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Lawyers for co-defendants of former President Donald J. Trump argued in federal court in Florida on Friday to dismiss charges of aiding in the obstruction of efforts to recover classified documents.

It was a rare hearing of the documents case in which Mr. Trump did not take center stage. His co-defendants, Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, are loyal Trump employees, accused of conspiring with the former president to hide boxes containing classified government materials after Mr. Trump left office.

Prosecutors also accused them of plotting to destroy security camera footage of the boxes being moved.

Judge Aileen M. Cannon considered the defense lawyers’ arguments in her Fort Pierce, Fla., courtroom but ended the two-hour hearing Friday without making a decision on whether the charges against the two men should be dismissed. She also did not announce a date for the trial to begin, despite holding a hearing more than a month ago on the matter.

Mr. Nauta and Mr. De Oliveira often take a back seat in the case against Mr. Trump. But each faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted of the most serious offenses.

Mr. Nauta, 41, is Mr. Trump’s personal aide and served as his military valet when Mr. Trump was in the White House. He spent 20 years in the Navy, taking an honorable discharge in September 2021, according to his service records.

Prosecutors working for the special counsel, Jack Smith, say Mr. Nauta moved 64 boxes from a storage room at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s Florida estate, and took them to the former president’s residence in the days before one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers was supposed to review the documents in response to a subpoena.

Mr. De Oliveira, 57, is a longtime Mar-a-Lago employee who rose through the ranks to become the property manager. He is accused of helping Mr. Nauta carry about 30 of those boxes from Mr. Trump’s residence back to the storage room the day Mr. Trump’s lawyer arrived at the resort to look through them.

Lawyers for the two men argued that their clients did not know the boxes they moved contained classified material. They also said their clients needed more details about the evidence against them than what was included in the 53-page superseding indictment.

Judge Cannon demurred, saying that the details in the indictment were “substantial.” She also suggested that some of their arguments for dismissing the charges were better suited for the jury to consider during the trial.

Motions to dismiss charges ahead of a trial are often long shots, and in many cases decided without holding a hearing. But Judge Cannon, who was appointed by Mr. Trump in the final days of his presidency, has at times seemed to embrace some of the former president’s legal arguments.

Some have also criticized the slow pace of her work, allowing routine issues to build up on her docket. Though the trial start date remains May 20 on the docket, it is exceedingly unlikely to begin that soon. Mr. Trump’s New York trial over the charge that he falsified records to cover up a hush-money payment to a porn star made during his 2016 presidential campaign is set to begin on Monday and expected to last six to eight weeks.

Judge Cannon has yet to set a new date for the trial, even though both the prosecutors and the defendants have said they could go to trial this summer.

Legal experts have noted her inexperience — just four years on the bench. Some also question whether she is favoring Mr. Trump in the case and point to the former president’s leaving her out of attacks on judges overseeing cases against him.

On Thursday, he praised Judge Cannon on his social media site, calling her “respected” and “fair and impartial.”

John Ismay contributed reporting, and Kitty Bennett contributed research.

A former United States ambassador accused of working for decades as a secret agent for Cuba in one of the biggest national security breaches in years pleaded guilty on Friday and was sentenced to 15 years in prison.

Manuel Rocha, 73, pleaded guilty to two charges — conspiring to defraud the United States as a foreign agent and failing to register as a foreign agent — as part of an agreement with the federal government. He also faces three years of supervised release, and a $500,000 fine.

Mr. Rocha, wearing a beige prison uniform and black glasses, conceded before he was sentenced to the “betrayal of my oath of loyalty to the United States during my two decades in the State Department.”

“During my formative years in college, I was heavily influenced by the radical politics of the day,” said Mr. Rocha, who prosecutors said was recruited by Cuban intelligence agents in 1973. “Today, I no longer see the world through the radical eyes of my youth.”

In imposing the sentence, Judge Beth Bloom of Federal District Court in Miami said that as recently as 2022 and 2023 Mr. Rocha was recorded by an undercover F.B.I. agent showing “a lack of allegiance of the United States.”

“You turned your back on the country,” she said. “A country that gave you everything.”

The proceedings did not shed much light on Mr. Rocha’s dealings with the Cuban government or whether he shared secrets during his diplomatic career, which included serving as ambassador to Bolivia and briefly working in a White House role under President Bill Clinton.

In an unusual turn of events, Judge Bloom expressed deep frustration with prosecutors for not seeking more penalties for Mr. Rocha, such as forfeiture of his assets. She demanded changes to the plea deal from the bench and pressed prosecutors to reveal more about when the government learned that Mr. Rocha had become “an enemy of the United States government.”

Prosecutors said details beyond those made public in the indictment were classified.

