.” United States v. Burnett, 773 F.3d 122, 130 (3d Cir. 2014). 16 “CSLI is a type of metadata that is generated every time a user’s cell phone connects to the nearest antenna. The user’s cell phone service provider retains a time-stamped record identifying the particular antenna to which the phone connected.” United States v. Goldstein, 914 F.3d 200, 202 (3d Cir. 2019). “Because most people constantly carry and frequently use their cell phones, CSLI can provide a detailed log of an individual’s movements over a period of time.” Id. 28 access to CSLI for Pelullo’s and Scarfo’s phones. 17 The District Court approved the requests, authorizing the collection from Pelullo’s cellphone provider of nine months of historical cell site data, going as far back as September 2006, and eleven months of prospective data, through May 2008.18 As trial approached, Pelullo moved to suppress that evidence based on the duration of the tracking and the government’s failure to show probable cause for obtaining the information. The District Court denied the motion, holding (in reliance on our precedent at the time) that probable cause was not required to obtain the CSLI and that, even if it was, the 17 The investigators also obtained authorization to use two other surveillance methods: pen registers to record outgoing phone numbers dialed on the phones, 18 U.S.C. § 3127(3), and trap-and-trace devices to record incoming phone numbers, id. § 3127(4). 18 “Prospective” CSLI means data collected after the government obtains court permission to acquire it, while “historical” CSLI describes data already in existence at the time of the court order. In re Application of U.S. for an Order Authorizing Installation & Use of a Pen Register & a Caller Identification Sys., 402 F. Supp. 2d 597, 599 (D. Md. 2005). The District Court similarly approved the collection of prospective and historical CSLI from Scarfo’s phone, and Scarfo moved alongside Pelullo in the District Court to suppress that data. But he does not, on appeal, challenge the Court’s denial of his suppression motion, so we are only concerned with Pelullo’s attack on the government’s gathering of CSLI from his phones. 29 evidence was nonetheless admissible by virtue of the goodfaith exception. Pelullo characterizes the government’s applications as “the most egregious and intrusive surveillance request ever filed by a United States Attorney.” (SP Opening Br. at 184.) He argues that the District Court erred in refusing to suppress the CSLI evidence obtained during the tracking. 19 His 19 Invoking Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 28(i), each Defendant purports to adopt all arguments of his “coappellants which are applicable to himself.” (SP Opening Br. at 223; NS Opening Br. at 183; WM Opening Br. at 36; JM Opening Br. at 49.) Each Defendant then identifies specific arguments advanced by codefendants that he intends to adopt. We will recognize their specific adoptions but not the “blanket request[s]” to adopt, which “fail[] to specify which of the many issues of [their] codefendants [they] believe[] worthy of our consideration.” United States v. Fattah, 914 F.3d 112, 146 n.9 (3d Cir. 2019) (citing Fed. R. App. P. 28(a)(5)). “[W]e will [not] scour the record and make that determination for [them].” Id.; accord Kost v. Kozakiewicz, 1 F.3d 176, 182 (3d Cir. 1993). Each Defendant has thus abandoned and forfeited any argument raised by his codefendants that he did not specifically adopt. As already noted, Scarfo did not adopt Pelullo’s CSLI argument. Supra note 18. Both Maxwells, however, did specifically adopt the argument. Their problem is they lack standing to pursue that Fourth Amendment claim, as no CSLI pertaining to them was collected by the government. See United States v. Cortez-Dutrieville, 743 F.3d 881, 883 (3d Cir. 2014) (defendant seeking “to invoke the Fourth Amendment’s 30 reasoning centers on Carpenter v. United States, in which the Supreme Court held that the collection of historical CSLI is a “search” under the Fourth Amendment and that the SCA’s “reasonable grounds” standard for obtaining a court order “falls well short” of the probable cause standard the Fourth Amendment imposes. 