WASHINGTON — The Justice Department asked a federal appeals court on Monday to throw out or at least temporarily halt a lawsuit that accuses President Trump of illegally benefiting from his family’s business, seeking to block more than three dozen subpoenas for documents from the Trump Organization, the president’s trust and other entities.

The department acted in response to recent rulings by a federal district judge in a lawsuit brought by the District of Columbia and the State of Maryland. The lawsuit alleges that Mr. Trump has violated the Constitution’s anticorruption clauses, in part by accepting payments from foreign officials who patronize the Trump International Hotel, only blocks from the White House.

“The complaint rests on a host of novel and fundamentally flawed constitutional premises, and litigating the claims would entail intrusive discovery into the president’s personal financial affairs and the official actions of his administration,” the Justice Department argued in a 40-page petition to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.

The federal judge overseeing the case, Peter J. Messitte of the United States District Court in Greenbelt, Md., has issued a series of rulings that have allowed the lawsuit to proceed to the evidence-gathering stage. This month, attorneys general for Maryland and the District of Columbia, who contend the Trump hotel unfairly competes with convention centers and hotels in their jurisdictions, issued 38 subpoenas for documents from the hotel and other entities.

In asking the appeals court to intervene, the Justice Department stressed the extraordinary nature of the lawsuit. Never before has any court defined the meaning of the Constitution’s language restricting federal officers from accepting benefits or “emoluments” from foreign or domestic governments.

Both sides expect that the case will eventually reach the Supreme Court. But while the president’s accusers are hoping to gather evidence before any appeal is granted, the Justice Department contends an emergency review is merited because the legal issues are brand-new and highly significant.

“Despite this remarkable complaint, the district court treated this case as a run-of-the-mill commercial dispute,” the department said in its filing.

Trump Still Makes Money From His Properties. Is This Constitutional?

Two lawsuits allege President Trump has violated the Constitution’s anticorruption clauses by continuing to own a business that receives payments and other benefits from foreign and domestic governments.

The Justice Department lawyers characterized a number of Judge Messitte’s decisions as legal errors. They said the errors included his broad definition of an emolument as “anything of value,” his determination that the local jurisdictions have standing to sue the president and his ruling that their claim was valid enough that they be allowed to try to prove it.

They called the judge’s refusal to halt the case while they appealed his rulings “a manifest abuse of discretion.” And they asked the appeals court to step in before Jan. 3, the deadline to reply to at least some of the subpoenas, to prevent “wide-ranging discovery into his personal finances and the official actions of his administration.”

In a statement, Karl A. Racine, the attorney general for the District of Columbia, said, “President Trump is going to extraordinary lengths to try to stop us from gathering information about how he is illegally profiting from the presidency. Unless the Fourth Circuit rules otherwise, we will continue to work hard to gather the evidence needed to put a stop to the president’s ongoing violations of the Constitution.”

The Justice Department is arguing that the framers of the Constitution sought only to prevent federal officials from acting as paid employees or officers of foreign or domestic governments, not from profiting from businesses that serve them. In any case, the department’s lawyers contend, the case is far too important to treat like an ordinary federal lawsuit.

Typically, appeals are restricted until after lower court proceedings finish. But the department noted that the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals had stepped in on an emergency basis in a case involving asylum claims of refugees. “The president is entitled to at least as much judicial solicitude in obtaining appellate review of threshold legal defenses” in this case, they wrote.

The lawsuit contends that foreign, state and federal officials deliberately book rooms at the Trump International Hotel and patronize its restaurant to curry favor with the president.

It alleges that since Mr. Trump was elected, the hotel has hosted events by the embassies of Kuwait, Bahrain and the Philippines and collected at least $270,000 from the government of Saudi Arabia. Other patrons have included a Malaysian government delegation and the governor of Maine, who was in Washington on business with the White House.

Among other entities, the plaintiffs are seeking documents from the Treasury Department, which was supposed to collect the hotel’s profits from business from foreign governments; the General Services Administration, which leased the property to Mr. Trump’s company; and 18 hotels, convention centers and other enterprises that compete for customers with Mr. Trump’s property.

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