“This case is a reminder that we face espionage and insider threats from a range of adversaries,” David Newman, the principal deputy assistant attorney general for national security at the Department of Justice, said at a news conference in Miami — home to the nation’s largest population of Cuban exiles — after Mr. Rocha’s sentencing.

Mr. Rocha was charged in December with acting as an agent of a foreign government; he was also charged with defrauding the United States, wire fraud and making false statements to obtain and use an American passport.

Prosecutors dropped the other charges as part of his plea agreement; the wire fraud charge had carried a 20-year maximum sentence. Mr. Rocha last appeared in court in February, when he indicated that he would change his earlier plea of not guilty.

Mr. Rocha’s plea deal compelled him to share with the government “a full, detailed damage assessment of that harm that was committed,” Jonathan Douglas Stratton, one of the prosecutors, said in court.

“Fifteen years for an individual who is 73 and a half years old is tantamount to a life sentence,” Mr. Stratton said, adding that “it was incredibly valuable to have the defendant not only plead guilty and admit his criminal conduct but to continue cooperating with the United States.”

Before accepting the agreement, Judge Bloom required prosecutors to include language making clear that Mr. Rocha remained liable for restitution should any victims of his actions emerge.

“I can’t accept that the victim is only the United States,” Judge Bloom said.

The judge also pushed to include language saying that the agreement did not preclude the government from pursuing civil denaturalization against Mr. Rocha, who was born in Colombia and became a naturalized American citizen in 1978.

As Mr. Rocha spoke in court, his wife, children and other relatives watched from the second row.

“I am making and will continue to make, as required, significant amends throughout my unconditional collaboration to those I have betrayed,” Mr. Rocha said.

Two former American officials convicted of spying for Cuba in past high-profile cases also agreed to provide information to federal authorities as part of their plea agreements.

The cooperation of Ana Belén Montes, a former analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency, following her arrest in 2001, led to the charging of Marta Rita Velazquez, who worked at the U.S. Agency for International Development. Ms. Velazquez fled to Sweden after Ms. Montes’s arrest; an indictment against Ms. Velazquez was unsealed in 2013, but she remains a fugitive.

Ms. Montes was released last year.

In another major case, Walter Kendall Myers, a former State Department official, pleaded guilty in 2009 to spying for Cuba for decades. He is serving a life sentence. His wife, Gwendolyn Steingraber Myers, was also charged and sentenced to nearly seven years in prison.

The indictment against Mr. Rocha said that he had aided the Cuban government, whose intelligence agency has had notable success in infiltrating the U.S. national security establishment over the decades, since at least 1981. He was posted at the U.S. mission in Havana during the 1990s.

The indictment did not detail Mr. Rocha’s interactions with the Cuban government or accuse him of sharing specific secrets. It also did not charge him with espionage, which Mr. Newman attributed in part to the unusually long period of time that has passed since Mr. Rocha last worked in government and had access to classified information.

Raised in New York, Mr. Rocha worked in the State Department under Mr. Clinton and President George W. Bush on matters related to Latin America. He served as ambassador to Bolivia from 2000 to 2002 and as an adviser to the U.S. military command that includes Cuba from 2006 to 2012.

After leaving government, he moved to Miami. Former colleagues said they had watched in astonishment as Mr. Rocha became a supporter of former President Donald J. Trump — an embrace of conservative politics that the indictment suggested may have been part of an effort to cover his tracks.

American intelligence analysts and officials said on Friday that they expected Iran to strike multiple targets inside Israel within the next few days in retaliation for an Israeli bombing in the Syrian capital on April 1 that killed several senior Iranian commanders.

The United States, Israel’s pre-eminent ally, has military forces in several places across the Middle East. But Iran is not expected to target them in order to avoid a direct conflict with the United States, according to U.S. and Iranian officials who spoke anonymously about intelligence gathered on the expected attacks, which they were not authorized to discuss publicly.

Any Iranian strike inside Israel would be a watershed moment in the decades of hostilities between the two nations that would most likely open a volatile new chapter in the region. Israel and Iran do not maintain any direct channels of communication, making the chances far greater that each side could misread the other’s intentions. And an Iranian attack would heighten the risk of a wider conflict that could drag in multiple countries, including the United States.

In remarks to reporters on Friday, President Biden said that he expected a military attack against Israel “sooner than later,” and that his message to Iran was “don’t.”

“We are devoted to the defense of Israel,” he added. “We will support Israel. We will help defend Israel and Iran will not succeed.”

In anticipation of an Iranian strike, several countries, including the United States, have issued new guidelines to their citizens for travel in Israel and the surrounding region. The Israeli military said its forces were on high alert.

The U.S. State Department barred its employees on Thursday from traveling to large parts of Israel, the first time the U.S. government has restricted its employees’ movement this way since the war in Gaza began more than six months ago.