138 S. Ct. 2206, 2219-21 (2018). Nobody disputes that, under Carpenter, acquiring a defendant’s CSLI without a warrant is an unconstitutional search. United States v. Goldstein, 914 F.3d 200, 203 (3d Cir. 2019). The question is whether Pelullo was entitled to a remedy for that violation of his Fourth Amendment rights – specifically, to have the illegally obtained CSLI suppressed at trial. The exclusionary rule is a “judicially created remedy” by which evidence is suppressed in order to “deter future Fourth Amendment violations.” Davis v. United States, 564 U.S. 229, 236-38 (2011). We do not reflexively apply it whenever an unconstitutional search takes place. Goldstein, 914 F.3d at 203. Instead, it is reserved for those cases where its expected deterrent effect justifies its use. Id. at 203-04. One set of circumstances in which suppression is not justified is when the government has an “objectively reasonable good faith belief in the legality of [its] conduct” at the time of the search. Id. at 204 (alteration in original). That good-faith exception to the exclusionary rule is satisfied when exclusionary rule” must have standing, which is the case when he has a “legitimate expectation of privacy in the invaded place” (citation omitted)). 31 the search in question was undertaken in “reli[ance] on a properly-obtained valid judicial order, a then-valid statute, and then-binding appellate authority[.]” Id. Here, prosecutors obtained CSLI pursuant to a court order following the SCA’s procedures, and, in 2007 and 2008, no binding precedent required them to do more. On the contrary, that was standard procedure at the time. See id.; United States v. Curtis, 901 F.3d 846, 849 (7th Cir. 2018); United States v. Joyner, 899 F.3d 1199, 1205 (11th Cir. 2018). Because we do not expect the government to have anticipated the “new rule” announced a decade later in Carpenter, its reliance on the SCA was reasonable, and so the good-faith exception applies to its acquisition of CSLI data without a warrant. Goldstein, 914 F.3d at 201, 204-05. Pelullo argues against that conclusion, saying that the government lacked a good- faith basis for seeking prospective CSLI – particularly over a lengthy time period – without a warrant. He seeks to cabin Carpenter and Goldstein as announcing a “new rule” only as to historical CSLI. 20 Tracking his movements in real time, Pelullo says, involved an “even greater intrusion into [his] privacy, for a far longer period of time[,]” and so the government should have known that it needed a warrant even prior to Carpenter. (SP Opening Br. at 189.) Yet Pelullo cites no pre-Carpenter authority from appellate courts that would have put the government on notice that seeking prospective CSLI required doing more than 20 For the distinction between prospective and historical CSLI, see supra note 18. 32 satisfying the SCA’s requirements.21 He cannot even show a consensus among district courts: at the time the orders at issue here were signed, courts had reached differing conclusions on whether officers seeking CSLI needed to show probable cause and get a warrant, and they were still grappling with the Fourth Amendment’s application to both historical and prospective CSLI. See, e.g., In re Applications of U.S. for Orders Pursuant to Title 18, U.S. Code Section 2703(d), 509 F. Supp. 2d 76, 7879, 78 n.4 (D. Mass. 2007) (noting a “disagreement among courts” and collecting cases that granted applications under the SCA standard and those that instead required a showing of probable cause). 22 Neither we nor the Supreme Court had addressed the issue. We did weigh in a few years after the searches here took place, in In re Application of the U.S. for an Order Directing a Provider of Electronic Communication 21 After argument, Pelullo brought to our attention Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle v. Baltimore Police Department, 2 F.4th 330 (4th Cir. 2021) (en banc), in which the Fourth Circuit extended Carpenter to new aerial surveillance technology and enjoined the City of Baltimore’s use of it. Setting aside that the case does not deal with CSLI, it does not affect our analysis of the state of the law before the Supreme Court held in Carpenter that collecting historical CSLI constituted a search. 22 Some of those cases held that prospective CSLI was not authorized by the SCA. But even if the data collection here violated the SCA, “suppression is not a remedy for a violation of the [SCA]” and is only appropriate if “cell site location data was obtained … in violation of the Fourth Amendment.” United States v. Guerrero, 768 F.3d 351, 358 (5th Cir. 2014). 33 Service to Disclose Records to the Government, 620 F.3d 304, 312-13 (3d Cir. 2010), but that was only to decide that, for Fourth Amendment purposes, acquiring historical CSLI was not a search, a holding later abrogated by Carpenter. In sum, then, the officers lacked clear guidance from any caselaw, much less binding precedent, that would have put them on notice that obtaining prospective CSLI would require compliance with the Fourth Amendment. Undeterred, Pelullo highlights language in In re Application noting that CSLI could “be used to allow the inference of present, or even future, location” and thus resembles a tracking device. Id. He also points out that the D.C. Circuit held, prior to Carpenter, that GPS tracking requires a warrant. United States v. Maynard, 615 F.3d 544, 563-64 (D.C. Cir. 2010). Based on those and other decisions, he says that, even before Carpenter, the heightened threat to privacy posed by prospective CSLI should have been evident to the officers. Setting aside that the GPS data considered by the D.C. Circuit reveals a person’s movements more precisely than does CSLI, which logs the suspect’s general area, “only binding appellate precedent” “at the time of the search” is relevant to the good-faith exception. Goldstein, 914 F.3d at 205. While conducting this investigation, prosecutors dealt with an unsettled area of law but relied in good faith on what was available to them – the plain text of the SCA and the court order they obtained in compliance with that Act. Given those circumstances, excluding the CSLI would not have “serve[d] any deterrent purpose[,]” id. at 204, and the District Court did not err in refusing to suppress the evidence. 34 Pelullo nonetheless insists that, even under the law as it then existed, the CSLI should have been suppressed because the government, in its applications for the court orders, misrepresented the technological capabilities of the equipment used to collect information from Pelullo’s phone and falsely claimed that the phone had a connection to New Jersey.23 He cites the principle that evidence must be suppressed “if the magistrate or judge in issuing a warrant was misled by information in an affidavit that the affiant knew was false or would have known was false except for his reckless disregard of the truth.” United States v. Leon, 468 U.S. 897, 923 (1984). His claim that the government made misrepresentations in those applications fails, however, because he did not first raise it before the District Court. Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 12 requires that a request to suppress evidence “be raised by pretrial motion[.]” Fed. R. Crim. P. 12(b)(3)(C). As a result, a suppression argument raised for the first time on appeal is forfeited, and we do not consider it even under Rule 52(b)’s plain-error standard. United States v. Rose, 538 F.3d 175, 182-84 (3d Cir. 2008). Pelullo offers no explanation for why he did not object in the District Court to the alleged 23 Specifically, Pelullo argues that the government misrepresented both that it lacked the capability to collect outgoing phone numbers dialed on his cellphones using a pen register without also collecting dialed “content” information, such as bank account numbers and Social Security numbers, and that it was unable to obtain precise “pin-point” location information for his phones using CSLI and could only ascertain the larger “sector” in which the phones were located. (SP Opening Br. at 195-98.) 35 misrepresentations, so there is no “good cause” to excuse his failure to do so. 24 Id. at 184-85. Even if Pelullo had not forfeited that suppression argument, his challenge to the evidence would prove fruitless. The government only introduced a small quantity of CSLI at trial. And what it did rely on merely served to corroborate other evidence of Pelullo’s whereabouts. For example, multiple witnesses testified that Pelullo was in Dallas during the takeover of FirstPlus, and, as a further example, visitor logs and security footage showed that Pelullo repeatedly visited Scarfo’s father in prison in Atlanta. Any alleged error in the admission of the CSLI was “rendered harmless” “in light of all of the other evidence” at trial.25 United States v. Perez, 280 F.3d 318, 338 (3d Cir. 2002). 24 It is true that Pelullo joined Scarfo’s challenge regarding the duration of the tracking and the lack of probable cause. But neither defendant raised the misrepresentation issue noted here, and accordingly it is forfeited. See United States v. Joseph, 730 F.3d 336, 342 (3d Cir. 2013) (holding that a suppression argument in the district court must match the argument in the court of appeals to be preserved). 25 Pelullo also argues that improprieties in the collection of the CSLI led to his conviction because they served as one of the bases for the government’s requests to conduct wiretaps. That, too, is not a basis for relief, since Pelullo makes no effort to show that the wiretap applications would have been devoid of probable cause without the CSLI. See Franks v. Delaware, 438 U.S. 154, 155-56 (1978) (holding that, when a defendant establishes the falsity of a statement in an affidavit used to 36
