Two and a half weeks after holding a hearing to choose a trial date in the classified documents case against former President Donald J. Trump, Judge Aileen M. Cannon still has not decided when the proceedings will begin.

Part of the problem is the case itself, which is inherently complex.

But Judge Cannon, who has only been on the bench for four years, has done herself no favors by allowing a logjam of unresolved issues to pile onto her docket. That pile-up appears to have kept her from reaching a quick decision on the timing of the case, even though the defense and prosecution have told her they believe the trial could begin this summer.

While the lack of a trial date may be the most important issue before her, it is one of many things Judge Cannon has done, or not done, that have raised concerns about her decision-making.

On Monday evening, for example, she issued a curious order asking Trump’s lawyers and prosecutors in the office of special counsel Jack Smith to send her dueling jury instructions on two of the former president’s defenses in the case. She had already rejected one and apparently dismissed the other during a hearing last week.

Her interest in jury issues was somewhat strange because it came before she had decided when the trial would begin. But it was doubly unusual because it appeared to embrace one of Trump’s boldest defenses, leaving open the possibility that she could let the charges go to trial and then acquit the former president near the end of the proceedings by declaring that the government had failed to prove its case.

Even a seasoned lawyer could have difficulty laying out the timeline for a case that requires complicated litigation over how to handle the classified material with which Mr. Trump is accused. It would also be a challenge for any judge to fit that schedule around his busy campaign calendar and his obligations to attend proceedings in his three other criminal cases.

Still, some legal experts said the slow pace of Judge Cannon’s decision-making and the confusion that accompanied her conduct of the proceedings were indications of Judge Cannon’s inexperience and the ways in which Mr. Trump’s lawyers have been able to take advantage of it.

Judge Cannon, 43, was nominated to federal court by Mr. Trump in the final months of his term. Previously, she had been a federal prosecutor, where she mainly handled appeals. When she was assigned to oversee the secret documents case last year, she had handled only four criminal cases that had gone to trial.

“Based on what we know of her professional biography, this judge is completely inexperienced with complex criminal cases, and this is a case where complexity is inherent because of the national security aspects,” said Samuel Buell, a former federal prosecutor and defense attorney. professor at Duke University.

“Then you have sophisticated lawyers who are more than capable of multiplying that complexity,” he said, adding that they could do so “knowing that at some point she will essentially drink through a fire hose.”

Of course, it’s impossible to know what Judge Cannon might be thinking in the privacy of her chambers in Federal District Court in Fort Pierce, Florida. But the backlog of issues on her plate in the Trump case, while confusing to follow, can at least be glimpsed on the public record.

It is likely that before she decides on the trial schedule, Judge Cannon will await ruling on another motion filed by Mr. Trump: his unusual request for additional discovery materials in which he sought to blame the intelligence community for trapping him.

It would make sense to rule on this motion first, as Trump’s lawyers have asked Judge Cannon as part of it for an expanded hearing on whether the country’s spies and other national security officials were part of the team that killed him continued. If the judge is inclined to grant the hearing, it would take some time and have a clear impact on the overall outcome of the case.

But before ruling on the discovery request, she appears to be waiting for a decision on a supplemental motion: one related to Mr. Trump’s unusual attempt to file an unredacted version of the discovery papers that names of almost twenty government leaders would be revealed. to give evidence.

Prosecutors asked Judge Cannon to keep the names secret because they feared that if they were made public, the witnesses could be subject to threats or intimidation. But even though prosecutors filed their appeal more than a month ago, Judge Cannon has not yet addressed it.

As if this tangled web of unresolved issues and delays wasn’t enough, Mr. Trump’s lawyers filed a new request for additional time last week.

The attorneys asked Judge Cannon for an additional ten days to file paperwork related to their many attempts to have the case dismissed. One of the reasons they cited for needing a delay was that the judge had not yet ruled on their discovery request – one of the cases in the impasse.

