Biden Immigration, Stimulus News and Russia Interference: Live Updates

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia authorized extensive efforts to hurt the candidacy of Joseph R. Biden Jr. during the election last year, including by mounting covert operations to influence people close to President Donald J. Trump, according to a declassified intelligence report released on Tuesday.

The report did not name those people but seemed to refer to the work of Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, who relentlessly pushed accusations of corruption about Mr. Biden and his family involving Ukraine.

“Russian state and proxy actors who all serve the Kremlin’s interests worked to affect U.S. public perceptions,” the report said.

The declassified report represented the most comprehensive intelligence assessment of foreign efforts to influence the 2020 vote. Besides Russia, Iran and other countries also sought to sway the election, the report said. China considered its own efforts but ultimately concluded that they would fail and most likely backfire, intelligence officials concluded.

A companion report by the Justice and Homeland Security Departments also rejected false accusations promoted by Mr. Trump’s allies in the weeks after the vote that Venezuela or other countries had defrauded the election.

The reports, compiled by career officials, amounted to a repudiation of Mr. Trump, his allies and some of his top administration officials. They reaffirmed the intelligence agencies’ conclusions about Russia’s interference in 2016 on behalf of Mr. Trump and said that the Kremlin favored his re-election. And they categorically dismissed allegations of foreign-fed voter fraud, cast doubt on Republican accusations of Chinese intervention on behalf of Democrats and undermined claims that Mr. Trump and his allies had spread about the Biden family’s work in Ukraine.

The report also found that neither Russia nor other countries tried to change ballots themselves. Efforts by Russian hackers to gain access to state and local networks were unrelated to efforts by Moscow to influence the presidential vote.

The declassified report did not explain how the intelligence community had reached its conclusions about Russian operations during the 2020 election. But the officials said they had high confidence in their conclusions about Mr. Putin’s involvement, suggesting that the intelligence agencies have developed new ways of gathering information after the extraction of one of their best Kremlin sources in 2017.

Foreign efforts to influence United States elections are likely to continue in coming years, American officials said. The public has become more aware of disinformation efforts, and social media companies act faster to take down fake accounts that spread falsehoods. But a large number of Americans remain open to conspiracy theories pushed by Russia and other adversaries, a circumstance that they will exploit, officials warned.

“Foreign malign influence is an enduring challenge facing our country,” Avril D. Haines, the director of national intelligence, said in a statement. “These efforts by U.S. adversaries seek to exacerbate divisions and undermine confidence in our democratic institutions.”

The report rebutted yearslong efforts by Mr. Trump and his allies to sow doubts about the intelligence agency’s assessments that Russia not only wanted to sow chaos in the United States but also favored his re-election.

“They were disingenuous in downplaying Russia’s influence operations on behalf of the former president,” Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California, who leads the House Intelligence Committee, said in an interview. “It was a disservice not to level with the public and to try to fudge the intelligence in the way they did.”

Border officials are expecting to encounter more migrants at the southwest border and its port entries this year than in the last two decades, Alejandro N. Mayorkas, the secretary of homeland security, said Tuesday.

“Poverty, high levels of violence and corruption in Mexico and the Northern Triangle countries have propelled migration to our southwest border for years,” Mr. Mayorkas said, referring to El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. He also cited two hurricanes that damaged the region last year. “The adverse conditions have continued to deteriorate.”

President Biden has faced intensifying criticism over his handling of migration to the U.S. border with Mexico, particularly the treatment of thousands of Central American children and teenagers stuck in border detention facilities. Lawyers who interviewed some of the young migrants in Texas have reported that they had been left to sleep on gym mats with foil sheets and had been confined to an overcrowded tent.

More than 9,400 minors — ranging from young children to teenagers — arrived along the border without parents in February, a nearly threefold increase over that month last year.

The encounters specified by Mr. Mayorkas include migrants who will be detained in U.S. border facilities as well as those rapidly turned away under a pandemic emergency rule. It does not include those who manage to avoid border agents when crossing the border. Many of those who crossed the border in the early 2000s were single adults seeking economic opportunity.