Because federal agents intercepted and seized materials covered by attorney-client privilege, the government established filter teams to keep that information out of procure a warrant and when “the affidavit’s remaining content is insufficient to establish probable cause, the search warrant must be voided and the fruits of the search excluded”). 26 We exercise de novo review over specific legal issues underlying the claim of attorney-client privilege and review factual determinations for clear error. In re Impounded, 241 F.3d 308, 312 (3d Cir. 2001). We review for abuse of discretion a district court’s judgment that the crime-fraud exception applies. Id. at 318. We review pre-indictment procedures used by the District Court for abuse of discretion. See In re Grand Jury Subpoena, 223 F.3d 213, 219 (3d Cir. 2000) (finding no abuse of discretion in district court “denying Appellant and/or his attorney access to this information to protect grand jury secrecy”). Preserved Fifth Amendment claims are typically reviewed for harmless error, United States v. Toliver, 330 F.3d 607, 613 (3d Cir. 2003), while infringements on the Sixth Amendment right to counsel are generally structural errors that require automatic reversal, United States v. Gonzalez-Lopez, 548 U.S. 140, 150 (2006). With regard to Pelullo’s challenges to ex parte proceedings, however, we need not grapple with the varying standards of review because those claims fail under any standard, as he identifies no error. We analyze his separation-of-powers claim under the harmless-error standard, as discussed in greater detail herein. 37 prosecutors’ hands. Pelullo challenges the procedures employed by the filter teams and the District Court’s attorneyclient privilege rulings as deprivations of his Fifth Amendment right to due process and his Sixth Amendment right to counsel, and as violative of the separation of powers.27 As a remedy for those alleged errors, he claims he is entitled to a new trial. His arguments fail.
In August 2007, approximately four years before Pelullo was indicted, the District Court entered an order permitting the government to intercept his cellphone communications, having found probable cause that he and others were committing criminal offenses and using communications with counsel to further those offenses. While wiretapping Pelullo’s phone, federal agents intercepted calls between Pelullo and his attorneys. Knowing that some of those communications could be privileged, the government deployed a “Wiretap Filter Team” between federal investigators and the prosecution team, to examine the communications and sort them into three categories before turning them over to the prosecutors: (1) communications protected by the attorney-client privilege; (2) communications that would be privileged but for the crimefraud exception, which excludes from the scope of the 27 John and William Maxwell say they adopt Pelullo’s arguments on these issues. That adoption, however, is ineffective, because Pelullo’s briefing focuses specifically on alleged intrusions into his own attorney-client privilege, an issue that has no relevance to the Maxwells. 38 attorney-client privilege any communications made “in furtherance of a future crime or fraud”; and (3) unprivileged communications. United States v. Zolin, 491 U.S. 554, 563 (1989). Once the Wiretap Filter Team sorted the information, it sought court approval to share with the prosecution team unprivileged communications and communications falling under the crime-fraud exception. The Wiretap Filter Team was headed by Assistant U.S. Attorney (“AUSA”) Melissa Jampol. She and her team reviewed wire and text communications between Pelullo and his attorneys, including, among others, David Adler, Gary McCarthy, and Donald Manno. Federal agent Kevin Moyer, who engaged as well in the surveillance of Scarfo and others for a brief period, was also assigned to the Wiretap Filter Team. In connection with his surveillance responsibilities, Moyer interacted with members of the prosecution team. During the duration of the wiretap, which was from August 2007 through January 2008, Jampol submitted five sealed ex parte motions to the District Court seeking to disclose communications to the prosecution team. The District Court granted each of those motions, authorizing disclosure of selected intercepted communications to the prosecution team. The Wiretap Filter Team’s memoranda of law, including supporting affidavits and related papers, remained under seal until after Pelullo’s indictment was unsealed. Following the indictment’s unsealing, all the intercepted communications, including those not yet disclosed to the prosecution team, were provided to Pelullo’s counsel, giving him an opportunity to challenge any of the communications as privileged, prior to their potential use at trial. Pelullo’s counsel moved to exclude the intercepted communications en masse, without identifying 39 any particular communication claimed to be privileged. The District Court denied that motion. Roughly nine months after the entry of the order, law enforcement officials executed search warrants at the offices of both Manno’s solo law practice and McCarthy’s law firm. Two more filter teams were established