So far, Mr. Smith has not complained too loudly about this. But at a hearing in Fort Pierce in early March, one of his top deputies, Jay I. Bratt, asked Judge Cannon to speed things up a bit in an effort, as he gently put it, “to keep this case moving.”

The judge appeared to respond to Mr. Bratt’s request.

“I can assure you,” she replied, “there is a lot of legal work going on in the background.”

Some legal experts, however, have questioned that work, pointing not only to the judge’s failure to set a trial date but also to her more recent ruling on jury instructions.

In that order, Judge Cannon asked the defense and prosecution to help her tighten for the jury the definition of a key phrase in the Espionage Act — the central statute in Trump’s indictment — that makes it a crime to take “unauthorized possession.” to have certain sensitive government documents.

Mr. Trump has argued for months that he had full authority to have the documents removed from the White House removed because under another law, the Presidential Records Act, he had converted the materials in question from official documents to personal documents.

But at a hearing in Fort Pierce last week, Judge Cannon seemed skeptical of that argument, saying it would “undermine” the Presidential Records Act. The law was introduced after the Watergate scandal not to allow presidents to make unfettered claims on documents from their time in office, but for the opposite reason: to ensure that most documents remained in the government’s possession.

Still, despite her initial misgivings about Trump’s claims that he had made the documents his own personal property, Judge Cannon seemed to entertain the idea again in her order on jury instructions.

One of the scenarios she asked the defense and prosecution to consider was whether “a president under the PRA has exclusive authority to categorize documents as personal or presidential during his/her presidency.”

Margaret Kwoka, a law professor at Ohio State University, said Judge Cannon’s order was unusual because she appeared to be asking the two sides to give her different jury instructions for different interpretations of the law rather than deciding the law themselves and then to ask for instructions. for the jury.

“The strange thing about this order is that it seems to be throwing things off,” Professor Kwoka said. “This is such a strange way to approach this problem.”

Eileen Sullivan reporting contributed.

The federal judge overseeing the prosecution of former President Donald J. Trump on charges of mishandling classified documents expressed strong reservations Thursday about some of the requests his lawyers filed to have the case dismissed.

During a nearly daylong hearing in Federal District Court in Fort Pierce, Florida, the judge, Aileen M. Cannon, heard arguments from defense attorneys and from prosecutors in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s office on two of the more unorthodox attacks the former president. about the federal indictment.

One such attack by Mr. Trump’s team was a direct, if questionable, attack on the constitutionality of the Espionage Act, which the administration says Mr. Trump violated 32 times through a trove of highly sensitive classified material from the White House. Remove house after leaving office.

In the other attack, Mr. Trump’s lawyers argued that under a law known as the Presidential Records Act, Mr. Trump classified the documents he took as his own personal property and thus could not be accused of possession without permission.

But Judge Cannon, who was appointed by Trump near the end of his term, seemed skeptical of both claims. As Mr. Trump and Mr. Smith sat across from her on opposite sides of the courtroom, she said it would be an “extraordinary” step if a judge were to unilaterally strike down the Espionage Act, the key federal law governing the handling of classified documents. material.

She also said that while Trump could argue at trial that the documents he was accused of possessing were actually his, it was “hard to see” how that argument justified throwing out the entire case before it went to a jury.

In recent weeks, Mr. Trump’s lawyers have filed a barrage of motions to dismiss the case, using a sort of kitchen sink approach that has tackled the suit from every conceivable angle — not to mention what many lawyers say some could consider unthinkable. also.

Beyond his attack on the Espionage Act and his claims about the Presidential Records Act, Mr. Trump has questioned the legality of Mr. Smith’s appointment and argued — without evidence — that President Biden personally ordered prosecutions against him as a way to sink his 2024 campaign.

Mr. Trump has also claimed that he is fully protected from the charges by presidential immunity, even though he was no longer president when almost all of the actions mentioned in the indictment took place.

Overall, the motions are an aggressive and often far-fetched attempt to avoid responsibility for holding onto what prosecutors have described as some of the country’s most closely guarded secrets, and to question the government’s authority to submit the case to the court. first place.