The administration has scrambled to find shelter space to move the children out of the detention facilities designed for adults. It will soon open a temporary center at a former camp for oil field workers in Midland, Texas, and move teenage boys to a convention center in Dallas. Mr. Mayorkas said the administration was working to set up an additional shelter in Arizona.

The backlog in shelters managed by Health and Human Services, which until recently were strained by coronavirus occupancy limits, has caused a logjam in Border Patrol processing facilities and resulted in the detention of many children for several days longer than the maximum 72 hours allowed under federal law. Roughly 4,000 children and teenagers were in border facilities as of Sunday.

“The Covid-19 pandemic has made the situation more complicated,” Mr. Mayorkas said in the written statement. “There are restrictions and protocols that need to be followed.”

Mr. Mayorkas said in the statement that the administration was working to open “joint processing centers” so the children could be moved to the custody of Health and Human Services shortly after they were stopped by border agents. The Homeland Security Department did not immediately respond to questions seeking additional details.

Mr. Mayorkas’s statement also came a day after Republican members of Congress traveled to the border to accuse Mr. Biden of opening the doors to illegal migration.

But a majority of the border crossings involved single adults, who under a public health emergency rule are often quickly expelled back to Mexico or their home countries, Mr. Mayorkas said. The administration has also used the rule against families, except in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas. Mexican officials in neighboring Tamaulipas, Mexico, have refused to accept the families the United States has tried to rapidly turn away after the passing of a Mexican law that prohibited detaining young immigrant children. As a result, border agents have dropped the families off at bus stations in South Texas communities.

The Biden administration has broken from the Trump administration in declining to restore a process of rapidly turning away unaccompanied minors. More than 29,700 have been detained this fiscal year — about 400 a day so far in March — compared with 17,100 during the same period last fiscal year.

The administration has announced multiple long-term strategies to deter migration, including investing foreign aid in Central America and restarting a program allowing some migrant children to apply for refugee status in the United States from their home countries and avoid making the dangerous journey north to join parents already in the United States.

But Mr. Biden faces an immediate humanitarian crisis at the border. He has placed Health and Human Services officials inside border detention centers to try to quickly identify sponsors for the children. Mr. Biden also deployed the Federal Emergency Management Agency to help identify shelter space to move the children and teenagers out of the border jails.

When asked at the White House on Tuesday if he plans to visit the southern border, Mr. Biden replied, “not at the moment.”

Video

transcript

Back

transcript

McConnell: ‘Scorched Earth’ If Democrats Alter Filibuster

On Tuesday, Senator Mitch McConnell warned Democrats that if they modified or eliminated the filibuster Republicans would bring the Senate to a standstill, and derail President Biden’s agenda in retaliation.

So let me say this very clearly for all 99 of my colleagues: Nobody serving in this chamber can even begin, can even begin to imagine what a completely scorched earth Senate would look like. None of us have served one minute in a Senate that was completely drained of comity and consent. Even the most basic aspects of our colleagues’ agenda, the most mundane tasks of the Biden presidency, would actually be hard — harder, not easier. Perhaps the majority would come after the other rules next. Perhaps Rule 22 would just be the first domino of many until the Senate ceased to be distinct from the House in any respect. This chaos would not open up an express lane to liberal change. It would not open up an express lane for the Biden presidency to speed into the history books. The Senate would be more like a 100-car pileup — nothing moving.

The fight over the filibuster escalated in the Senate on Tuesday as Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, threatened harsh reprisals if Democrats moved to weaken it, a prospect that appeared increasingly likely as President Biden’s allies on Capitol Hill began building a public case for its elimination.

After Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Senate Democrat, called for changes to reduce the power of the procedural tactic, Mr. McConnell of Kentucky bluntly promised a “scorched-earth” response and pledged to grind the Senate to a standstill and derail Mr. Biden’s agenda if Democrats took that step.

“Everything that Democratic Senates did to Presidents Bush and Trump, everything the Republican Senate did to President Obama, would be child’s play compared to the disaster that Democrats would create for their own priorities if — if — they break the Senate,” Mr. McConnell said.

Mr. McConnell was referring to the prospect that Democrats might resort to a move known as the “nuclear option,” using their majority status to force a change in the Senate rules that allow lawmakers to block action on a bill unless proponents can muster 60 votes to move forward. That would effectively destroy the filibuster, allowing the majority party — currently the Democrats — to muscle through any measure on its own.

