While the prosecutors entered the seemingly final stages of their investigation into the handling of former President Donald J. Trump’s classified documents, Mr. Trump launched a pre-emptive strike against the possible indictment, posting a pair of messages on his social media platform earlier. Thursday morning seeking to delegitimize the inquiry.
Mr. Trump has accused a top federal prosecutor in an investigation into search documents of “bribing and intimidating” a lawyer representing one of the witnesses in the case. He admitted that the prosecutor offered the lawyer “an important ‘judgement’ of the Biden administration” if his client “‘flips’ on President Trump.”
The attacks of Mr. Trump’s Truth Social is drawn from a playbook he often uses to deflect questions about his behavior. His efforts to tar investigations and investigators began before he became president and continued throughout his term in office, perhaps most prominently during the questioning of his campaign’s possible collusion with Russian officials in 2016. .
The posts from Mr. Trump on Thursday have their roots in an effort by his legal team to collect allegations about potential misconduct by prosecutors in the documents case.
A few weeks ago, while the assistants and lawyers of Mr. Trump became increasingly concerned that an indictment might be coming, they began compiling a list of complaints about alleged misconduct by prosecutors in the office of special counsel Jack Smith, according to two people familiar with the matter.
The list of complaints was then put into the draft of a letter written to Attorney General Merrick B. Garland intended to alert Mr. Garland’s lawyers’ concerns about how Mr. Smith’s case documents, the people said.
An abbreviated version of the letter, which also requested a formal meeting with Mr. Garland, was sent to the Justice Department last month. It resulted in a meeting this week between three of Mr. Trump’s lawyers and Mr. Smith and other prosecutors, not including the attorney general.
Mr. Trump’s accusations about a judge’s offer are similar to an allegation uncovered while his lawyers were collecting complaints about the prosecution team, people familiar with the matter said.
According to the indictment, the people said, during a meeting with a defense lawyer representing a potential witness against Mr. Trump, a top prosecutor in the case of the documents brought – in a unique and perhaps inappropriate way – an application submitted by the lawyer. to be a municipal judge in Washington.
The legal team of Mr. Trump believes the prosecutor’s comment may have been a veiled threat designed to pressure the lawyer into getting his client to become a cooperating witness, the people said.
Peter Carr, a spokesman for Mr. Smith, declined to comment.
Throughout his life, Mr. Trump has treated every challenge to him like an ongoing negotiation. His desire is to go directly to the person he considers the highest official in an organization to push his grievances. That was the case when special counsel Robert S. Mueller III was appointed in 2017; The advisers of Mr. Trump should stop him from trying to contact Mr. Mueller to argue his case.
By airing his complaints on social media rather than making them in court papers to a judge, Mr. Trump avoided the normal procedure for filing accusations of prosecutorial misconduct — a procedure that, of course , also places a burden of truth and accuracy on the accuser. .
If an indictment is filed, he may choose to include his complaints in a motion to dismiss the case. In theory, he could also file a motion before any charges are filed using the complaints to attack the process of investigating him by the grand jury.
Since his days as a New York real estate developer decades ago, Mr. Trump has sought to discredit people who scrutinize his character or his company. His company was sued in 1973 by the Justice Department, accusing its housing practices of racial discrimination. The lawyer of Mr. Trump, brutal fixer Roy M. Cohn, claimed in court filings in a countersuit that the government engaged in “Gestapo-like tactics” and called investigators “storm troopers.”
A few years ago, Mr. Trump is being investigated by federal prosecutors in Brooklyn for possible fraud charges connected to his acquisition of a parcel of land. Mr. Trump met with investigators without a lawyer. The case was eventually dropped, but Mr. Trump continued to complain to people about what he went through.
Decades later, when Eric Schneiderman, then the New York attorney general, investigated Mr. Trump, Trump University, Mr. Trump filed a complaint with state ethics officials claiming that Mr. Schneiderman has sought to collect money from him in the past and says the investigation is punishment for not making more contributions.
Even before being accused Mr. Trump in state court in Manhattan earlier this year, he has spent months shaming the district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, as a puppet of Mr. Trump’s political enemies. He repeatedly pointed at Mr. Bragg, the first Black prosecutor in Manhattan, who was “racist.” And he is currently seeking to have the judge in the case, acting Justice Juan M. Merchan, recuse himself, claiming he has a conflict of interest because his relative works with Democrats.
After Mr. Trump took office as president, he and his allies have repeatedly turned their anger on law enforcement officials involved in investigations close to him.
In 2018, for example, after federal agents searched the office of Michael Cohen, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer at the time, for evidence of campaign finance violations, Rudolph W. Giuliani, another lawyer close by Mr. Trump, launched an attack against the FBI
Mr. Giuliani declared that the FBI’s New York office – which he worked closely with as the US attorney in Manhattan – behaved like “storm troopers” in conducting the raid, the same language used by Mr. Cohn years ago.
But how Mr. Trump approaches special counsel Jack Smith’s investigations is likely to be closely related to how he seeks to combat the Mueller investigation.
Mr. Trump has repeatedly attacked the FBI and the prosecutors who worked for Mr. Mueller, who called the Russia investigation a witch hunt. Mr. Trump and his allies tried to undermine the legitimacy of the inquiry by mixing up problems that internal Justice Department investigators later discovered and distorting the facts used by John Durham, another special who is investigating the Russia investigation, in his own question.