Category: News

LAUGHLINTOWN, Pa. — Michael Testa, 51, an Army veteran and handyman, drives a minivan plastered with stickers reading “Trump Won.”

He recently stood in the rain and mud for hours to attend Donald Trump’s Pennsylvania rally. He calls himself a “conspiracy realist” and said he’s one of millions who believe the 2020 election was stolen from the former president.

But as he sat on his front porch in Laughlintown, a small borough of Westmoreland County outside Pittsburgh that was once home to the Mellon family fortune, he was undecided about which candidate to vote for on Tuesday in Pennsylvania’s Republican primary for Senate. He has misgivings about supporting Mehmet Oz, the celebrity doctor Mr. Trump has endorsed.

“I’m not going to be somebody who does something just because one person says so, even if that person is Trump,” Mr. Testa said.

Like other Republican primaries throughout the country, the Pennsylvania Senate race is testing just how strong Mr. Trump’s grip remains on the party. But unlike other primaries this year, the Senate contest in Pennsylvania has suddenly pivoted into something else — a case study of whether the movement Mr. Trump created remains within his control.

In interviews with more than two dozen Republican voters in western Pennsylvania, many echoed Mr. Testa’s ambivalence and uncertainty about Dr. Oz — despite Mr. Trump’s backing, they view him with suspicion, call him “too Hollywood” and question his ties to the state. Those Republicans, including Mr. Testa, said they were instead voting for or considering voting for Kathy Barnette, the far-right author and conservative-media commentator who has surged in the polls on a shoestring budget.

In a race that could determine control of the Senate, many Republicans in the state find themselves deeply devoted to Mr. Trump yet, at the same time, less swayed by his guidance. Trumpism, as Ms. Barnette herself has put it on the campaign trail, is bigger than Trump.

Many voters said they were choosing who they believed would carry out Mr. Trump’s ideals, even if they and the former president disagreed on who could best accomplish that. And interviews showed how effectively Ms. Barnette, who has never held public office, had used her life story as a poor, Black child of the South to connect with white working-class voters in western Pennsylvania. At events and in her ads, Ms. Barnette often invokes the phrase “I am you.”

Many voters who said they planned to vote for Ms. Barnette struggled to remember her name and said they were supporting “that Black woman.” Those who said they were voting for her said they were unaware of or unbothered by her history of homophobic and anti-Muslim views. But her strong anti-abortion beliefs — Ms. Barnette calls herself a “byproduct of rape”— have been a key part of her appeal to white conservatives.

“I like what she stands for,” said Dolores Mrozinski, 83, who first watched Ms. Barnette on the Christian Television Network and was immediately impressed. “She’s no-nonsense and the real thing.”

Years ago, Ms. Mrozinski and her daughter, Janey Mrozinski, a 62-year-old physical therapist, watched Dr. Oz on television and even admired him. Now, the elder Ms. Mrozinski said, “he just doesn’t seem genuine.”

“I don’t even know if he really lives in Pennsylvania,” she said, referring to Dr. Oz’s long history, until recent years, of living and voting in New Jersey. “He seems more Hollywood than here and it doesn’t impress me.”

Her daughter added, “He looks like he had a face lift.” On the other hand, David McCormick, a former hedge fund executive who is also running in the primary, was simply, she said, “too much, too proud of himself.”

In many ways, the vote for the Senate seat is as much a battle over the perception of authenticity as any ideological or policy debate. For months now, the leading candidates have each tried to align themselves closely with Mr. Trump and promote their conservative credentials. In the tight contest between the leading contenders — Dr. Oz, Ms. Barnette and Mr. McCormick — all three of them have tried hard to cast themselves as the true MAGA warrior.

Some voters have clearly made up their minds about which one they believe is more authentic. But others are still deciding.

One glance at John Artzberger’s auto body shop along Highway 8 in Butler County makes his political leanings clear: A “Let’s Go Brandon” flag flies from the shop’s marquee, and Trump paraphernalia covers a large wall near the entrance. When one customer asked him to place a Barnette lawn sign out front, he did not hesitate to agree. Still, the sign was just a sign — he said he was undecided and considering voting for either Ms. Barnette or Dr. Oz.

“She’s 100 percent on our side — close the border, pro-life,” Mr. Artzberger, 68, said of Ms. Barnette. “If she gets it, she’s going to be for the people.” Like many other Republicans in Butler County, Mr. Artzberger views Dr. Oz’s previous time in the spotlight with disdain.

“But then again, Trump had been in the public eye, too, and he ended up being really with us,” he said. “I’ve changed, so maybe he changed, too.”

In Laughlintown in Westmoreland County, it takes about 10 steps to travel from the front porch of Mr. Testa’s old Craftsman to the front doors of the small brick church next door. In that short distance lies a glimpse of the Republican Party’s identity crisis.

Jonathan Huddleston, 48, the minister of Laughlintown Christian Church, calls himself a Never-Trump Republican but remains committed to the party to, in part, “help vote the wackos out.” He, too, is undecided — he is considering voting for Mr. McCormick, who tried but failed to win the Trump endorsement.

