Trump Steps Up Efforts to Undermine Classified Documents Case

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

Even before Mr. Trump was indicted in a Manhattan state court earlier this year over a hush-money payment to a porn star, he had already spent months denigrating the district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, as a puppet of Mr. Trump’s political enemies. He repeatedly referred to Mr. 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 the judge has conflicts because a relative of his has worked with Democrats.

After Mr. 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.

In 2018, for example, after federal agents searched the office of Michael Cohen, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer at the time, for evidence of campaign finance violations, Rudolph W. Giuliani, another lawyer close to Mr. Trump, opened an attack against the F.B.I.

Mr. Giuliani declared the F.B.I.’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 Mr. Cohn had used years earlier.

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

Mr. Trump repeatedly attacked the F.B.I. and prosecutors working for Mr. Mueller, calling the Russia investigation a witch hunt. Mr. Trump and his allies tried to destroy the legitimacy of the inquiry by conflating problems that internal Justice Department investigators later uncovered and distorting facts used by John Durham, another special prosecutor who scrutinized the Russia investigation, in his own inquiry.