Mr. Trump’s arguments have portrayed the prosecution as illegal and unfair from the start, reflecting, as one of Mr. Smith’s surrogates recently wrote, “his view that, as a former president, the laws and principles of accountability of nation that controls every other citizen does not apply to him.”

As Judge Cannon spent much of the day peppering the defense and prosecution with detailed questions about key phrases in the Espionage Act and about exactly how Mr. Trump went about classifying the documents he took as personal property, one important topic she did not bring up: the timing of the trial.

Two weeks ago, Judge Cannon held a hearing, ostensibly to choose a new trial date, but she has not yet made a decision.

Robert K. Hur, the former special counsel who investigated President Biden’s possession of classified documents after he left the vice presidency, testified before the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday.

Republicans criticized Mr. Hur over his conclusion that the evidence was insufficient to charge Mr. Biden with a crime. Democrats, for their part, attacked him for disparaging comments in his report on Mr. Biden’s mental acuity — including calling him a “well-meaning, older man with a poor memory” who had “diminished his faculties late in life.”

Here are five takeaways:

Hur was attacked by both sides.

Members of both parties were unhappy with aspects of Mr. Hur’s report. Republicans were angry that Mr. Biden was not charged with a crime, and repeatedly pointed to the criminal indictment against former President Donald J. Trump, which accuses him of deliberately withholding sensitive national security documents. Democrats accused Mr. Hur of smearing Mr. Biden’s mental acuity, saying that was contrary to Justice Department practices.

Sometimes the comments became harsh.

Representative Hank Johnson, Democrat of Georgia, accused Mr. Hur of deliberately providing fodder to “play into Republicans’ narrative that the president is unfit for office because he is senile.” That casting was false, he said, pointing to Mr. Biden’s energetic speech at the State of the Union.

Getting Mr. Hur, a former Trump political appointee to acknowledge that he is a registered Republican, accused Mr. Johnson of “doing everything you can do to get President Trump re-elected so you can be appointed to federal judge or perhaps to another position at the Ministry of Justice.”

Mr. Hur responded that he “had no such ambitions.” He insisted: ‘Party politics had no place in my work, it had no place in the investigative steps I took, it had no place in the decision I made, and it had no place in a single word of my report. ”

Across the aisle, Representative Tom Tiffany, Republican of Wisconsin, accused Mr. Hur of protecting Mr. Biden as part of what he portrayed as a politicized double standard by the Justice Department, which it accuses of committing crimes.

“I want to thank you for the work you have done to the best of your ability, but unfortunately you are part of the Praetorian Guard that guards the swamp here in Washington DC and protects the elites – and Joe Biden is part of that company of the elites,” Mr. Tiffany said.

Attempts to score political points dominated the hearing.

The hearing rarely focused on gaps in the evidence Mr. Hur gathered, beyond Mr. Biden’s mental state. Instead, Republicans sought to portray Mr. Biden as a criminal who has escaped indictment solely because he is, in the words of Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida, a “senile cooperator” and “the elevator doesn’t go all the way to the ground’. the top.”

Mr. Hur, who has been under fire for making what some have described as unnecessary and disparaging comments about Mr. Biden’s memory, had an incentive to focus on how Mr. Biden’s mental state could be presented to a jury come across as relevant and appropriate to discuss. .

Democrats often focused on how Mr. Trump kept classified documents; Mr. Trump was criminally charged. That included the contrast between Mr. Biden’s cooperation and Mr. Trump’s efforts to hinder efforts to retrieve files he kept at his Florida club and residence, Mar-a-Lago. And on several occasions, they played video clips of Mr. Trump misremembering things or speaking garbled.

There was less discussion about why the facts Mr. Hur found fell short of proving Mr. Biden knew he had a particular classified document, regardless of his memory.

Yet Democrats like Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington and Representative Mary Gay Scanlon of Pennsylvania have at several points led Mr. Hur to agree that his report also included lines like: “In addition to this dearth of evidence, there are other innocent explanations for the documents we cannot refute.”