“I want to support the Romneys of the world, the reasonable leaders, the ones who drew me to begin with,” Mr. Huddleston said. “Now I’m searching to find people like that. All of the other voices are drowning them out.”

Some Republican voters said they had tried to tune out the deluge of attack ads on television from Mr. McCormick and Dr. Oz, who have each spent millions of dollars of their own wealth in the race. The backlash against the Oz and McCormick ads appeared to benefit Ms. Barnette, who has spent less than $200,000 in her campaign.

“It’s just every moment and nothing about what they say they’re going to do or how they’re going to help people,” said Jeannie Gsell, 70, who lives in Greensburg, about 30 miles east of Pittsburgh.

In 2020, Ms. Gsell, a registered Republican, voted for President Biden, after some convincing from her liberal daughter. But she said she had been disappointed by his time in the White House. She plans to vote in Tuesday’s Republican primary but is still undecided. She said she would make up her mind by deciding whom she finds most sincere.

“People should be going to Washington to take care of regular people’s priorities, not taking care of themselves and getting more rich or more famous,” Ms. Gsell said.

In downtown Butler, a working-class city north of Pittsburgh, Brittney Meehan, a 34-year-old waitress, said the two most important issues for her were “guns and weed — two that don’t usually go together.”

Ms. Meehan said she was “not absolutely sold on voting Republican,” citing her commitment to supporting both gun rights and abortion rights. “What I want is a real person, not people who are up on that level, but are just in touch as human beings,” she added.

Ms. Meehan said she wished “people would just hear each other out when they disagree,” a sentiment shared by Mr. Huddleston, the minister in Laughlintown.

“I want to have honesty and respect, is that really so impossible now?” Mr. Huddleston said as he sat in the church pews one recent afternoon.

He thinks about voters like his next-door neighbor Mr. Testa and wonders what will become of moderate Republicans like himself. The two men know each other, but they haven’t spoken about politics directly. He noticed his neighbor’s many bumper stickers. One of them reads, “I pledged an oath to protect against foreign and domestic.” He wondered about the meaning. For now, though, he said, “I haven’t felt it was the neighborly thing to do to ask.”

The Las Vegas Raiders have been rocked by a mass exodus of front office leaders amid dire management blunders like overpaying taxes and underpaying certain employees for years.

The latest upheaval came last week with the ouster of the team’s interim team president. That executive, Dan Ventrelle, responded by accusing the owner, Mark Davis, whose family has run the team for more than 50 years, of creating a hostile work environment, without giving specifics.

It was one of many examples of a workplace racked by years of dysfunction, and the latest sign of an N.F.L. franchise with troubled inner workings. Since the Raiders moved to Las Vegas from Oakland, Calif., in 2020, with high hopes in a growing market, six of the team’s eight top executives have quit or been fired with little explanation, either publicly or internally.

In interviews with The New York Times, more than a dozen former employees, some of whom spoke on condition of anonymity because they signed agreements with the team prohibiting them from discussing their employment publicly, described numerous problems large and small. There were, they said, lax controls over how money was spent and how people were paid and even the bungling of the payment of its taxes over several years. Not long after its move, the team missed a payment for the electric bill in its temporary office, forcing the lights to be shut off.

Nobody has asserted the financial disorder amounts to any crimes, but erroneous information on company ledgers can generally lead to problems with creditors, regulators, the league and others.

Employees who raised concerns over the team’s operations were often ignored or pushed out and given settlements and nondisclosure agreements to keep them quiet.

“If anyone complained, they were let go,” said Nicole Adams, who worked in the human resources department for almost five years. She was pushed out in late 2020 and declined to sign a severance agreement that she said would have prevented her from speaking about her tenure at the team. She said that Ventrelle, then the team’s general counsel, “joked he would be ready to settle if anyone came forward with a charge.”

Ventrelle did not answer requests for comment, but he told The Las Vegas Review-Journal shortly after he left that he had been making an effort to clean things up and had informed league officials of written complaints from employees of alleged misconduct.

The Raiders did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The N.F.L. declined to comment on Friday. After Ventrelle’s claims last week about a hostile work environment on the team, an N.F.L. spokesman, Brian McCarthy, said the league would look into the matter.

“We recently became aware of these allegations and take them very seriously,” McCarthy said.

The decimation of the front office staff is the latest in a series of setbacks for the Raiders. In October, Coach Jon Gruden resigned after The Times detailed emails in which he had made homophobic and misogynistic remarks before he was in his second stint with the team. Two players from his tenure have been accused of felony crimes.

The team’s troubles come at a time when the N.F.L., more popular than ever with fans, grapples with serious questions around the way the league and some teams are run. The league has been stung by a scandal at the Washington Commanders, where dozens of female employees accused team owner Daniel Snyder and top executives of harassment. The team last year was fined $10 million and has replaced many executives and rebranded itself. A congressional committee and attorneys general in Virginia and the District of Columbia are investigating some of the accusations, including mismanagement of the team’s finances.

