The President's Bad Move

In trying to defuse a showdown with Congress, Mr. Bush created another problem.

PRESIDENT Bush's action to seal the papers seized from the congressional office of Rep. William J. Jefferson (D-La.) may have been a well-intentioned effort to defuse a confrontation between the executive and legislative branches. It was also a mistake. In trying to solve one problem, Mr. Bush created another: Presidential intervention in an ongoing criminal investigation is a bad idea and a worse precedent.

Imagine the uproar -- and it's not hard to do so -- if the target were a Republican lawmaker, not a Democrat, and the president ordered the seized information put on ice for 45 days, as the election drew closer. And remember the blowup over the involvement of Clinton White House officials in an FBI investigation into alleged misconduct by employees of the White House travel office. There is good reason to have firewalls between criminal investigators and White House officials.

It's precisely the fact that prosecutors are investigating Republican lawmakers that makes the president's intervention so ominous here. Certainly, investigations of sitting legislators have to be conducted with respect for their constitutional role; we have expressed support for the possible need to search lawmakers' offices under extraordinary circumstances and reservations about the way it unfolded in Mr. Jefferson's case. But it sends a chilling message to agents and career prosecutors working on cases involving other lawmakers to know that the president is on call to second-guess them if members are unhappy with the way their investigation is proceeding.

Mr. Bush has other interests here -- his diminished political standing and his need for congressional help on other issues, such as immigration reform -- that are not necessarily congruent with the legitimate needs of law enforcement. If it were necessary to take this step -- and we're not convinced it was -- there was a better way to handle it, which was to have the Justice Department make and announce the decision. The report in today's Post by Dan Eggen and Peter Baker -- that the Justice Department signaled to the White House that the top three law enforcement officials would quit if ordered to return Mr. Jefferson's documents -- only underscores the inadvisability of White House interference here.

It's important to remember that this search warrant was approved by a federal judge, who certainly was aware of the constitutional sensitivities involved. Indeed, Mr. Jefferson had already asked the judge, Chief U.S. District Judge Thomas F. Hogan, to grant some form of the relief Mr. Bush ordered Thursday. In a motion filed in federal court here, Mr. Jefferson asked that Judge Hogan order investigators to stop reviewing the seized items and to have the material sequestered. We think the judge is a better arbiter of whether that should be done than is the president.