“I didn’t acquit him.”

Moments after Mr. Hur’s report became public last month, Mr. Biden’s allies quickly sought to characterize it as an exoneration of the president. In their view, Mr Hur’s failure to find enough evidence to charge the president with a crime meant Mr Biden was innocent.

But Mr. Hur did find some evidence consistent with Mr. Biden deliberately withholding classified documents — even as he also concluded that the available facts did not provide sufficient evidence. Against that backdrop, five words during a conversation with Rep. Pramila Jayapal, a Washington Democrat, could complicate Democrats’ message as the 2024 campaign unfolds.

After claiming that Mr. Hur had exonerated the president, Ms. Jayapal tried to go further with her comments. But Mr Hur intervened and said: “I did not ‘acquit’ him – that word does not appear in the report.” He repeated that several more times, under questioning from members of both parties.

The discussion offered an echo of an ambiguous and much-researched line in the 2019 report by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel who investigated Russian interference in the 2016 campaign. Unlike Mr. Hur, Mr. Mueller did not some indication as to whether Mr. Trump should be charged with a crime, but he wrote only that “while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him” of obstruction of justice.

Hur made lawmakers say things he disagreed with.

Throughout the hearing, Mr. Hur generally kept a straight face and — except when defending himself personally — rarely raised objections to members of Congress who questioned him, even when their claims contradicted what he said or wrote.

For example, while Republicans like Rep. Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey used their time to portray Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump’s improper possession of classified documents as equals, Mr. Hur did not speak and repeated what he wrote in his report: that there are “several material differences” between the two cases.

And late in the hearing, Mr. Hur did not respond when a Democratic congresswoman, Representative Veronica Escobar of Texas, declared that “you were able to completely and totally exonerate him of any criminal wrongdoing.”

The hearing seemed likely to resonate in the coming campaign.

Some of the most intense conversations have focused on the president’s age and cognitive abilities, and are likely to resonate in the next eight months of the 2024 presidential campaign as Mr. Biden faces a rematch with Mr. Trump.

Biden, who at 81 is already the oldest elected president, has been dogged for months by concerns about his age among voters of both parties. He and his allies have dismissed those concerns, but Mr. Hur’s report described memory problems during a five-hour interview.

On Tuesday, Republicans repeatedly tried to engage Mr. Hur in discussions about the president’s state of mind, but he refused to go beyond the words in his report. Democrats, meanwhile, angrily disputed Mr. Hur’s claim that he was not political: “You were not born yesterday, you understood exactly what you were doing. It was a choice, said Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California.

Within the West Wing, the political damage has already been done by Mr Hur’s report. And Tuesday’s hearing can do little but reinforce it — a reality Republicans were clearly aware of when they invited him to testify.

For the president’s opponents, Mr. Hur’s denial that he exonerated Mr. Biden could also be political gold. It’s not hard to imagine this moment appearing in political television ads in support of Trump’s campaign.

Democrats will try to focus on Mr. Hur’s conclusion that no charges should be filed, and draw a sharp contrast between the charges brought against Mr. Trump over his own handling of turning over classified documents after he had left the White House. 2021.

Less than a year ago, New Jersey Governor Philip D. Murphy signed legislation that weakened the power of a watchdog agency set up to monitor election campaigns. Now lawmakers are moving to limit another good-governance effort, a public records law introduced to limit corruption by encouraging government transparency.

Mr. Murphy, a Democrat, has not publicly discussed the proposal, and his spokesman declined to comment on whether he would sign the bill if it reached his desk. But it comes at a critical time in his second term, with his wife, Tammy Murphy, running for the U.S. Senate and relying on support from some of the same Democratic lawmakers pushing the legislation.

The public records law, known as the Open Public Records Act, was passed 21 years ago, long before the explosion of digital communications increased the amount of information covered by the law — and expanded the universe of people trying to access the data. to acquire.