to review and sort out privileged materials seized from those offices: the “Manno Filter Team” and the “McCarthy Filter Team.” AUSA Matthew Smith and federal agent Michael O’Brien formed the Manno Filter Team. O’Brien performed an initial review of materials seized from Manno’s law office, trying to make sure those items fell within the scope of the search warrant, and Smith then made the privilege determinations. Manno v. Christie, 2008 WL 4058016, at  (D.N.J. Aug. 22, 2008). If Smith determined that items were not privileged, he turned them over to the prosecution team, without going through the District Court first. Id. In contrast, if he thought that certain items might be privileged, he then determined whether an exception to the privilege, such as the crime-fraud exception, applied. Id. When such an exception did apply, Smith would “‘meet and confer’ with Manno or any … individual who may have a claim of privilege in an attempt to work out a resolution.” Id. Then, if that was unsuccessful in resolving any concerns, Smith applied to the District Court for a privilege determination before disclosing anything to the prosecution team. Id. The McCarthy Filter Team, led by Department of Justice attorney Cynthia Torg, followed similar procedures. It cataloged the materials seized from McCarthy’s law office and substantively evaluated them. Because the materials included 40 multiple parties and transactions, the team worked with McCarthy’s counsel to identify items covered by the attorneyclient privilege and the names of any of McCarthy’s clients who may have held the corresponding privilege as to those items. Any items identified as “potentially privileged” were segregated, and in February 2013, nearly one and a half years after Pelullo’s indictment, his counsel in this case was provided copies of those items to confirm if either Pelullo or Seven Hills claimed that privilege. The McCarthy Filter Team then sought to work with Pelullo’s counsel to resolve privilege disputes and reduce the volume of contested documents that the District Court needed to review.
Pelullo first challenges the propriety of the procedures employed by the Wiretap Filter Team and Manno Filter Team, saying they violated his Fifth and Sixth Amendment rights. He asserts it was improper for Agent Moyer to be on both the Wiretap Filter Team and an investigative team that had regular contact with the prosecution. He claims that error necessarily led to privileged information making its way from the Wiretap Filter Team to the prosecution. Additionally, Pelullo contends the Manno Filter Team’s attorney-client privilege determinations were improperly made by Agent O’Brien, a non-attorney. While rare, governmental intrusion into an attorneyclient relationship has occasionally risen to the level of “outrageous government conduct” violative of the Fifth 41 Amendment’s Due Process Clause.28 United States v. Voigt, 89 F.3d 1050, 1066 (3d Cir. 1996). We have exercised “scrupulous restraint” before declaring government action so “outrageous” as to “shock[] … the universal sense of justice[.]” Id. at 1065 (citation omitted). We thus require defendants to show the government knew of and deliberately intruded into the attorney-client relationship, resulting in “actual and substantial prejudice.” Id. at 1066-67. But nowhere does Pelullo claim the government’s conduct “amount[ed] to an abuse of official power that ‘shocks the conscience’” or otherwise explain how his due process rights were violated. Fagan v. City of Vineland, 22 F.3d 1296, 1303 (3d Cir. 1994) (citing Collins v. City of Harker Heights, 503 U.S. 115, 126 (1992)). He directs us to “no document, no telephone call, nothing that was turned over to the prosecution team that in any way has been used against [him] improperly[.]” (JAB at 2225.) Although Agent Moyer’s presence on both a surveillance team 28 Common-law attorney-client privilege, which Pelullo asserts, has been described as overlapping with the Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination. See Fisher v. United States, 425 U.S. 391, 405 (1976) (noting the overlap between the right against self-incrimination and the attorney client privilege); In re Foster, 188 F.3d 1259, 1271 (10th Cir. 1999) (“Under Fisher, [the attorney-client] privilege effectively incorporates a client’s Fifth Amendment right; it prevents the court from forcing [the attorney] to produce documents given it by [the client] in seeking legal advice if the Amendment would bar the court from forcing [the client] himself to produce those documents.”). Pelullo, however, only argues a Fifth Amendment due process violation, and he does not invoke his right against self-incrimination. 