WASHINGTON >> As former President Donald Trump prepares for a momentous court appearance Tuesday on charges related to the hoarding of top-secret documents, Republican allies are amplifying, without evidence, claims that he is the target of a political prosecution.

To press their case, Trump’s backers are citing the Justice Department’s decision in 2016 not to bring charges against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, his Democratic opponent in that year’s presidential race, over her handling of classified information. His supporters also are invoking a separate classified documents investigation concerning President Joe Biden to allege a two-tier system of justice that is punishing Trump, the undisputed early front-runner for the GOP’s 2024 White House nomination, for conduct that Democrats have engaged in.

But those arguments overlook abundant factual and legal differences — chiefly relating to intent, state of mind and deliberate acts of obstruction — that limit the value of any such comparisons.

Clinton relied on a private email system for the sake of convenience during her time as the Obama administration’s top diplomat. That decision came back to haunt her when, in 2015, the intelligence agencies’ internal watchdog alerted the FBI to the presence of potentially hundreds of emails containing classified information.

After a roughly yearlong inquiry, the FBI closed out the investigation in July 2016, finding that Clinton did not intend to break the law.

The indictment filed by Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith alleges that when Trump left the White House after his term ended in January 2021, he took hundreds of classified documents with him to his Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago — and then repeatedly impeded efforts by the government he once oversaw to get the records back.

The material that Trump retained, prosecutors say, related to American nuclear programs, weapons and defense capabilities of the United States and foreign countries and potential vulnerabilities to an attack — information that, if exposed, could jeopardize the safety of the military and human sources.

Beyond just the hoarding of documents the Justice Department says Trump showed highly sensitive material to visitors without security clearances and obstructed the FBI by, among other things, directing a personal aide who was charged alongside him to move boxes around Mar-a-Lago to conceal them from investigators.

Though Trump and his allies have claimed he could do with the documents as he pleased under the Presidential Records Act, the indictment makes short shrift of that argument and does not once reference that statute.

All told, the indictment includes 37 felony counts against Trump, most under an Espionage Act statute pertaining to the willful retention of national defense information.