[heyyyouu]

Any action by the government that can be seen to be chilling toward a free press can be interpreted as a violation of the first amendment. It's not as black and white as you make it out to be, and remember new precedents are being set all the time. They're also in the ninth circuit which is historically hugely favorable to these kinds of cases. You get a strong enough case, a lot of money and a creative lawyer, you might be able to make some caselaw here. There's at least a baseline argument for it.

That said, target is not irrelevant for illegality. There's also an issue of ethics in targeting other lawyers; if I was the defense lawyer this is the issue I'd be pushing like crazy with the judge, ethics panels, etc. Right or wrong, they can do something with that, esp. if they can get some discovery that proves there was actually an attempt to target -- that would be huge. (And they're not allowed to delete any documents to that effect since they are the government).