For-profit companies are now using government laws to obtain data central to their business models, sometimes burdening taxpayer-funded agencies, and there has been a bipartisan push across the country for public records laws to evaluate.

States including Arkansas, Colorado and Kentucky are considering restricting access to documents, while California is moving in the opposite direction, with activists pushing for a November ballot question to seek more disclosure.

The New Jersey legislation, if signed by Mr. Murphy, would represent the most significant change yet to the Open Public Records Act.

The bill would affect access to many different types of information, including real estate transactions, dog licenses and legal proceedings. Information that currently must be provided immediately upon request – such as government contracts and payroll information – may be delayed if the material is more than a year old. Home and email addresses, phone numbers and other identifying information now available would be redacted or hidden. And a broad group of people—representatives of the estimated $300 billion data broker industry, which bundles and sells records—would be denied access to anything at all.

The efforts to restrict access to public records pit municipal and county officials against advocates of government transparency.

Supporters say the legislation will ease burdens on government offices and protect citizens’ personal information in an era of identity theft and other high-tech crimes.

The effort is backed by some of the State House’s most influential forces, including local government lobby groups that say City Hall staff cannot keep up with rising data requests.

In recent years, for example, some agencies have been inundated with requests for video and audio files of arrests and other law enforcement interactions, said Lori Buckelew, deputy director of the New Jersey League of Municipalities.

“Editing one hour of bodycam footage takes three hours,” Ms. Buckelew said by phone.

John Donnadio, executive director of the New Jersey Association of Counties, said commercial requests for government documents have become particularly difficult. “There are counties that receive 3,000 or 4,000 public records requests a year,” he said.

Some of the best-known companies that collect data from government archives offer lawyers, researchers and scientists access to subscriptions. Other companies offer contact information about former classmates or potential romantic interests.

Critics of the bill, including the New Jersey Press Association, a newspaper industry lobbying group, call it an attack on democracy. They argue that restricting access to government documents would open the door to more corruption in a state that is no stranger to political scandals.

“We are living in a moment where there is significant distrust of government and public institutions,” Amol Sinha, executive director of the New Jersey chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a telephone interview. “The worst thing we can do is limit government liability and limit access to documents.”

The League of Women Voters of New Jersey called the legislation an “anti-transparency bill” in a social media post and said more than 700 people had joined an email protest.

On Sunday, Ms. Murphy, the first lady, said she opposed the legislation, which she characterized as an attempt to “undermine” the state’s public records law. “Both the public and the press should be able to ask questions – and get answers,” she said on social media. Her leading opponent in the Democratic Senate primary, Rep. Andy Kim, has also expressed concerns about the proposal.

The legislation is moving unusually quickly. A lead sponsor, Sen. Paul Sarlo, will chair a Senate Budget Committee hearing on the issue on Monday, while the Assembly’s State and Local Government Committee will examine the issue in its own hearing.

In the coming weeks, Mr. Murphy will need Senator Sarlo’s support on important initiatives. One of those is the reauthorization of the Transportation Trust Fund for rail and highway projects, which is contingent on a gasoline tax increase of nearly 10 cents per gallon and a fee for electric vehicles. Another example is the $55.9 billion state spending plan, which calls for an 11.5 percent tax on the most profitable companies to help fund public transportation, and $2.3 billion in housing tax credits.

Senator Sarlo did not return a spokesperson’s call for comment.

A federal judge in Florida will hold a hearing Friday to choose a new date for former President Donald J. Trump’s trial on charges of mishandling classified documents, a move likely to have major consequences for his legal and political future.

The judge, Aileen M. Cannon, has already said she is inclined to make some “reasonable adjustments” to the timing of the trial, which is tentatively scheduled to begin May 20 in Federal District Court in Fort Pierce. , Fla. Several decisions Judge Cannon has made in recent months about the pace of the case have made it virtually impossible for the trial to begin as planned.

What remains to be seen is how long the delay Judge Cannon ultimately imposes will be.