42 and a filter team may have run afoul of Department of Justice procedures, 29 that alone is not enough to establish a constitutional violation. With respect to the Manno Filter Team, Pelullo is not quite accurate when he says that Agent O’Brien, a nonattorney, performed the initial privilege determinations. O’Brien did screen the materials in the first instance to decide what fell within the scope of the warrant. Manno, 2008 WL 4058016, at . The initial privilege review, however, was performed by AUSA Smith. Id. And even if that were not the case, Pelullo does not present an argument that O’Brien being an initial screener would “shock the conscience.” Finally, in a conclusory fashion, Pelullo also asserts that the errors he alleges are also all in violation of the Sixth Amendment. But the Sixth Amendment does not attach before the indictment. See McNeil v. Wisconsin, 501 U.S. 171, 175 (1991); United States v. Kennedy, 225 F.3d 1187, 1194 (10th Cir. 2000) (“Government intrusions into pre-indictment attorney-client relationships do not implicate the Sixth Amendment.”). Pelullo fails to identify any constitutional deficiencies in the procedures of the filter teams, and we discern no error. 29 A Department of Justice manual provides that “‘privilege team[s]’ should … consist[] of agents and lawyers not involved in the underlying investigation.” U.S. Dep’t of Justice, Justice Manual § 9-13.420 (2021). 43
Next, Pelullo challenges the ex parte proceedings held in conjunction with the filter teams, saying they violated his Fifth Amendment due process rights, his Sixth Amendment right to counsel, and separation of powers principles. Again, he comes up short. The use of filter teams is an acceptable method of protecting constitutional privileges. Moreover, Pelullo has not identified any privileged materials that were improperly shared with the prosecution, nor has he otherwise attempted to demonstrate prejudice. The use of filter teams in conjunction with ex parte proceedings is widely accepted. See, e.g., In re Search of Elec. Commc’ns, 802 F.3d 516, 530 (3d Cir. 2015) (“[T]he use of a ‘taint team’ to review for privileged documents [is] a common tool employed by the Government.”); In re Grand Jury Subpoenas, 454 F.3d 511, 522 (6th Cir. 2006) (explaining that when “potentially-privileged documents are already in the government's possession, … the use of the taint team to sift the wheat from the chaff constitutes an action respectful of, rather than injurious to, the protection of privilege”); United States v. Avenatti, 559 F. Supp. 3d 274, 282 (S.D.N.Y. 2021) (“[T]he use of a filter team is a common procedure in this District and has been deemed adequate in numerous cases to protect attorney-client communications.” (citation and internal quotation marks omitted)). Contrary to Pelullo’s suggestion, he had no pre-indictment Sixth Amendment rights, nor did he have a Fifth Amendment due process right to notice of the ex parte proceedings. Indeed, his surveillance was consistent with the Wiretap Act, which requires courts to seal all government applications for wiretaps and any resulting orders. 18 U.S.C. § 2518(8)(a)-(b). That sealing provision was established “to 44 protect the confidentiality of the government’s investigation[,]” United States v. Florea, 541 F.2d 568, 575 (6th Cir. 1976), which the sealing did here until the appropriate time. Although the Act entitles the subject of the wiretap to notice and an inventory of the intercepted communications within a reasonable time, such notice may be postponed pursuant to an ex parte showing of good cause. 18 U.S.C. § 2518(8)(d). Good cause is not a high bar, and an ongoing criminal investigation will typically justify delayed notice of the wiretap. E.g., United States v. John, 508 F.2d 1134, 1139 (8th Cir. 1975); United States v. Manfredi, 488 F.2d 588, 602 (2d Cir. 1973). It did so in this case. The undercover investigation here continued until the intercepted communications gave the government probable cause in May 2008 to search the law offices of Manno and McCarthy. By executing those searches pursuant to warrants, the government’s investigation could no longer continue undercover. Pelullo was thus notified about the existence of the wiretap shortly thereafter. Pelullo next challenges the procedures employed by the Manno and McCarthy Filter Teams, arguing they violated separation-of-powers principles. The Manno and McCarthy Filter Teams, as detailed above, instituted procedures to ensure the protection of privileged materials. In challenging those procedures, Pelullo relies predominantly on a Fourth Circuit case, In re Search Warrant, 942 F.3d 159 (4th Cir. 2019), which held comparable conduct unconstitutional. That case, however, arose in the context of a motion for a temporary restraining order brought by a law firm to enjoin the use, without adequate process, of materials that had been seized as part of