On Thursday, Britain told its citizens that they “should consider leaving” Israel and the Palestinian territories “if it is safe to do so.” On Friday, India told its citizens “not to travel to Iran or Israel till further notice.” And France advised people not to travel to Israel, Iran or Lebanon, and evacuated the families of French diplomats from Iran.

Details about Iran’s potential attack on Israel are closely guarded, but American and Israeli officials have assessed that it might involve drones and missiles. Iran has the largest arsenal of ballistic missiles and drones in the Middle East, including cruise missiles and anti-ship missiles, experts say, as well as short-range and long-range ballistic missiles with ranges up to 2,000 kilometers (about 1,250 miles).

Iran also has a large inventory of drones that have a range of about 1,200 to 1,550 miles and are capable of flying low to evade radar.

The exact form an attack on Israel might take, what kinds of targets would be involved and the precise timing all remain unclear.

The top American military commander for the Middle East, Gen. Michael E. Kurilla, traveled to Israel this week to coordinate a response should Iran attack, U.S. officials said.

“Our enemies think that they will divide Israel and the United States,” the Israeli defense minister, Yoav Gallant, said in a statement on Friday, after meeting with General Kurilla. “They are connecting us and are strengthening the relationship between us.”

If Iran attacks, he added, “we will know how to respond.”

On Thursday, the Israeli military’s chief spokesman, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, said the armed forces were “highly alert and prepared” for any action from Iran.

Iran has publicly and repeatedly vowed revenge for the April 1 airstrike on its embassy complex in the Syrian capital, Damascus, which killed three generals and four officers from its elite Quds Force, an arm of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.

But analysts say Iranian leaders want to calibrate their response so that it is big enough to send a message at home and abroad that Iran is not impotent in the face of conflict, but not so big that it spirals into a full-fledged war with Israel or draws an American attack.

In the first months of the war between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Iran-backed militias regularly attacked U.S. troops in Iraq, Syria and Jordan. But after a drone strike killed three Americans in Jordan in January and the United States launched retaliatory strikes, Iran stopped the attacks by its proxies, fearing a more powerful U.S. response.

Despite the clashes and hostile rhetoric, both Iranian and U.S. leaders have made it clear they want to avoid an all-out war.

John F. Kirby, the White House’s national security spokesman, told reporters on Friday, “We are certainly mindful of a very public and what we consider to be a very credible threat made by Iran in terms of potential attacks on Israel, and that we are in constant communication with our Israeli counterparts about making sure that they can defend themselves against those kinds of attacks.”

How Israel would respond to an Iranian attack on its soil is unclear. The Israeli military “continues to monitor closely what is happening in Iran and different arenas,” Herzi Halevi, chief of the Israeli general staff, said in a statement on Friday. He added, “Our forces are prepared and ready at all times and for any scenario.”

Iran believes it can generate international support for a retaliatory strike by focusing attention on the attack against its embassy complex and arguing that it was merely defending itself, the Iranian officials said.

International law generally treats embassies and consulates as exempt from attacks. But Israeli officials have argued that the building they destroyed was diplomatic in name only, and was being used as a Revolutionary Guards base, as evidenced by the high-level commanders who were meeting there when they were killed.

A strategist for the Revolutionary Guards said Iran wanted to take advantage of the widening rift between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and Mr. Biden over Israel’s conduct of the war against Hamas — and not unite them in hostility to Iran.

The Biden administration has not only criticized the level of death and destruction wrought by Israeli forces in Gaza, it has also voiced fears that increased clashes across Israel’s northern borders, primarily with Iranian proxies like Hezbollah, could escalate into a broader regional war.

In an apparent response to international pressure, including from the United States, to do more to alleviate the hunger and deprivation produced by the war in Gaza, the Israeli military said on Friday that it had begun allowing humanitarian aid trucks to enter northern Gaza through a new crossing.

The military did not specify the location of the new crossing, and it remained unclear how many trucks had crossed, what aid agency they belonged to and when the crossing might be open for wider use.

Jamie McGoldrick, a top U.N. relief official in Jerusalem, said that U.N. officials planned to head to the crossing on Saturday to examine it. He said the crossing would be a significant improvement “if it can go to scale and is not temporary.”

After Israeli strikes killed seven aid workers on April 1, Mr. Biden told Mr. Netanyahu by phone that the United States could withhold military support for Israel unless it did more to protect civilians and ensure adequate supplies for Palestinian civilians.

Mr. Gallant, Israel’s defense minister, pledged on Wednesday to “flood Gaza with aid” and said he expected to ultimately see 500 relief trucks entering the enclave on a daily basis. U.N. figures show that an average of about 110 aid trucks have entered Gaza daily since the war began on Oct. 7.

