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| Andrew Goldstein with his former boss Preet Bharara |
The routine was always the same. President Trump’s lawyers would drive to heavily secured offices near the National Mall, surrender their cellphones, head into a windowless conference room and resume tense negotiations over whether the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, would interview Mr. Trump.That's the first of several times this is mentioned in the article which begins to sound like a warning that everyone had better pour themselves a big drink because this thing probably isn't going anywhere.
But Mr. Mueller was not always there. Instead, the lawyers tangled with a team of prosecutors, including a little known but formidable adversary: Andrew D. Goldstein, 44, a former Time magazine reporter who is now a lead prosecutor for Mr. Mueller in the investigation into whether the president obstructed justice.
Mr. Mueller is often portrayed as the omnipotent fact-gatherer, but it is Mr. Goldstein who has a much more involved, day-to-day role in one of the central lines of investigation.
Mr. Goldstein, the lone prosecutor in Mr. Mueller’s office who came directly from a corruption unit at the Justice Department, has conducted every major interview of the president’s advisers. He questioned Donald F. McGahn II, Mr. Trump’s former White House counsel, and Michael D. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s former fixer and lawyer, for dozens of hours. He signed Mr. Cohen’s plea agreement. He conducted grand jury questioning of associates of Roger J. Stone Jr., the former adviser to Mr. Trump who was indicted last month.
And he was one of two prosecutors who relayed to the president’s lawyers dozens of questions about Mr. Trump’s behavior in office that Mr. Mueller wanted the president to answer under oath. The questions showed the Mueller team’s hand for the first time: extensive, detailed lines of inquiry that could imperil the presidency.
“He knew the facts like I knew the facts,” John Dowd, Mr. Trump’s former lawyer, said of Mr. Goldstein.
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Now that Mr. Mueller is expected to deliver his report in the coming weeks, Mr. Goldstein’s past as a prosecutor offers a glimpse into how he might be helping the special counsel make a final determination.
Interviews with Mr. Goldstein’s colleagues and friends and an examination of his past work reveal someone profoundly at odds with the cowboylike image Mr. Trump has painted of Mr. Mueller’s team. He is one of the few in the group with a career outside the law — in addition to working for Time, Mr. Goldstein was a high school teacher — and is known for his nonconfrontational personality and cautious approach to prosecutions.
Before Mr. Mueller hired him, Mr. Goldstein, the son of a former Republican United States attorney, led the corruption unit in the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan as the office made a highly unusual call to announce that it had declined to charge Mayor Bill de Blasio with a variety of crimes. The decision revealed how restrained high-level prosecutors often are in major political investigations.
“Investigating and prosecuting public corruption offenses can only go so far,” Mr. Goldstein said in a rare speech around the time he joined the special counsel’s team in 2017. “We can only police the outer bounds of misconduct: the really bad stuff, or at least the stuff that we can prove.”
From the beginning, the byzantine structure of the Mueller investigation split its dozen-plus prosecutors into silos and specialties: money laundering, hacking, national security and public corruption.
Starting in the summer of 2017, when Mr. Trump’s closest White House advisers were summoned to Mr. Mueller’s offices, they typically met the same calm stare and gravelly voice of the man his former high school students still call Mr. Goldstein.
With James L. Quarles III, a former prosecutor in the Watergate investigation, Mr. Goldstein has led the office’s investigation into whether the president’s dismissal of the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey — and Mr. Trump’s repeated assaults on the Justice Department — should be considered obstruction of justice.
He has tried to determine the president’s motives in Mr. Comey’s firing during dozens of hours questioning Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s former chief strategist, and nearly seven hours with Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s senior adviser and son-in-law, in April.
As evidence built over two years, Mr. Goldstein functioned as a repository of conversations that Mr. Trump had with lawyers, advisers and top law enforcement officials from early 2017 on. Among Mr. Goldstein’s jewels, according to Mr. Trump’s lawyers: exhaustive notes taken by Annie Donaldson, Mr. McGahn’s former chief of staff, which detailed in real time Mr. Trump’s behavior in the West Wing.
The office made a highly unusual decision to release a public statement explaining why Mr. de Blasio would not be charged, citing “the high burden of proof” and the “difficulty in proving criminal intent in corruption schemes where there is no evidence of personal profit.”I don't know what that tells us. But unless they have Trump on tape saying "I've got to fire that James Comey or my handler Comrade Putin will be so angry" it won't be surprising if they decide that he's so damned stupid that he didn't indent to obstruct justice because he literally doesn't understand what it is.
“He was very much measure 10 times, cut once,” said Kan M. Nawaday, a prosecutor who worked with Mr. Goldstein in the corruption unit. “Nine times out of 10, you do a lot of investigation, and you realize the conduct is pretty terrible and foul. But since you’re here to do justice, it isn’t a crime, and you walk away.”
Mr. Goldstein has also gone out of his way to attack defendants who repeatedly fail to tell the truth. “And why do people lie?” Mr. Goldstein said in a closing argument against Sheldon Silver, the former Democratic speaker of the New York State Assembly, who had covered up illegal payments from a friend seeking favors and was found guilty on all counts. “Why do people hide things? Why do people keep secrets? Because they have something to hide.”
“You want to have people who have had experience not only bringing high-profile cases, but in walking away from them because it’s the right thing to do,” he said. “The fact that you have a person who’s comfortable saying there’s nothing here, even though there’s a lot of clamor for it, is exactly the kind of person you want.”