Women who worked at N.F.L. headquarters have also complained about an office culture that marginalized them, allegations that prompted attorneys general from New York and five other states to threaten to investigate the N.F.L. if conditions did not improve.

A Lucrative Move

After years languishing in a crumbling stadium in Oakland, the Raiders sought to reinvent themselves in Las Vegas, where they play in a new, heavily subsidized $2 billion stadium that will host the 2024 Super Bowl, the league’s premier event. In 2021, the Raiders’ second season at Allegiant Stadium, the team finished 10-7 and lost in the first round of the N.F.L. playoffs. The value of the team has swelled to more than $3 billion helped by the prospect of adding more fans in the fast-growing Las Vegas area.

While many other N.F.L. teams are owned by billionaires who amassed their wealth in other industries, the Raiders are a family business. The franchise is largely the creation of Al Davis, who was the team’s coach and general manager before seizing ownership control in 1972. The team was Davis’s principal business until he died in 2011.

Mark Davis, the son of Al Davis, is now the team’s principal owner. In the years before he took the bold step of moving the team to Las Vegas, he was mostly hands-off and left the day-to-day running of the club to trusted lieutenants. They included Marc Badain, the longtime president who had been close to the Davis family for decades.

Several former employees who spoke to The Times said that Davis was rarely seen around the office. There was little oversight of expenses, employees said, and money was often disbursed without a clear accounting of where it was going.

By some accounts, Davis began to take a closer look at the inner workings of his team last year. Two former employees said a management consulting firm was brought in to assess the organizational structure. And while it is not known precisely what Davis found, several top executives — Badain; Ed Villanueva, the chief financial officer; and Araxie Grant, the team’s controller — were soon gone.

Three months later, Davis gave an explanation.

“I think it’s pretty much clear now, or I don’t know if it is clear now, but it was pretty much accounting irregularities,” including the overpayment of taxes, Davis told reporters at a league meeting in New York. “That’s why the C.F.O. left, the controller left and the president left, that’s what it was.”

Badain and Villanueva have not spoken publicly, and did not respond to requests for comment for this story. But Grant denied Davis’s claims, releasing a statement that said, in part, “I can say that I have never been involved in any financial impropriety or wrongdoing before or during my 20-month tenure with the Raiders.”

That irregularities could occur did not surprise veteran employees, who said the team, with roots going back to 1960, had yet to modernize much of its operations.

“The Raiders kind of operate back in the Stone Age,” Adams said. Another former employee, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of career repercussions, said “everything was still very much paper, files, boxes, warehouses.”

Employee Uprisings

What happened in the top offices inevitably affected the employees below. Workers were systematically underpaid, prompting lawsuits that have resulted in the Raiders paying more than $1 million in settlements. In 2017, the Raiders settled a lawsuit with dozens of former cheerleaders who accused the team of paying them less than the minimum wage during the 2010 to 2013 seasons. The team paid $1.25 million to the women to pay them the equivalent of minimum wage, and to cover their out-of-pocket expenses.

Cheerleaders were not the only employees treated poorly. Adams, who started in the human resources department in 2016, said she was told to create job descriptions that would make it impossible for employees to file for overtime even though workers could log 12 or more hours during game days, training camp and other busy periods.

Adams said that she told her boss that skirting overtime was illegal. Her boss agreed, but said that Ventrelle wanted it done.

Adams, who is Black, filed a complaint against the Raiders with the Nevada Equal Rights Commission. In the complaint, which was reviewed by The Times, she accused the team of discriminating against her because of her race and retaliating against her after she raised concerns about pay disparities and unequal treatment.

Separately, in 2020, Nicolle Reeder, a former Raiders employee, sued the team on behalf of herself and other game-day employees, accusing the team of violating labor laws by denying them required rest and meal breaks and not paying wages on time. The suit was settled last year for $325,000, a fraction of which was distributed among more than 400 affected employees.

Bradley Kaplan, who worked as a scout for 12 years, sued the Raiders in 2019 because, he said in a lawsuit, he was demoted after telling the team he and his wife were expecting a child during the football season. He said that after he expressed concerns about balancing his football and family responsibilities, and after he requested family leave, he was fired. The team successfully moved these claims to arbitration, where they were resolved behind closed doors.

Kaplan also claimed in his lawsuit that the Raiders required some football operations personnel to sign unlawful confidentiality and non-disparagement agreements, which he said prevented employees from discussing matters related to their employment or raising concerns about working conditions. The Raiders denied these claims, but agreed to a $25,000 settlement in 2021 covering the 65 past or present employees who signed contracts with such confidentiality provisions between July 2018 and September 2021.

Lawsuits against the team alleging poor working conditions continue to be filed. Matthew Proscia, who worked for The Raider Image, the team’s apparel stores, filed a class-action lawsuit last month accusing the team of overtime pay violations and a “company-wide policy and practice of refusing to pay full daily overtime wages to Nevada employees who worked over eight hours in a workday.”

