Trump turns to a familiar playbook in effort to undermine documents inquiry

As prosecutors entered what seemed to be the final stages of their investigation into former President Donald Trump's handling of classified documents, Trump launched a preemptive strike against a possible indictment, posting a pair of messages on his social media platform early Thursday morning that sought to delegitimize the inquiry.

Trump accused a top federal prosecutor in the documents investigation of seeking to "bribe & intimidate" a lawyer representing one of the witnesses in the case. He claimed that the prosecutor had offered the lawyer an "important 'judgeship' in the Biden administration" if his client "'flips' on President Trump."

The attacks by Trump on Truth Social were drawn from a playbook that he has used time and again to undermine inquiries into his conduct. His efforts to tar both investigations — and investigators — started well before he was president and continued throughout his term in office, perhaps most prominently during the inquiry into his campaign's possible collusion with Russian officials in 2016.

The posts from Trump on Thursday had their roots in an effort by his legal team to gather allegations about potential misconduct by prosecutors in the documents case.

Some weeks ago, as Trump's aides and lawyers became increasingly worried that an indictment might be looming, they began assembling 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 grievances was then placed in the draft of a letter written to Attorney General Merrick Garland intended to alert Garland to the lawyers' concerns about how Smith's team has handled the documents case, the people said.

An abbreviated version of the letter, which also requested a formal meeting with Garland, was sent to the Justice Department late last month. It resulted in a meeting this week between three of Trump's lawyers and Smith and other prosecutors, not including the attorney general.

According to that accusation, the people said, during a meeting with a defense lawyer representing a potential witness against Trump, a top prosecutor in the documents case, brought up — in an unusual and perhaps inappropriate manner — an application that the lawyer had submitted to become a municipal judge in Washington.

Trump's legal team believed the prosecutor's reference to the judgeship 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 spokesperson for Smith, declined to comment.

Throughout his life, Trump has treated every challenge to him like an ongoing negotiation. His impulse is to go directly to the person he considers the top official of an organization to lodge his complaints. That was the case when special counsel Robert Mueller was appointed in 2017; Trump's advisers had to stop him from trying to reach out directly to Mueller to argue his case.

By broadcasting his complaints on social media rather than making them in court papers to a judge, Trump avoided the normal method of lodging accusations about prosecutorial misconduct — a method that, of course, also puts a burden of veracity and accuracy on the accuser.

Since his days as a New York real estate developer decades ago, Trump has sought to undermine people examining his or his company's behavior. His company was sued in 1973 by the Justice Department, alleging racially discriminatory housing practices. Trump's lawyer, the brutal fixer Roy Cohn, claimed in court filings in a countersuit that the government had engaged in "Gestapo-like tactics" and called investigators "storm troopers."

A few years later, Trump was investigated by the federal prosecutor in Brooklyn for a possible fraud charge connected to his acquisition of a parcel of land. Trump met with investigators without a lawyer present. The case was eventually dropped, but Trump went on to complain to people about what he went through.

Decades later, when Eric Schneiderman, then the New York attorney general, investigated Trump's for-profit Trump University, Trump filed a complaint with state ethics officials claiming that Schneiderman had sought to raise money from him previously and claimed the investigation was retribution for not doing more to contribute.

Even before Trump was indicted in a Manhattan state court earlier this year, he had already spent months denigrating the district attorney, Alvin Bragg, as a puppet of Trump's political enemies. He repeatedly referred to Bragg, Manhattan's first Black prosecutor, as "racist." And he is currently seeking to have the judge in the case, acting Justice Juan M. Merchan, recused, claiming he has conflicts because a relative of his has worked with Democrats.

After Trump took office as president, he and his allies turned their ire several times on law enforcement officials involved in investigations that came close to him.

Giuliani declared the FBI's office in New York — with which he had once worked closely as the U.S. attorney in Manhattan — had behaved like "storm troopers" in conducting the raid, the same language Cohn had used years earlier.

But how Trump approaches special counsel Jack Smith's investigations is likely to track most closely with how he sought to combat the Mueller investigation.