On Thursday evening, Trump’s lawyers and prosecutors in the office of special counsel Jack Smith sent Judge Cannon their proposals on when the trial should begin.

Mr. Smith’s legal team, adhering to its long-held position for the trial to take place before Election Day, requested a date of July 8. But after months of trying to postpone the trial until next year, Mr. Trump’s lawyers suddenly backtracked. and suggested a date of August 12.

The hearing for Judge Cannon, who was appointed to the bench by Mr. Trump in his final days as president, comes just days after a Supreme Court decision that raises the possibility that the former president may not face trial sooner. Election Day in his other federal case — the one in which he is accused of plotting to overturn the 2020 election.

The justices agreed to decide whether Mr. Trump is immune from prosecution on the election interference charges, with oral arguments scheduled for late April and the court proceedings remaining frozen until the issue is resolved. In practice, the Supreme Court’s decision to hear the case meant that the election process was unlikely to begin before September, in the heat of the general election campaign.

Judge Cannon’s decision on whether to use a July date, an August date or a little later in the documents case could also have an effect on the timing of the election case. Mr. Trump is expected to attend the hearing on Friday.

It was not clear why Mr Trump’s legal team said it would remain open until August, after long trying to delay the trial until next year. But one possibility was that by proposing to spend much of the late summer and early fall in court on the classified documents case, the lawyers were trying to reduce the chance that there would be time to resolve the election case before the to bring election day to court.

Just months ago, it appeared Trump would spend much of 2024 before a jury, fending off four separate criminal charges in four different cities.

However, at this time only one of his criminal trials has a solid start date. Last month, a state judge in Manhattan selected March 25 to begin his trial on charges of arranging hush money payments to a porn star in an effort to prevent a scandal on the eve of the 2016 election.

Trump’s fourth criminal case, accusing him of tampering with the election results in Georgia, has not yet gone to trial. The situation is currently in turmoil as a Fulton County judge considers disqualifying Fani T. Willis, the prosecutor who filed the charges, from the case over allegations of financial misconduct surrounding a romantic relationship she had with one of her deputies.

The Florida hearing, which will last most of Friday, won’t just be about scheduling issues.

Judge Cannon has asked the defense and prosecution to be prepared to discuss Trump’s unusually broad and highly politicized motion for additional discovery, filed in January. In the motion, the former president’s lawyers suggested that, as part of their defense at trial, they planned to argue that federal officials — including especially those in the intelligence community — were “politically motivated and biased” against Mr. Trump.

The sides will also debate an attempt by Mr. Smith to keep secret the names of about 20 potential witnesses who could testify at the trial.

Judge Cannon briefly granted a request from Mr. Trump’s lawyers to include the names of the witnesses in a public trial. But she suspended that decision after Mr Smith accused her of making a “clear mistake” and said the witnesses could face threats or intimidation if their identities were revealed.

Even during the discussion of these other issues, the issue of the timing of the trial was arguably of paramount importance.

If Judge Cannon were to postpone the proceedings until next year, she would likely face a groundswell of criticism. It is possible she could also trigger Mr Smith’s first appeal since the suit was filed in June, even though rulings on planning issues are generally not open to challenge in higher courts.

When Judge Cannon was randomly assigned to the case last spring, she was already under fire for making a ruling early in the investigation that was favorable to Mr. Trump but so legally questionable that an appeals court severely reprimanded her when she reversed the case. It.

After the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s private club and residence in Florida, for classified documents in August 2022, Judge Cannon appointed an independent arbitrator to determine whether the material collected by the agents was privileged and could must be. kept out of the hands of researchers.

But she accompanied that relatively typical decision with another that was virtually unheard of, effectively freezing the government’s investigation into Mr. Trump until after the arbitrator, known as a special master, had completed his work.

Prosecutors were outraged by the move, accusing Judge Cannon not only of not having the power to intervene so extremely in the case, but also of treating Mr. Trump differently than a normal criminal defendant.