The Raiders have yet to respond to Proscia’s complaint.

An Attempt to Rally

Ventrelle, who had been the team’s general counsel, was named interim president after Badain suddenly left in July. A wave of high-level employee departures followed. Tom Blanda, who was in charge of building the stadium; Mark Shearer, the chief revenue officer; and Brandon Doll, the vice president in charge of business strategy, all left the team.

The departed executives collectively had put in more than 100 years of work for the Raiders, with most of their tenures stretching back to when Al Davis was still alive.

“Current people tell me the culture is worse than they’ve seen it,” Adams said.

Days after Badain’s departure, business-side employees were gathered into a team meeting room. For the next hour or so, Gruden, still the coach at the time, gave what was intended to be a rousing speech about teamwork, peppering his message with football metaphors as he paced around the room and asked the employees to get behind their new boss, Ventrelle, according to two former employees who were present.

But over the next year, that “team” would continue to unravel. Gruden was gone just three months after his speech, and in the immediate aftermath, employees were given spontaneous bonuses, either $5,000 or a percentage of their salary, depending on their rank with the team. One former employee who received this bonus felt it was an effort by Davis to boost morale — but there was more upheaval to come.

Jaime Stratton, who ran human resources for two years, left in April. Employees were informed of her departure in an email that said only that she was “no longer” with the team. Jeremy Aguero, the team’s chief operations and analytics officer, resigned in May after just seven months.

Days later, it was Ventrelle’s turn to go. Davis’s public statement gave no reason for his firing. Ventrelle insisted to The Review-Journal that he had tried to address the team’s problems with Davis, to no avail.

“When Mark was confronted about these issues he was dismissive and did not demonstrate the warranted level of concern,” Ventrelle said.

Amid the turmoil, some of the team’s top leadership roles have remained vacant.

At least one top executive has Davis’s ear, according to former colleagues. Marcel Reece, who was a running back with the Raiders for seven seasons, was hired by the Raiders in late 2020 after retiring from playing in 2017 and spending time with the NFL Network as a football analyst.

Now, after less than two years in the Raiders’ front office, he is listed second on the club’s organizational chart — right under Davis — following a recent promotion from senior adviser to chief people officer.

WASHINGTON — Robert C. McFarlane, a former decorated Marine officer who rose in civilian life to be President Ronald Reagan’s national security adviser and then fell from grace in the Iran-contra scandal, died on Thursday in Lansing, Mich. He was 84.

Mr. McFarlane, who lived in Washington, was visiting family in Michigan at the time. A family friend, Bill Greener, said the death stemmed from an unspecified previous lung condition.

Mr. McFarlane pleaded guilty in 1988 to charges of withholding information from Congress in its investigation of the affair, in which the Reagan administration sold arms covertly to Iran beginning in 1985 in exchange for the freedom of Western hostages in Lebanon. Profits from the arms sales were then secretly funneled to the contra rebels in Nicaragua, who were trying to overthrow the country’s Marxist regime, known as the Sandinistas.

Both parts of the scheme were illegal; Congress had imposed an arms embargo against Iran and prohibited American aid to the contras.

Mr. McFarlane, Bud to his friends and associates, was one of many players in the operation, which was run out of the White House with the cooperation of the Central Intelligence Agency. But he distinguished himself in its aftermath by his full and unequivocal acceptance of blame for his actions. Everyone else involved had either defended the operation as just and wise or sought to deny responsibility.

The episode stained the Reagan administration and raised questions as to how much the president was aware of what was going on in his own White House.

And its fallout left Mr. McFarlane so ridden with guilt that he attempted suicide in his home in February 1987. While his wife, Jonda, a high school English teacher, was upstairs grading papers, he took an overdose of Valium and got into bed alongside her. When he couldn’t be roused in the morning, he was taken to a hospital and revived. He subsequently underwent many weeks of psychiatric therapy at the Bethesda Naval Hospital.

It was a stunning act in official Washington. Many considered it an unconcealed howl of pain by someone from whom they would have least expected it — one of the capital’s most self-contained of public and powerful men.

Killing himself, Mr. McFarlane believed at the time, was “the honorable thing to do,” he said in an interview for this obituary in January 2016 at his home in the Watergate complex in Washington.

“I so let down the country,” he said.

He had earlier tried to explain his actions by citing the ancient Japanese tradition of the honorable suicide. But he came to realize, he said in the interview, that those ways had no resonance in modern American culture and that most people could not understand such behavior.

Mr. McFarlane always asserted — and he was supported by evidence — that he had been involved mostly in the Iran part of the scandal, and that he had been ignorant of the more blatantly illegal portion, the sending of profits from the weapons sales to the Nicaraguan contras.

Mr. McFarlane had been a fervent advocate of repairing relations with Iran — so much so that after he left the White House he made a secret visit there in 1987, traveling incognito, at President Reagan’s request. There he met with various officials but found that the meetings were a waste of time, he said.

