Trump Turns to a Familiar Playbook in Effort to Undermine Documents Inquiry

Mr. Trump’s legal team believed the prosecutor’s reference to the judgeship may have been a veiled threat designed to pressure the lawyer into getting his client to become a cooperating witness, the people said.

Peter Carr, a spokesman for Mr. Smith, declined to comment.

Throughout his life, Mr. Trump has treated every challenge to him like an ongoing negotiation. His impulse is to go directly to the person he considers the top official of an organization to lodge his complaints. That was the case when the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III was appointed in 2017; Mr. Trump’s advisers had to stop him from trying to reach out directly to Mr. Mueller to argue his case.

By broadcasting his complaints on social media rather than making them in court papers to a judge, Mr. Trump avoided the normal method of lodging accusations about prosecutorial misconduct — a method that, of course, also puts a burden of veracity and accuracy on the accuser.

Should an indictment be filed, he could choose to include his complaints in a motion to dismiss the case. In theory, he could also file a motion before any charges are filed using the complaints to attack the process of investigating him with the grand jury.

Since his days as a New York real estate developer decades ago, Mr. Trump has sought to undermine people examining his or his company’s behavior. His company was sued in 1973 by the Justice Department, alleging racially discriminatory housing practices. Mr. Trump’s lawyer, the brutal fixer Roy M. Cohn, claimed in court filings in a countersuit that the government had engaged in “Gestapo-like tactics” and called investigators “storm troopers.”

A few years later, Mr. Trump was investigated by the federal prosecutor in Brooklyn for a possible fraud charge connected to his acquisition of a parcel of land. Mr. Trump met with investigators without a lawyer present. The case was eventually dropped, but Mr. Trump went on to complain to people about what he went through.

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.