Now, if he had taped "pass:1234" on to the inside of his phone case, and the CBP official had typed that in I'd argue it wasn't his action. But the act of giving false information that led to the auto-destruct is 100% equivalent to him typing it in himself.

The lesson imo, is to have something similar to trucrypt / veracrypt, in which multiple passcodes can unlock different sections of an encrypted drive (and the empty space is encrypted as well with a random key). That way, you have much more plausible deniability ("I gave you the key"), and it's not actively destroying evidence.

I remember watching a video about the interrogation of Stephanie Lazarus, who police suspected of a decades-old murder. They initially misrepresented how much evidence they had on her to get her to talk more, which ultimately worked and helped to gather evidence that assisted in securing the conviction. The point being that our society currently allows the police to lie to suspects (but NOT to the courts/public at large), in theory for the greater good (catching criminals).

Now whether or not this person was fairly targeted in the first place, and whether or not they should be in trouble for wiping their phone is a whole different question, but the premise of the article kind of implies there was some sort of new "gotcha" in the case, which doesn't appear to be so.