Trump Lawyers Accuse Prosecutors of Misconduct in Documents Case

For the past few months, federal prosecutors and lawyers for former President Donald J. Trump have been battling in secret over allegations of misconduct and politicization in how the government handled the investigation that led to an indictment accusing Mr. Trump of illegally holding on to classified documents after he left office.

The fight spilled into the public eye on Tuesday as the judge overseeing the case unsealed a pair of motions by Mr. Trump attacking the integrity of the inquiry and claiming that the special counsel, Jack Smith, had timed his charges to create maximum political damage.

The aggressive and often baseless filings by Mr. Trump’s lawyers amounted to a multipronged assault on the underpinnings of the classified documents case and were the sharpest articulation yet of an argument the former president has often raised on the campaign trail: that law enforcement has been weaponized against him in a series of overreaching and politically driven witch hunts.

The two filings, which were released with hundreds of pages of supporting documents, homed in on an array of investigative steps taken by the government that the defense has claimed were improper.

In filings responding to Mr. Trump’s claims, which were also unsealed on Tuesday, Mr. Smith’s prosecutors vehemently defended themselves, denying there had been any misconduct or efforts to politicize an investigation that from the start, they said, had taken a “measured, graduated approach.”

In their filings, Mr. Trump’s lawyers accused “politically biased” officials in the National Archives, the agency responsible for taking control of presidential records, of colluding with the Biden administration to open a criminal investigation of the former president even before they found classified materials in an initial tranche of 15 boxes they received from Mr. Trump in January 2022.