Mr. Gallant also said that Israel would soon open the port of Ashdod, an Israeli city north of Gaza, to accept aid shipments, without providing a time frame.

A new transitional ruling council was finalized in Haiti on Friday to try to bring political stability to a country wracked by escalating gang violence and a worsening humanitarian crisis.

The council’s formation, announced in an official state-run bulletin, comes after gangs who have a brutal grip on much of the capital prevented the prime minister, Ariel Henry, from returning to the country after a trip overseas and ultimately pushed him to announce his resignation.

The presidential transition council is tasked with restoring law and order through the appointment of an acting prime minister to head a new government as well as to pave the way for the election of a new president.

A coalition of armed gangs has had control of most of the capital, Port-au-Prince, since it launched an offensive in late February, destroying police stations and government offices, looting banks and hospitals and killing and kidnapping hundreds of people.

The establishment of the council was hashed out in Jamaica last month by a regional Caribbean Community bloc, CARICOM, along with the United States, France and Canada after it became clear that Mr. Henry would no longer be able to govern Haiti.

But the selection of the body’s members was delayed after several names were withdrawn out of safety fears or because ethical issues had become a concern.

Mr. Henry left Haiti for Kenya in early March to finalize an agreement for a 2,500-member multinational force, led by the East African nation, to deploy and take on the gangs.

The council includes members of Haiti’s main political parties and coalitions as well as representatives of the private sector, civil society, the Haitian diaspora and religious leaders. The council’s mandate says a new president is expected to take office in February 2026, but does not specify when elections would be held.

As a condition for joining the body, all the members agreed to back deployment of the Kenya-led mission. Anyone under indictment, facing sanctions by the United Nations or intending to run in the next election was excluded from the council.

One gang leader, Jimmy Chérizier, known as Barbecue, had threatened to attack anyone who signed on to the new government, describing the transition as an illegitimate concoction of Haiti’s corrupt political system.

“Cut off their heads and burn down their houses,” he told his gang members, using a 19th-century war cry for Haitian independence.

While the installation of the council is widely considered to be a positive step, many challenges remain, experts say.

“Will it have the capacity to silence the guns of the armed men?” asked Robert Fatton, a Haitian-born political scientist at the University of Virginia. “How can it be installed safely, and how can it start governing in an environment of widespread insecurity?”

Some Haitians have questioned the council’s constitutional legitimacy, and protesters tried to prevent the official announcement from being printed on Thursday at the offices of Le Moniteur, the official state bulletin.

The council must first be sworn in at the National Palace in downtown Port-au-Prince, the scene of some of the heaviest clashes between gang members and the Haitian police.

The multinational security force meant to take on the gangs still lacks funding, despite a pledge of $300 million by the Biden administration. So far Congress has approved only $10 million of that commitment.

“We are at a tipping point, and we need a solution now,” U.S. Representative Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, a Democrat from Florida and the only Haitian American in Congress, said on the floor of the House this week. “Haitians cannot wait any longer for the multinational security mission.”

The Biden administration pushed hard for the installation of the transition council, which comes days after the arrival of a new U.S. ambassador, Dennis Hankins, an experienced diplomat who served previously in Haiti.

“I recognize that these are difficult times for the Haitian people,” he said in a statement. “Haitians deserve to be represented by elected officials who are accountable to the people.”

The United Nations’ human rights office reported this month that more than 1,500 people had been killed in Haiti so far this year, the result of what it described as a “cataclysmic situation” in the country.

Corruption, impunity and poor governance, together with increasing levels of gang violence, have brought the Caribbean nation’s state institutions “close to collapse,” the agency said.

Local humanitarian agencies have also reported a shortage of food and fuel after the capital’s main port was shut down. Several countries, including the United States, Canada and France, have evacuated hundreds of stranded citizens on emergency flights and by helicopter.

The World Food Program said that Haiti was suffering its worst levels of food insecurity on record after gangs took over farmlands and blocked the roads in and out of the capital, extorting buses and trucks delivering goods.

On Thursday, the program, which is a U.N. agency, warned that its stocks in Haiti could run out by the end of the month.

“We can only hope the transition council is ready to deliver,” said Reginald Delva, a Haitian security consultant and former Haitian government minister. “The population can no longer wait.”

“We are facing the worst humanitarian and sanitarian crisis,” he added. “A new cabinet is a priority to get the ball rolling. Political leaders need to put their differences aside, make the population a priority.”

The dean of Berkeley’s law school is known as a staunch supporter of free speech, but things became personal for him when pro-Palestinian students disrupted a celebratory dinner party for some 60 students at his home.

In a viral video, Erwin Chemerinsky, a noted constitutional scholar, can be seen shouting “Please leave our house! You are guests in our house!” as a third-year law student, Malak Afaneh, interrupted the event on Tuesday, speaking into a microphone to the students gathered in the dean’s backyard in Oakland, Calif.