The results of the arms sales themselves were little better: A few hostages were released sporadically by Iran’s allies in Lebanon — fewer than had been promised — and, in any event, new hostages were subsequently seized.

The scheme began to unravel on Oct. 5, 1986, when a plane supplying arms to the contras was shot down in Nicaragua, exposing the mission and prompting an investigation by a joint congressional committee and televised hearings. Summoned to testify, Mr. McFarlane and his former deputy, Lt. Col. Oliver L. North — White House figures little known to the public until then — emerged into the glare of national publicity as key players in the affair.

Colonel North, still an officer on active duty at the time, was an enthusiastic player in the scheme. He held forth before a joint congressional investigating committee in full dress uniform (he had favored business suits in the White House), at times expressing defiance, at other times insisting that he had been motivated by patriotism.

Colonel North’s testimony made him a national hero to many conservatives, and he later parlayed that support into hosting a talk show, writing books and running, though unsuccessfully, for the United States Senate from Virginia as the Republican nominee. (He was later president of the National Rifle Association for less than a year.)

Mr. McFarlane, by contrast, did not garner any such public adulation or even much support. Job offers were withdrawn, he wrote, and he was asked to resign from a corporate board.

In his memoir, he recalled that at first he had liked Colonel North, his fellow Marine, and thought that they had much in common. That changed after he discovered, he said, that Colonel North had deceived him about many of his activities.

He wrote that in misjudging Colonel North he “did not see what was really there, the manipulative skill, the easy betrayal, the hubris and the fierce ambition for personal advancement.” He campaigned against him in the Virginia election.

Mr. McFarlane did, however, win approval from some of those who had investigated the Iran-contra affair.

One member of the investigating committee, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Democrat of New York, praised his testimony, saying that there was “no ‘cute,’ no evasion. ‘I’m here, I’ll tell you everything I know.’”

The independent prosecutor, Lawrence E. Walsh, who was frustrated by the stiff resistance of others who had been involved in the operation, acknowledged that he had been so moved by Mr. McFarlane’s forthrightness and contrition that he chose to charge him with only four misdemeanor counts.

Mr. McFarlane served a sentence of 200 hours of community service, in part by helping to establish an independent living program for the disabled in suburban Washington, and by setting up a computer program listing after-school recreational programs for area youths.

Before he left office, President George H.W. Bush pardoned Mr. McFarlane on Christmas Eve, 1992, along with others involved in the Iran-contra affair, including Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger.

An unresolved question at the heart of the Iran-contra matter was the extent of President Reagan’s knowledge and support. The episode has been an important area of study for scholars pondering if Reagan — who after his retirement was acknowledged to have Alzheimer’s disease — had begun to lose his mental acuity in the White House. Mr. McFarlane, in interviews and in his memoirs, depicted the president as sometimes confused or vague about the details of what was happening with Iran and the contras. But he depicted Mr. Reagan as mostly in control.

Robert Carl McFarlane was born in Washington on July 12, 1937, the son of a Democratic congressman, William McFarlane, from the Texas Panhandle and a grandson of a Texas Ranger. Despite those roots, he was to have little Texas in him, growing up in the Washington area.

He graduated high in his class in 1959 from the Naval Academy in Annapolis; married his high school girlfriend, Jonda Riley; and joined the Marines. As a captain, he led one of the first combat operations in Vietnam. He described the operation as almost farcical.

His commanding general, he recalled in an interview, insisted that he take his troops ashore in a difficult waterborne landing, even though it would it have been easier to get to their destination by simply docking at a nearby pier. A shore landing was more suitable for Marines, the general told him. Mr. McFarlane said his heart sunk as he watched his command jeep plunge to the bottom of a hidden lagoon.

In the 2016 interview with The Times, Mr. McFarlane lamented that while he was the national security adviser, he did not press the basic lesson he thought he had learned in Vietnam: that the United States should not wage war without clear and strong support at home. He said the Reagan administration had been wrong to try to help the contras because there was little public support, as evidenced by the congressional ban on aid to them.

Mr. McFarlane was a surprise choice to succeed William P. Clark Jr. in October 1983 as Reagan’s second national security adviser, the person in the White House responsible for coordinating policy among the State and Defense Departments and other government agencies. He was generally considered a staff person, a notable contrast from some of his more well-known predecessors, who brimmed with abundant self-confidence and published scholarly works, like Henry A. Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski.

He began his climb in the national security establishment while still a lieutenant colonel in the Marines, when he won a White House fellowship and worked for Mr. Kissinger and then Brent Scowcroft when they were national security advisers. He also held senior staff positions at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the State Department.

According to contemporary accounts, he played important roles in complicated and significant arms control negotiations with the Soviet Union and, especially, promoting and guiding President Reagan’s antimissile defense program known as Star Wars. The system was never put in place, but it was said to have forced Moscow to vastly accelerate military spending to the detriment of the Soviet Union, hastening its collapse.

After he left the government, Mr. McFarlane founded an international business consulting company specializing in energy issues.

His survivors include his wife; three children, Lauren, Melissa and Scott; two sisters; and eight grandchildren.

