For the past few months, federal prosecutors and lawyers for former President Donald 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 Trump of illegally holding on to classified documents.

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

The aggressive and often baseless filings by 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 Trump’s claims, which were also unsealed Tuesday, Smith’s prosecutors denied 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, 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 Trump in January 2022.

And they claimed, without citing any evidence, that prosecutors had illegally waited until last June to file their indictment against Trump in effort to disrupt his primary campaign and damage his chances in the general election this November.

Trump’s lawyers asked Judge Aileen M. Cannon to exclude from the case any evidence the FBI discovered in August 2022 when agents searched Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s private club and residence in Florida.

Prosecutors called the former president’s accusations that the National Archives had colluded with the Biden administration a “conspiracy theory” based on a single misinterpreted sentence in an email in which a lawyer for the National Archives circulated a draft letter from archives officials to the Justice Department.

The prosecutors dismissed Trump’s claims that they had delayed filing his indictment to give Biden a “tactical advantage,” asserting that “the investigation and charges were driven solely by the facts and the law.” They noted that, since the indictment was filed, the former president’s lawyers have often accused them of proceeding too quickly in moving the case toward trial.