Mr. Chemerinsky’s wife, Catherine Fisk, also a Berkeley law professor, can be seen with her arm around Ms. Afaneh, trying to yank the microphone away and pulling the student up a couple steps.

Ms. Afaneh and her supporters, who were invited to the dinner, described Ms. Fisk’s struggle for the microphone as a disproportionate and violent response. Students, they said, had a right to speak at a university gathering. The dinner was open to all third-year law students and paid for by the university, according to Mr. Chemerinsky.

Mr. Chemerinsky and his supporters say that the students, who brought their own microphone and amp, had no such right in a private home, at a dinner with no planned remarks.

Mr. Chemerinsky has supported speech rights for pro-Palestinian students, including the right to block Zionists from speaking to their groups.

But this latest incident shows how the Israel-Hamas war has intensified and complicated the free speech debate. As pro-Palestinian students stage sit-ins and disrupt events at campuses across the country, some administrators, pressed by donors and politicians, have cracked down on unruly behavior, arresting and suspending students.

The moment has been especially fraught for the University of California, Berkeley, long a hotbed of leftist activism and the home of the ’60s Free Speech movement. As protests there continue over the Middle East conflict, some Jewish students and alumni have criticized university officials, saying that the school has tolerated activism that veers into antisemitic speech.

On Thursday night, about 15 protesters returned to Mr. Chemerinsky’s home for another student dinner, this time staying outside the house for about 90 minutes, Mr. Chemerinsky said.

“They were carrying signs and had drums,” he wrote in an email message. “They stood in front of our house chanting (some quite offensive) and banging their drums.”

In February, an event at Berkeley featuring an Israeli speaker was canceled after a crowd of protesters broke down doors, which the chancellor, Carol Christ, said was “an attack on the fundamental values of the university.” Last month, Representative Virginia Foxx, chair of the House committee on education that has been investigating antisemitism on campus, sent a letter to university officials demanding documents and information about Berkeley’s response to antisemitism.

Mr. Chemerinsky said that he himself was the subject of an antisemitic flier, circulated earlier in the week, which depicted a cartoon image of him gripping a bloody knife and fork, with the words “No Dinner With Zionist Chem While Gaza Starves.”

“I never thought I would see such blatant antisemitism,” he wrote in a statement to the law school community after the first protest, “with an image that invokes the horrible antisemitic trope of blood libel and that attacks me for no apparent reason other than I am Jewish.”

The Berkeley chapter of Law Students for Justice in Palestine, where Ms. Afaneh is co-president, did not respond to requests for an interview. But Camilo Pérez-Bustillo, the head of the local chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, which consulted with Ms. Afaneh before the protest, said that Mr. Chemerinsky was not singled out because he is Jewish.

“He was being targeted because he’s failed to take a public position on a matter of urgency,” Mr. Pérez-Bustillo said, “which is U.S. complicity with the unfolding genocide.”

The Chemerinsky dinner on Wednesday fell on the last day of Ramadan, the Muslim holy month. As Ms. Afaneh and Professor Fisk both gripped the microphone, Ms. Afaneh said, “We refuse to break our fast on the blood of Palestinian people” and accused the university system of sending billions of dollars to weapons manufacturers.

“I have nothing to do with what the U.C. does,” Ms. Fisk said. “This is my home.”

Ms. Fisk threatened to call the police but did not. After she let go of the microphone, Ms. Afaneh and about 10 other law students left peacefully and the dinner continued, Mr. Chemerinsky said.

“I am enormously sad that we have students who are so rude as to come into my home, in my backyard, and use this social occasion for their political agenda,” Mr. Chemerinsky wrote. Through Mr. Chemerinsky, Ms. Fisk declined to be interviewed.

Many pro-Palestinian supporters argue this is not the moment for decorum, as the death toll of Israel’s bombing in Gaza tops 30,000, according to Gaza health officials. The protesting students wanted Mr. Chemerinsky, who describes himself as a Zionist, to denounce what they described as an unfolding genocide and to call for the university to divest from companies that aid Israel’s military campaign.

After the dinner altercation, the Law Students for Justice in Palestine chapter demanded the resignations of Mr. Chemerinsky and Ms. Fisk, and called for a Palestine studies program that centers on the “resistance and the right to return in a settler-colonial context.”

Richard Leib, the board chairman of the University of California system, and Ms. Christ, the Berkeley chancellor, have supported the couple.

“I am appalled and deeply disturbed by what occurred at Dean Chemerinsky’s home last night,” Ms. Christ said in a statement on Wednesday. “While our support for Free Speech is unwavering, we cannot condone using a social occasion at a person’s private residence as a platform for protest.”