A federal appeals court in Atlanta ultimately agreed, unanimously reversing her decision and noting that she appeared to have granted “a special exception” for Mr. Trump, despite “our nation’s fundamental principle that our law applies to everyone.”

Yet Judge Cannon has shown herself willing to thwart Mr. Trump in some of her more recent rulings.

On Wednesday, for example, she denied a highly unusual request from his lawyers to access a secret government file detailing a trove of classified evidence that prosecutors said was neither useful nor relevant to his defense.

Had Judge Cannon granted the request, legal experts said, it would have fallen far outside the normal procedures laid out in the Classified Procedures Act, the federal law that governs the use of classified materials during public trials.

But even as he ruled against Trump, Judge Cannon seemed to suggest he was different from most criminal defendants. She did not fully agree with Mr. Smith’s position that the facts in this case “did not remotely justify a departure from the normal process.”

“The court,” she wrote, “cannot speak with such confidence about this first-ever criminal prosecution of a former president of the United States — once the nation’s leading classification authority on many of the documents the special counsel is now trying to get him to withhold.’

Federal prosecutors on Monday rejected former President Donald J. Trump’s claims that he was wrongly accused of keeping classified documents after leaving office, saying his case was not comparable to the one in which President Biden was acquitted of wrongdoing , even though he was. found in possession of classified material after leaving the vice presidency.

In rejecting what was known as Mr. Trump’s claim of “selective prosecution,” prosecutors said that while many government officials over the years had taken classified material with them after leaving office — often unintentionally, but occasionally deliberately – Mr Trump’s case survived. unique because of the extent to which he had ‘resisted the government’s lawful efforts to recover them’.

“There has never been a case in American history in which a former official has engaged in conduct even remotely comparable to that of Trump,” they wrote.

In their twelve-page fileprosecutors have addressed a separate claim that Mr. Trump raised in his defense — that Mr. Biden “secretly took charge” of the case with classified documents and used the special counsel who filed the indictment, Jack Smith, dismissed as a ‘conspiracy theory’. as a ‘doll’ and a ‘stalking horse’.

“Decisions made by the Department of Justice in general, and the Special Counsel in particular, were made based on the facts and the law, and not on political considerations,” prosecutors wrote. “The defendants offer no evidence to the contrary because such evidence is lacking.”

Selective prosecution petitions are notoriously difficult to win because they require suspects to essentially prove that prosecutors discriminated against them by not filing charges against “similarly situated persons.” Mr. Trump’s lawyers have argued for months that Mr. Smith selectively and vindictively brought his case against the former president during his campaign for the White House for partisan political reasons.

But their claims swelled this month after a second special counsel, Robert K. Hur, released a report clearing Mr. Biden of any criminal wrongdoing after classified material was discovered in his possession several years ago.

In his report, Mr. Hur concluded that the cases involving Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden were not the same, largely because Mr. Biden had fully cooperated with investigators while Mr. Trump had tried to defy them in a variety of ways.

Mr. Smith’s prosecutors agreed, noting in their filing that in addition to illegally retaining “an enormous amount of some of the country’s most sensitive documents,” Mr. Trump also engaged in a “series of intentional and deceptive criminal conduct” intended to hinder efforts to recover the classified documents.

Prosecutors, citing their own indictment, said that Mr. Trump had initially defied the National Archives’ efforts to recover the documents and then “engaged in additional deception” by archives officials “only a fraction of the documents in to give up his property, while claiming that his production was complete.”

Mr. Trump also enlisted one of his own lawyers in a “corrupt attempt” to evade a grand jury subpoena demanding the return of all classified materials in his possession, prosecutors said. They noted that at one point Mr. Trump suggested to the lawyer, M. Evan Corcoran, that he “hide or destroy documents rather than turning them over to the government.”

After those efforts failed, prosecutors said, Trump had one of his personal assistants, Walt Nauta, move boxes of documents to Mar-a-Lago, the former president’s private club and residence in Florida, in an effort to deceive Mr. . Corcoran and keep the secret materials hidden.