Jordan Allen contributed reporting.

A court in Russia on Friday extended the pretrial detention of the W.N.B.A. star Brittney Griner until June 18, her lawyer said, in a high-profile case that came at the height of tensions between Russia and the United States.

Ms. Griner, one of the most decorated athletes in women’s basketball, has been in Russian custody since mid-February on drug charges that can carry up to 10 years in prison. The charge is based on allegations that she had vape cartridges containing hashish oil in her luggage when she was stopped at the Sheremetyevo airport near Moscow in February.

Ms. Griner appeared in court in the town of Khimki near Moscow for a procedural hearing on Friday, according to her lawyer, Aleksandr Boikov.

“She is OK,” Mr. Boikov said in an interview, adding that the court denied his appeal to have Ms. Griner transferred to house arrest. He said he expects the trial to begin in about two months.

While Ms. Griner was arrested one week before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Russian authorities did not reveal her detention until days after the war began, raising fears she could be used as a bargaining chip in the overall crisis.

The U.S. State Department has said that it had determined Ms. Griner was “wrongfully detained,” signaling its intention to get more actively involved in the situation.

Russia’s release of Trevor R. Reed, an ailing former American Marine who had been sentenced to nine years in prison for assault, at the end of April in a prisoner swap with the United States raised hopes that Ms. Griner might follow suit.

It is typical of Russian courts to extend detention until trial, which then can take weeks to complete. Mr. Reed’s release, for instance, happened after he was convicted and had spent years in a Russian prison.

Ms. Griner’s team and family have been relatively quiet about her situation.

A two-time Olympic gold medalist, Ms. Griner was one of several American players who compete for international teams in the off-season period to supplement their W.N.B.A. paychecks. She has played for the UMMC team in Yekaterinburg, Russia, since 2014.

WASHINGTON — In embracing Finland’s, and soon Sweden’s, move to join NATO, President Biden and his Western allies are doubling down on a bet that Russia has made such a huge strategic mistake over the past three months that now is the time to make President Vladimir V. Putin pay a major price: enduring the expansion of the very Western alliance he sought to fracture.

But the decision leaves hanging several major questions. Why not allow Ukraine — the flawed, corrupt but also heroic democracy at the heart of the current conflict — to join as well, enshrining the West’s commitment to its security?

And in expanding NATO to 32 members, soon with hundreds of additional miles of border with Russia, is the military alliance helping ensure that Russia could never again mount a vicious, unprovoked invasion? Or is it only solidifying the divide with an isolated, angry, nuclear-armed adversary that is already paranoid about Western “encirclement”?

The White House welcomed the announcement on Thursday by Finland’s leaders that their country should “apply for NATO membership without delay,” while Swedish leaders were expected to do the same within days. Russia, not surprisingly, said it would take “retaliatory steps,” including a “military-technical” response, which many experts interpreted as a threat to deploy tactical nuclear weapons near the Russian-Finnish border.

For weeks, American officials have quietly been meeting with both Finnish and Swedish officials, planning out how to bolster security guarantees for the two countries while their applications to join the alliance are pending.

To Mr. Biden and his aides, the argument for letting Finland and Sweden in, and keeping Ukraine out, is fairly straightforward. The two Nordic states are model democracies and modern militaries that the United States and other NATO nations regularly conduct exercises with, working together to track Russian subs, protect undersea communications cables and run air patrols across the Baltic Sea.

In short, they have been NATO allies in every sense except the formal one — and the invasion of Ukraine ended virtually all of the debate about whether the two countries would be safer by keeping some distance from the alliance.

“We have stayed out of NATO for 30 years — we could have joined in the early ’90s,” Mikko Hautala, the Finnish ambassador to the United States, said on Thursday as he was walking the halls of the U.S. Senate, drumming up support for his country’s sudden change of course. Trying to avoid provoking Mr. Putin, he said, “hasn’t changed Russia’s actions at all.”

Ukraine, in contrast, was at the core of the old Soviet Union that Mr. Putin is trying to rebuild, at least in part. And while it altered its Constitution three years ago to make NATO membership a national objective, it has been considered too full of corruption and too devoid of democratic institutions to make membership likely for years, if not decades, to come.

Key members of NATO — led by France and Germany — have made clear they are opposed to including Ukraine. It is a view that has hardened now that President Volodymyr Zelensky’s government is engaged in an active shooting war in which the United States and the other 29 members of the alliance would be treaty-bound to enter directly if Ukraine were a full-fledged member, covered by its core promise that an attack on one member is an attack on all.

Mr. Zelensky understands this dynamic, and weeks into the conflict, he dropped his insistence that Ukraine be ushered into NATO. In late March, a month after the Russian invasion and a point when there still seemed some prospect of a diplomatic solution, he made clear that if it would bring about a permanent end to the war, he was prepared to declare Ukraine a “neutral” state.

“Security guarantees and neutrality, nonnuclear status of our state — we are ready to go for it,” he told Russian journalists, a line he has repeated several times since.