Mr. Chemerinsky said he invites first-year law students to a welcome dinner in his backyard to create a sense of community. This dinner — spread over three nights with about 60 students each — was for third-year students whose traditional welcome dinner was canceled because of Covid, Mr. Chemerinsky said.

The dean said he was such a believer in the tradition that when he bought a home in 2017, he made sure the backyard could fit a crowd.

“I never could have imagined this would be divisive or a flashpoint,” he said, adding, “It’s an ugly moment.”

Multiple people were reported injured on Friday after a person driving a semitrailer truck crashed into a Department of Public Safety office in Brenham, Texas, in what officials said may have been an intentional act.

It was unclear exactly how many people were injured, and details about the injuries were unknown. The Texas Department of Public Safety said on social media that there were “reports of multiple serious injuries.”

A suspect was taken into custody, according to the Department of Public Safety, and Texas Rangers were investigating the crash. Judge Mark Keough of Montgomery County said in a social media post that the driver had been denied a commercial driver’s license on Thursday. “He returned today with intent to harm,” Judge Keough wrote.

KHOU, a CBS affiliate, reported that Sheriff Otto Hanak of Washington County said that he believed the crash may have been an intentional act. Dade Phelan, the Texas House speaker, also said in a post on social media that the driver “intentionally caused injury to innocent Texans.” Mr. Phelan also said the truck was stolen.

Video and images of the scene showed the truck in a parking lot, and damage to a wall of the building with debris scattered on the ground.

The Department of Public Safety provides a range of services, in addition to supervising vehicle inspection. Public safety facilities can also handle handgun licensing, some criminal processing and sex offender registration.

Brenham is about 75 miles northwest of Houston.

This is a developing story.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has made her first-ever contribution to the campaign arm of House Democrats — a $260,000 donation that is a milestone in the New York Democrat’s long and complicated relationship with her own party’s political establishment.

In an interview, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said her decision to give to the campaign arm, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, was driven primarily by the dire threat of Republicans staying in power. She feared a Republican-controlled House would not certify a potential re-election of President Biden this fall.

“The entire country saw a terrorist attack on the United States Capitol that was predicated on not certifying the duly submitted results of a presidential election,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said of the riot on Jan. 6, 2021. “And if anybody thinks that that was not a dress rehearsal for what they may try to attempt in January of 2025, I’m sorry to say, but I think that’s a very naïve assumption.”

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez rocked the Democratic establishment in 2018 when she defeated one of the most powerful members of Congress in a stunning primary upset, ousting Joseph Crowley, who represented a diverse district in Queens and the Bronx and who was in line to be a potential House speaker. She arrived on Capitol Hill as the youngest woman ever elected to the House and as an instant insurgent instigator who protested that fall in the office of the incoming House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, before even being sworn in.

But Ms. Ocasio-Cortez quickly began to work within the political system, building alliances and pressing for policies that have been included in legislation. Her transfer of funds was another step in the 34-year-old lawmaker’s evolution inside the Democratic Party.

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said the cash transfer represented her assessment that House Democratic leadership had changed sufficiently to now merit her money.

“If we take a look at it, we have the entirety of House leadership has now changed,” she said, citing the exit of Representatives Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer and James Clyburn from the top of the House Democratic hierarchy.

“We’ve exerted a lot of our power through our existing channels,” she added. “Now it’s time to assert our influence in larger institutions, including the D.C.C.C.”

Almost immediately after her election, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez became the face of a small cohort of progressives known as “the squad” that tried to pull the party to the left politically and on policy. She was a rising star on the left and vilified relentlessly on the right. Early reports that she was considering backing a primary challenge to another prominent New York Democrat, Representative Hakeem Jeffries, who is now the party’s leader, created added friction within her party even if such a challenge never emerged.

In 2019, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee established a blacklist of consultants and vendors who worked for Ms. Ocasio-Cortez and other candidates who challenged incumbents. She and others loudly objected, and by 2021, the blacklist was dissolved.

“We spent a lot of time, since first coming into office in 2019, working to change this institution,” she said of the campaign committee. “And we have successfully done so.”

In a statement, Mr. Jeffries thanked Ms. Ocasio-Cortez for “helping us protect the integrity of the electoral process and take back the House in 2024,” calling her “a valuable member of the House Democratic Caucus who is a powerful voice for the voiceless and defender of democracy.”

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has become one of the Democratic Party’s most prolific fund-raisers; her campaign committee has raised more than $37 million since 2019. She has raised another $11.1 million, according to her office, for nonfederal candidates and causes, including nonprofits, food banks and abortion-rights groups.

But until now, she had never given a dime to her own party’s leadership, even though House Democrats are each assigned “dues” that they are supposed to pay to remain members in good standing.

