This NY Times piece analyzes Trump’s long-standing habit of obstructing justice. The man who claims that everyone else is cheating has always been a cheater and a cover-up artist. He is completely unethical and immoral.
By now you know the new charges in the superseding indictment. He tried to have the surveillance tapes destroyed and he worked to make sure his henchmen wouldn’t say anything. They did and now they are under federal indictment.
Trump has always done this:
“Demanding that evidence be destroyed is the most basic form of obstruction and is easy for a jury to understand,” said Mr. Goldstein, who is now a white-collar defense lawyer at the firm Cooley.
“It is more straightforwardly criminal than the obstructive acts we detailed in the Mueller report,” he said. “And if proven, it makes it easier to show that Trump had criminal intent for the rest of the conduct described in the indictment.”
The accusation about Mr. Trump’s desire to have evidence destroyed adds another chapter to what observers of his career say is a long pattern of gamesmanship on his part with prosecutors, regulators and others who have the ability to impose penalties on his conduct.
And it demonstrates how Mr. Trump viewed the conclusion of the Mueller investigation as a vindication of his behavior, which became increasingly emboldened — particularly in regards to the Justice Department — throughout the rest of his presidency, a pattern that appears to have continued despite having lost the protections of the office when he was defeated in the election.
In his memoir of his years in the White House, John R. Bolton, who served as Mr. Trump’s third national security adviser, described Mr. Trump’s approach as “obstruction as a way of life.”
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The updated indictment also demonstrates how Mr. Trump, in the aftermath of the search of Mar-a-Lago last August, turned to an issue that he obsessed about in the White House: loyalty.
“Someone just wants to make sure Carlos is good,” the indictment quoted Mr. Nauta as saying about Mr. De Oliveira to another Trump employee.
That employee told Mr. Nauta that Mr. De Oliveira was “loyal” and “would not do anything to affect his relationship with Mr. Trump.”
Shortly after that exchange, Mr. Trump called Mr. De Oliveira and said that he would get him a lawyer, the indictment said. Legal fees for Mr. De Oliveira, Mr. Nauta and other Trump employees who have become witnesses or defendants in the documents case are being paid by a political action committee affiliated with Mr. Trump.
Mr. Trump’s desire for loyalty echoed behavior that Mr. Mueller captured in his report, which laid out how Mr. Trump asked the former F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, for his loyalty just days after taking office. Mr. Comey continued to pursue an investigation into ties between Mr. Trump’s campaign and Russia and was fired in Mr. Trump’s fifth month in office. Mr. Mueller was appointed as special counsel in the aftermath of Mr. Comey’s dismissal.
Mr. Mueller’s investigation ultimately identified nearly a dozen acts Mr. Trump took that could be seen as obstruction of justice. One of the most damning related to how Mr. Trump pressured his White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, to create a fake document rebutting statements he gave to Mr. Mueller’s office. Mr. McGahn refused to go along with what Mr. Trump wanted.
Another example related to Mr. Trump’s powers as president. During Mr. Mueller’s investigation, several of his allies and associates — including Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort — were indicted by the Justice Department in cases that could have produced damaging testimony about Mr. Trump and his campaign. As the prosecutions of the men went forward, Mr. Trump publicly dangled the idea of issuing pardons. In the final weeks of Mr. Trump’s presidency, he pardoned them.
“There are all sorts of ways to obstruct an investigation, but not every one has an equal impact,” said Brandon Van Grack, a former prosecutor on Mr. Mueller’s team. “Hiding and lying are damaging, but prosecutors can often still get at the truth. Destruction is often looked at seriously because it’s permanent. It’s permanently deleting or destroying” evidence in the case.
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Over many decades before reaching the White House, Mr. Trump engaged in gamesmanship with prosecutors, regulators and officials who had authority in aspects of the industries in which he operated. He lived in a New York City where corruption touched aspects of the political and government establishments and the real-estate construction businesses, and he came to believe that everything could be worked out through some kind of deal, associates and former employees said.
He courted officials who had prosecutorial jurisdiction in New York City, including Rudolph W. Giuliani, then the U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York, and Robert Morgenthau, the district attorney in Manhattan. Faced with massive amounts of civil litigation, his impulse, former employees said, was to find lawyers who knew the judge.
In April 2018, an aspect of the Russian investigation spun off into a separate one into Michael D. Cohen, a lawyer for the Trump Organization who also served as a fixer for Mr. Trump and knew many of his secrets. After Mr. Cohen’s hotel, apartment and office were searched by the F.B.I. that month, Mr. Trump called Mr. Cohen with a message: stay strong.
He then predicted on Twitter that Mr. Cohen would never “flip” on him. Mr. Cohen eventually did provide prosecutors with information about Mr. Trump’s hush-money payments before the 2016 election to a porn star who said she had a sexual liaison with him. He later said that Mr. Trump spoke in “code” to avoid plainly communicating his desires.
Mr. Bolton, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, wrote in his book, “The Room Where It Happened,” that Mr. Trump repeatedly sought to interfere with law enforcement and other official actions involving foreign leaders.
During an investigation into Halkbank, a state-financed institution based in Turkey that was facing an investigation by U.S. officials for a scheme to evade sanctions on Iran, Mr. Trump told the country’s leader that he would “take care of things,” Mr. Bolton wrote.
In a brief interview on Friday, Mr. Bolton pointed to a specific aspect of Mr. Trump’s view of how the rules apply to him: his use of government power for his personal and political benefit while in office.
He cited Mr. Trump’s efforts to solicit damaging information about the Bidens from Ukraine as he withheld military aid to that country. “It shows as president he had fundamental difficulty distinguishing himself from the government,” Mr. Bolton said. “And it’s also why he couldn’t understand why government officials weren’t personally loyal to him.”