Those statements were a relief to Mr. Biden, whose first objective is to get the Russians out of Ukraine, irreversibly, but whose second is to avoid World War III.

By that, he means staying clear of direct conflict with Mr. Putin’s forces and avoiding doing anything that risks escalation that could quickly turn nuclear. If Ukraine were ushered into NATO, it would reinforce Mr. Putin’s contention that the former Soviet state was conspiring with the West to destroy the Russian state — and it could be only a matter of time until that direct confrontation broke out, with all its perils.

Under that logic, Mr. Biden declined to send MIG fighters to Ukraine that could be used to bomb Moscow. He rejected a no-fly zone over Ukraine because of the risk that American pilots could get into dogfights with Russian pilots.

But his once-clear line has grown fuzzier over the past few weeks.

As Russia’s military weaknesses and incompetence became clear, Mr. Biden approved sending the Ukrainians heavy artillery to frustrate Russia’s latest drive in Donbas, and he has sent missiles and Switchblade drones that have been used to hit Russian tanks.

When the administration denounced reports last week that the United States was providing Ukraine with intelligence that helped it sink the Moskva, the pride of Mr. Putin’s naval fleet, and target mobile Russian command posts and the Russian generals sitting inside them, the reason for the upset was clear. The revelations showed how close to the line Washington was getting in provoking Mr. Putin.

The question now is whether expanding NATO risks cementing a new Cold War — and perhaps something worse. It is a debate similar to the one that took place during the Clinton administration when there were warnings about the dangers of NATO expansion. George F. Kennan, the architect of the post-World War II “containment” strategy to isolate the Soviet Union, called the expansion “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era.”

Last week, Anne-Marie Slaughter, the chief executive of the New America think tank, warned that “all parties concerned should take a deep breath and slow down.”

“The threat of Russia invading either Finland or Sweden is remote,” she wrote in The Financial Times. “But admitting them to the military alliance will redraw and deepen Europe’s 20th-century divisions in ways that will probably preclude far bolder and braver thinking about how to achieve peace and prosperity in the 21st.”

That is the long-term concern. In the shorter term, NATO and American officials are concerned about how to assure that Russia does not threaten either Finland or Sweden before they are formal members of the alliance. (That assumes no current member of the alliance objects; many believe Mr. Putin will lean on Hungary and its prime minister, Viktor Orban, to reject the applications.) Only Britain has been explicit on the issue, signing a separate security pact with the two countries. The United States has not said what security assurances it is willing to give.

But it has blamed Mr. Putin for bringing NATO expansion upon himself by invading a neighbor. Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, loosely quoted Finland’s president, Sauli Niinisto, who made clear that Ukraine had forced the Finns to think differently about their security.

“You caused this,” Mr. Niinisto said of Mr. Putin. “Look at the mirror.”

Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky on Thursday single-handedly delayed a bipartisan effort to quickly send $40 billion in aid to Ukraine, which Congress had tried to fast-track amid the escalating brutality of Russia’s war.

The Senate needed unanimous consent to waive procedural hurdles and approve the humanitarian and military aid package, which the House passed 368-to-57 on Tuesday. Mr. Paul, a Republican and a libertarian who generally opposes U.S. spending on foreign aid, objected, halting what had been an extraordinary effort to rapidly shepherd the largest foreign aid package through Congress in at least two decades.

Mr. Paul had sought to alter the bill to include a provision requiring that an inspector general monitor the spending, and was not satisfied with a counteroffer from party leaders to have a separate vote on that proposal. In his objection on the Senate floor, Mr. Paul cited concerns about inflation and rising energy and gas prices.

“My oath of office is to the U.S. Constitution, not to any foreign nation,” he said, adding, “We cannot save Ukraine by dooming the U.S. economy.”

The Senate is still expected to approve the aid package, but Mr. Paul’s objection will delay a vote until at least next week.

Any changes to the legislation would require a second vote in the House and potentially invite other lawmakers to force their own changes, delaying agreement on the legislation. Speaking on the Senate floor, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, said lawmakers in both parties had concerns with the proposal.

“If every member held every bill in exchange for every last little demand, it would mean total and permanent paralysis for this chamber,” he warned. Mr. Schumer pointedly added: “When you have a proposal to change a bill, you have to convince members to support it. The junior senator from Kentucky has not done that.”

With Russia’s campaign growing more violent as the war drags into an 11th week, some Democratic and Republican lawmakers have set aside their skepticism over entangling the United States — at least financially — in a foreign war. The $40 billion package would allow President Biden to authorize the transfer of up to $11 billion of American weapons, equipment and military supplies, as well as send billions of dollars to support the Ukrainian government and refugees from the country.

Antony J. Blinken, the secretary of state, and Lloyd J. Austin III, the defense secretary, warned Congress this week in a letter that the package needed to become law before May 19 “to provide uninterrupted critical military support to our Ukrainian partners.”