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s $260,000 contribution is earmarked specifically for the party’s Voter Protection Program. It is the first time a member of Congress has given money to a program that works on voter registration, poll observation and litigation.

Her PAC has another $500,000 that she said was intended to defend fellow members of the squad from party challengers, a sum that she noted was larger than her transfer to the campaign arm.

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez and the party are aware that her financial support could be used against candidates running in swing districts. But she said that with the earmarked funds, “we just tried to make that argument as ineffective for Republicans as possible.”

The “foundational element” of her decision to give now, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said, was to make sure she helped Democrats take back the House, which Republicans only narrowly control now.

She said she had little confidence that Speaker Mike Johnson, who is set to appear at Mar-a-Lago on Friday with former President Donald J. Trump to make an “election integrity” announcement, would rebuff any efforts by Mr. Trump to overturn the election.

“This party has turned into a party of Trumpism and it has turned into a cult of personality,” she said. “I don’t know if Mike Johnson has it in him to defend our democracy against a threat like that.”

The Biden administration on Friday made it more expensive for fossil fuel companies to pull oil, gas and coal from public lands, raising royalty rates for the first time in 100 years in a bid to end bargain basement fees enjoyed by one of the country’s most profitable industries.

The government also increased more than tenfold the cost of the bonds that companies must pay before they start drilling.

The new rules are among a series of environmental regulations that are being pushed out as President Biden, in the last year of his term in the White House, seeks to cement policies designed to protect public lands, lower fossil fuel emissions and expand renewable energy.

While the oil and gas industry is strongly opposed to higher rates, the increase is not expected to significantly discourage drilling. The federal rate had been much lower than what many states and private landowners charge for drilling leases on state or private property.

“These are the most significant reforms to the federal oil and gas leasing program in decades, and they will cut wasteful speculation, increase returns for the public, and protect taxpayers from being saddled with the costs of environmental cleanups,” Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said.

The government estimates that the new rules, which would also raise various other rates and fees for drilling on public lands, would increase costs for fossil fuel companies by about $1.5 billion between now and 2031. After that, rates could increase again.

About half of that money would go to states, approximately a third would be used to fund water projects in the West, and the rest would be split between the Treasury Department and Interior.

“This rule will finally curtail some of these wasteful handouts to the fossil fuel industry,” said Josh Axelrod, senior policy advocate with the Natural Resources Defense Council. “Communities, conservationists, and taxpayer advocates have been demanding many of these changes for decades.”

The rate increase was mandated by Congress under the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which directed the Interior Department to raise the royalty fee from 12.5 percent, set in 1920, to 16.67 percent. Congress also stipulated that the minimum bid at auctions for drilling leases should be raised from $2 per acre to $10 per acre.

But the sharp jump in bond payments — the first increase since 1960 — was decided by the Biden administration, not Congress. It came in response to environmental advocates and watchdog groups that have argued for years that the burden of cleaning up abandoned, uncapped wells should be shifted from taxpayers to the oil and gas companies.

“Taxpayers have been losing billions of dollars on a broken leasing system with these ridiculously low royalty rates, rents, and minimum bids for far too long,” said Autumn Hanna, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a fiscal watchdog group. “Adding insult to injury, taxpayers were left holding the bag for damages from wells oil and gas companies left behind, long after they had already profited from them. We own these resources and it’s about time we are fairly compensated.”

The new rules increase the minimum bond paid upon purchasing an individual drilling lease from $10,000 to $150,000. The cost of a bond required upon purchasing a drilling lease on multiple public lands in a state would rise from $25,000 to $500,000.

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Oil and gas companies said the changes, which could take effect in as few as 60 days, would damage the economy.

“As energy demand continues to grow, oil and natural gas development on federal lands will be foundational for maintaining energy security, powering our economy and supporting state and local conservation efforts,” said Holly Hopkins, a vice president at the American Petroleum Institute, which lobbies for oil companies. “Overly burdensome land management regulations will put this critical energy supply at risk.”

The oil and gas industry will continue to receive nearly a dozen federal tax breaks, including incentives for domestic production and write-offs tied to foreign production. Total estimates vary widely but the Fossil Fuel Subsidy Tracker, run by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, calculated the total to be about $14 billion in 2022.

But more expensive bonds could put drilling out of reach for smaller oil and gas producers, said Kathleen Sgamma president of Western Energy Alliance, an association of independent oil and gas companies. “They are ludicrously high, ludicrously out of whack with the problem,” she said. “They could actually put companies out of business and create new orphan wells.”

The Interior Department estimates that there are 3.5 million abandoned oil and gas wells in the United States. When oil and gas wells are discarded without being properly sealed, which can happen when companies go bankrupt, the wells can leak methane, a powerful planet-warming pollutant that is a major contributor to global warming.