a criminal investigation into one of its clients. Id. at 45 164. The Fourth Circuit reversed the district court’s denial of the motion, ordering that the challenged filter team procedures be enjoined. Id. at 170. Pelullo’s argument arises in an entirely different procedural posture: on post-conviction appeal. The full applicability of the Fourth Circuit’s precedent is thus open to question. More importantly, however, Pelullo has not identified any way in which the process used to screen for attorney-client privileged material caused him harm. We do not believe, nor has Pelullo suggested, that the alleged error – allowing an executive branch employee to make an initial privilege determination – is structural. See United States v. Colon-Munoz, 192 F.3d 210, 217 n.9 (1st Cir. 1999) (finding alleged separation-of-powers violation not structural because it “involve[d] the structure of the federal government rather than the structure of the criminal trial process as a reliable means of determining guilt or innocence”); see also Neder v. United States, 527 U.S. 1, 8-9 (1999) (structural error is that which would “deprive defendants of ‘basic protections’ without which ‘a criminal trial cannot reliably serve its function as a vehicle for determination of guilt or innocence ... and no criminal punishment may be regarded as fundamentally fair’” (citation omitted)). Thus, we employ harmless-error review, and the answer to whether there was any error here that caused Pelullo harm is simple. There was not. Despite having had a full and fair opportunity to do so, before both the District Court and us, Pelullo has not pointed to any piece of evidence that was privileged but improperly provided to the prosecution. Without reaching the question of whether a constitutional violation occurred (and without commenting on the 46 advisability of the particular screening methods employed by the government), it is clear that, even if there were error, there was no prejudice as a consequence. See United States v. Schneider, 801 F.3d 186, 200 (3d Cir. 2015) (“An error is harmless when it is highly probable that it did not prejudice the outcome.” (citation and internal quotation marks omitted)). Because Pelullo has not shown that injury resulted from the filter teams’ review, any error was harmless, and his Fifth and Sixth Amendment claims fail.
Pelullo’s final complaint about the handling of his attorney-client privilege assertions in the District Court is that the Court applied the incorrect standard when determining whether the crime-fraud exception applied to certain intercepted communications. But it is Pelullo who misconstrues that exception. The crime-fraud exception to the attorney-client privilege limits “the right of a client to assert the privilege … with respect to pertinent [communications] seized by the government, when the client is charged with continuing or planned criminal activity.” In re Impounded Case, 879 F.2d 1211, 1213 (3d Cir. 1989). To invoke the exception, the party seeking to overcome the privilege must first demonstrate “a factual basis … to support a good faith belief by a reasonable person that the [seized] materials may reveal evidence of a crime or fraud.” Haines v. Liggett Grp. Inc., 975 F.2d 81, 96 (3d Cir. 1992). If that threshold is crossed, the district court will conduct an in camera review to determine whether the party advocating the exception has made “a prima facie showing that (1) the client was committing or intending to 47 commit a fraud or crime, … and (2) the attorney-client communications were in furtherance of that alleged crime or fraud[.]” In re Grand Jury Subpoena, 223 F.3d 213, 217 (3d Cir. 2000) (citations omitted). Contrary to the just-quoted precedent, Pelullo says that the crime-fraud exception requires something beyond a prima facie showing, that some heightened standard governs whether disclosure to the prosecution is permitted. He is wrong. As our precedent makes clear, there is no heightened standard beyond the requisite prima facie showing. Here, the District Court performed the correct analysis when it determined, based on the government’s prima facie showing, that Pelullo was committing crimes and that the communications at issue included discussion furthering those crimes. The Court’s conclusion was supported by the filter teams’ evidence of Pelullo’s criminal activities, the connection between his attorneys and the purported fraud, and analysis of how Pelullo’s conversations with attorneys furthered that fraud. In sum, the showing required to apply the crime-fraud exception was met by the evidence provided by the filter teams, and the District Court relied on the appropriate legal standard in making its determinations. Pelullo has not established any error based on the government’s use of filter teams.