Federal prosecutors have begun a grand jury investigation into whether classified White House documents that ended up at former President Donald J. Trump’s Florida home were mishandled, according to two people briefed on the matter.

The intensifying inquiry suggests that the Justice Department is examining the role of Mr. Trump and other officials in his White House in their handling of sensitive materials during the final stages of his administration.

In recent days, the Justice Department has taken a series of steps showing that its investigation has progressed beyond the preliminary stages. Prosecutors issued a subpoena to the National Archives and Records Administration to obtain the boxes of classified documents, according to the two people familiar with the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the ongoing investigation.

The authorities have also made interview requests to people who worked in the White House in the final days of Mr. Trump’s presidency, according to one of the people.

The investigation is focused on the discovery by the National Archives in January that at the end of Mr. Trump’s term he had taken to his home at the Mar-a-Lago resort 15 boxes from the White House that contained government documents, mementos, gifts and letters.

After the boxes were returned to the National Archives, its archivists found documents containing “items marked as classified national security information,” the agency told Congress in February. In April, it was reported that federal authorities were in the preliminary stages of investigating the handling of the classified documents.

The subpoena that was sent to the National Archives in recent days for the classified documents is one of a series of requests that the Justice Department has made to the agency for records from the Trump administration in recent months, according to the two people.

A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment. The public affairs office at the National Archives did not return an email message seeking comment. A spokesman for Mr. Trump, Taylor Budowich, said: “President Trump consistently handled all documents in accordance with applicable law and regulations. Belated attempts to second-guess that clear fact are politically motivated and misguided.”

Charges are rarely brought in investigations into the handling of classified documents. But the Justice Department typically conducts them to determine whether any highly sensitive information may have been exposed so the intelligence community can take measures to protect sources and methods.

The documents in question are believed to have been kept in the residence of the White House before they were boxed up and sent to Mar-a-Lago. The investigation is focused on how the documents made their way to the residence, who boxed them up, whether anyone knew that classified materials were being improperly taken out of the White House and how they were ultimately stored in Mar-a-Lago, according to a person with knowledge of the matter, who also spoke on condition of anonymity.

An investigation in 2016 into Hillary Clinton over a similar issue involving her personal email account ended without her being charged. And in the case of Mr. Trump, legal experts said, presidents have the ability while in office to essentially declassify whatever information they want, further complicating any possible prosecution.

The classified documents in question are considered presidential records under federal law. Because of that distinction, Mr. Trump’s lawyers were notified of the Justice Department’s request, giving them the opportunity to block their release by going to court to quash the subpoena. It is unclear if the lawyers have responded.

Last year, Mr. Trump’s lawyer unsuccessfully went to court to stop the National Archives from handing over a range of presidential records to the special congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attacks on the Capitol.

The question of how Mr. Trump has handled sensitive material and documents he received as president loomed throughout his time in the White House, and beyond it. He was known to rip up pieces of official paper that he was handed, forcing officials to tape them back together because it is illegal to destroy presidential records. And an upcoming book by a New York Times reporter reveals that residence staff would find clumps of torn-up paper clogging a toilet, and believed he had thrown them in. They did not know the subjects or contents of the documents.

The investigation of the classified documents adds to an array of legal problems Mr. Trump still faces 15 months after he left office. A local prosecutor in Atlanta is investigating whether he and his allies illegally interfered with Georgia’s 2020 election results, and the New York State attorney general is investigating the finances of Mr. Trump’s company.

Despite Mr. Trump’s role in helping incite the mob that stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 and his other efforts to disrupt the counting and certification of the election, there has been no indication to date that the Justice Department has begun examining any criminal culpability he might have in those matters.

But the prosecutors’ moves in the documents case show that the Justice Department under Attorney General Merrick B. Garland is at least willing to examine a matter that may ultimately touch directly on the president’s conduct.

Democrats, anti-Trump Republicans and even President Biden have been frustrated with Mr. Garland over his apparent reticence to investigate Mr. Trump for his role in trying to overturn the 2020 election.

Now, the decision to move forward with an investigation into the classified documents could draw the department even deeper into the country’s political tensions. Such investigations typically take at least a year, putting Mr. Garland on a path of potentially having to conclude it at the same time Mr. Trump is running for president again.

During the 2016 campaign, Mr. Trump made attacking Mrs. Clinton for her handling of classified information a central part of his rallies and remarks to the media, helping to undermine her credibility with voters.

The Justice Department and F.B.I. had opened an investigation into whether she had mishandled classified information when she relied on a personal email account as secretary of state shortly after she began running for president in 2015.

That investigation, which ended with the F.B.I. director at the time, James B. Comey, holding a news conference shortly before both parties held their nominating conventions in the summer of 2016, found that Mrs. Clinton had highly classified information in her emails, but no charges were brought against her or anyone else.

For prosecutors to prove a felony in the mishandling of classified materials, the authorities would likely need evidence showing that the person in question knowingly and intentionally broke the law. In this case that would mean proving that the person had been told that taking the information outside of secure channels would violate the law.

Adam Goldman contributed reporting.