The Biden administration has had to navigate challenging terrain when it comes to extraction of fossil fuels on public lands and in federal waters, which is responsible for almost a quarter of the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions.

As a candidate, Mr. Biden promised “no more drilling on federal lands, period. Period, period, period.” He also campaigned to end billions of dollars in annual tax breaks to oil and gas companies within his first year in office.

But since Mr. Biden took office, his administration has continued to sell leases to drill, compelled by court decisions. The Biden administration approved more permits for oil and gas drilling in its first two years (over 6,900 permits) than the Trump administration did in the same period (6,172 permits). Congress has done nothing to end tax breaks for oil and gas companies. And in 2023, the United States produced more oil than any country, ever.

Environmentalists excoriated Mr. Biden for his administration’s final approval earlier last year of an enormous $8 billion oil drilling project in Alaska known as Willow.

At the other end of the political spectrum, Republicans have accused the administration of waging a “war” on fossil fuels that threatens the nation’s economy and national security.

At rally in January, former President Donald J. Trump blamed economic inflation on Mr. Biden’s policies. “His inflation that he caused and would’ve been so easy not to. All it was — is energy. Remember this, gasoline, fuel, oil, natural gas went up to a level that it was impossible,” said Mr. Trump, who is running to unseat Mr. Biden. “That’s what caused inflation, and we’re going to bring it down because we’re going to go drill, baby, drill. We drill, baby, drill. We’re bringing it way down.”

Last month, the Republican-majority House passed a bill, sponsored by Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado, that would force the administration to withdraw the new royalty regulation, although the measure has little chance of passage in the Democratic-majority Senate.

The Biden administration announced an additional $7.4 billion in student loan cancellations for some 277,000 borrowers on Friday, building on plans announced earlier this week to provide debt relief for millions of borrowers by the fall if new rules the White House has put forward hold.

The latest round of relief reflects a strategy the White House has embraced by taking smaller, targeted actions for subsets of borrowers that it hopes will add up to a significant result, after a larger plan to wipe out more than $400 billion in debt was struck down by the Supreme Court last year.

It also comes as President Biden aims to shore up support with young voters who may be disproportionately affected by soaring education costs, but who may be drifting away over his policy on Israel and the war in Gaza.

Taken together with previous actions, the announcement on Friday brought the total to $153 billion in debt forgiven, touching around 4.3 million borrowers so far, the administration said. The administration hopes to forgive some or all loans held by some 30 million borrowers total. The administration said the 277,000 people it identified would be notified by email on Friday.

“We’ve approved help for roughly one out of 10 of the 43 million Americans who have federal student loans,” Miguel A. Cardona, the education secretary, told reporters ahead of the announcement.

The new round of cancellations involves three categories of borrowers who qualified under existing programs, with the bulk of the forgiveness going to around 207,000 people who borrowed relatively small amounts — $12,000 or less — and were enrolled in the administration’s income-driven repayment plan, known as SAVE.

An additional 65,000 enrolled in repayment plans will see reductions in what they owe through adjustments correcting what Mr. Cardona described as “administrative and servicing failures.” The remaining group would see their loans forgiven through the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program, having already qualified after making 10 years of payments while engaging in public service.

Administration officials have said they studied the Supreme Court’s decision rejecting large-scale loan forgiveness and are taking a piecemeal approach that identifies specific groups of borrowers who qualify for cancellation under established law, such as the Higher Education Act.

If the administration’s rules announced on Monday are finalized after a comment period that could stretch through the summer, Mr. Biden has said 25 million borrowers could see some amount of forgiveness — including those whose interest payments surpassed the amount they originally borrowed, and others who were cheated or defrauded by their schools.

But Republican opposition to Mr. Biden’s plans has been pronounced, with legal challenges mounting from state-level officials and an outcry growing in Congress.

Economic analyses have suggested that the administration’s SAVE plan could cost the government as much as $475 billion over the next decade.

The U.S. government is already the largest lender to Americans borrowing to pay for college, and the plan requires the government to shoulder a larger amount of those costs than it has in the past.

The SAVE plan is facing two challenges from Republican attorneys general even as the White House announced that more than eight million people had enrolled as of Friday.

Republicans in Congress have seized on the announcements this week to restate grievances over Mr. Biden’s vision for student debt cancellation, which they have often characterized as unfair to borrowers who struggled to pay off their student debt without assistance.

“You’re incentivizing people to not pay back student loans and at the same time penalizing and forcing people who did to subsidize those who didn’t,” Representative John Moolenaar, Republican of Michigan, said during a hearing on Wednesday, in which Mr. Cardona testified about the Education’s Department’s budget request for next year.

“I don’t see it as unfair. I see it as we’re fixing something that’s broken,” Mr. Cardona said. “We have better repayment plans now so we don’t have to be in the business of forgiving loans in the future.”