Ultimately, prosecutors said, Mr. Trump called out Mr. Nauta and Mar-a-Lago property manager Carlos De Oliveira in an effort to delete video footage showing the boxes being moved.

Both Mr Nauta and Mr De Oliveira have been charged as co-defendants of Mr Trump in the case.

Mr. Trump’s lawyers have now twice filed claims of selective and vindictive prosecution in two separate filings before Judge Aileen M. Cannon, who is overseeing the classified documents case in Federal District Court in Fort Pierce, Florida.

The first came three weeks ago as part of a request to the judge to force the government to provide additional information they believe could support their arguments that the case was brought unfairly. The second came late last week in a motion to dismiss the complaint filed under seal with the judge.

Mr. Smith’s prosecutors said they would refute the claims in more detail when they respond to the request to dismiss the case next month.

At the end of this week, Judge Cannon has scheduled a hearing in Fort Pierce to decide the separate question of when the classified documents trial will take place. Currently scheduled to begin on May 20, the judge has already said she is inclined to make some “reasonable adjustments” to the timing of the case.

A congressional committee said Friday it would issue subpoenas to Harvard University in a search for documentation on whether the university tolerated anti-Semitism on its campus.

The move is part of a growing Republican effort to investigate elite universities for their response to pro-Palestinian student demonstrations, especially after the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks in Israel. The committee has also launched investigations into Columbia, MIT and the University of Pennsylvania. But Harvard is the first to receive subpoenas.

The war between Israel and Hamas has exposed deep political divisions among Harvard students, faculty and alumni, contributing to the resignation last month of Claudine Gay, the university's first black president.

Harvard, like many other universities, has said it must protect Jewish students while protecting free speech, but critics have said university officials have allowed demonstrations to spiral into anti-Semitism.

The House Committee on Education and the Workforce said the subpoenas would go to Harvard's interim president, Alan Garber; the head of the governance company, Penny Pritzker; and NP Narvekar, the CEO of the management company, which handles the university's endowments.

The subpoenas came as no surprise, as the committee had in recent days reprimanded Harvard for withholding or heavily redacting documents and warned it would take legal action.

“Harvard's continued failure to meet the committee's requests is unacceptable,” Rep. Virginia Foxx said in a statement Friday. “I will not tolerate delays and resistance to our investigation while Harvard's Jewish students continue to weather the firestorm of anti-Semitism that has engulfed the campus.”

Harvard has denied withholding information, saying in a statement Wednesday that it had responded “extensively and in good faith” by providing more than 3,500 pages of documentation.

“Through these submissions, Harvard has clearly demonstrated the steps it has and continues to take to combat acts of anti-Semitism on our campus,” the university said.

In its requests for documents, the committee said there was evidence that anti-Semitism was “pervasive” at Harvard long before the Oct. 7 attack. The subpoena issued to Ms. Pritzker and Dr. Garber asked for “all minutes and/or summaries of Harvard Corporation meetings, both formal and informal, since January 1, 2021,” among a wide range of other documents.

As head of Harvard's enterprise, Ms. Pritzker, a businesswoman and philanthropist, was one of the key supporters of Dr. Gay. The company repeatedly expressed its support for Dr. Gay, even when she accepted her resignation on January 2.

Mr. Narvekar, of Harvard's management company, appears to have been targeted for his role in communicating with major donors during the unrest from Oct. 7 to Jan. 2, when they may have threatened to withdraw over allegations of anti-Semitism.

The subpoenas also request information about disciplinary proceedings “related to conduct involving Jews, Israelis, Israelis, Zionists or Zionism since January 1, 2021.”

The deadline for Harvard to produce the documents is March 4.

It would be the first time that the committee, founded in 1867, has issued a summons to a university, according to a spokesperson for the committee.

The committee said it could refer the findings to the Ministry of Education, which has some oversight powers. And Ms. Foxx has said that universities that tolerate anti-Semitism should not receive federal funding.