Progressives have been agitating for such a change to allow Mr. Biden to steer his agenda around Republican obstruction, and a growing number of Democrats are openly considering it. The idea has gained strength after the enactment of Mr. Biden’s $1.9 trillion stimulus measure, which Democrats pushed through the Senate without a single Republican vote under a special budget process.

Seeking to slow Democrats and get the attention of the White House, Mr. McConnell was adamant that Republicans would tie the Senate into knots in retaliation if they took the step. He issued his warning after Mr. Durbin, a respected veteran of the institution, had said on Monday that it was time to stop allowing the minority party to routinely block legislation by requiring a three-fifths majority to advance most bills. It was the most explicit call yet by a Democrat leader to take action.

In his comments, Mr. McConnell threatened that Republicans would turn the rules against Democrats and try to make it virtually impossible to do anything in the Senate if they proceeded with the change. He referred to the fact that the chamber operates under arcane rules often bypassed through what is known as a unanimous consent agreement where no senator objects. If Democrats plunged ahead to gut the filibuster, he warned, Republicans would deny consent even on the most mundane of matters, effectively bogging down the Senate.

“None of us have served one minute in a Senate that was completely drained of comity, and this is an institution that requires unanimous consent to turn the lights on before noon,” he added.

The incomplete wall at the southern border of the United States, one of the costliest megaprojects in the country’s history, is once again igniting tensions as critics urge President Biden to tear down parts of the wall and Republican leaders call on him to finish it.

Former President Donald J. Trump made the wall a symbol of his administration’s efforts to slash immigration. While many stretches of the 1,954-mile border already had some low-level barriers built by previous administrations, the project was mired in controversy from the start.

Only a few miles were built in South Texas, the area most prone to illegal crossings. Instead, much of the construction, especially in the Trump administration’s closing days, has taken place in remote parts of Arizona where crossings in recent years have been relatively uncommon.

The Biden administration suspended construction of the border wall on Jan. 20, the president’s first day in office, announcing a 60-day period during which officials are determining how to proceed.

Alejandro Mayorkas, Mr. Biden’s homeland security secretary, has been directed to decide whether to “resume, modify, or terminate” projects when the 60-day suspension ends this month.

Some stretches of the border now have long, continuous segments of 30-foot high steel barriers that could endure in the desert for decades to come. But in other areas, border-crossers can easily tiptoe around far-flung islands of wall, some of which look more like conceptual art pieces than imposing barriers to entry.

There are half-dynamited mountaintops where work crews put down their tools in January, leaving a heightened risk of rapid erosion and even dangerous landslides. In some areas, colossal piles of unused steel bollards linger at deserted work sites.

After temporarily suspending building activities in February, Mr. Biden rescinded the national emergency that Mr. Trump used to justify advancing construction. But parts of the federal bureaucracy are continuing with the land acquisition process, alarming landowners.

Video

transcript

Back

transcript

Biden Touts Rescue Plan During Pennsylvania Visit

President Biden visited small businesses in Pennsylvania on Tuesday to promote the benefits of his $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief bill, stressing the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on communities of color.

I said yesterday, we’re going to get 100 million shots in people’s arms within the first 60 days of my administration, and 100 million checks out — 100 million people are going to be getting, not a joke, a check for $1,400 to change their life. You know, one of the things that we haven’t, and we’re trying like the devil to make sure its correct, is people are hardest hit by, and Congress would know this better than I do, the hardest hit are people in the minority communities. The rate at which they get Covid is significantly higher. Sometimes the Latino community, Black community, is up to four times greater, and the death rate is significantly higher. And that’s why we’re working so hard, they’re working so hard to make sure you get the vaccine in places that are not ordinarily the focus. That’s why we put vaccines in community health centers. That’s why we have drugstores now. That’s we have mobile units. But I’m not just saying this because they’re here. They have been loud and strong voices, again, this time.

President Biden dropped by a flooring company in the Philadelphia suburbs on Tuesday to promote an assortment of measures in his $1.9 trillion aid package that are aimed at helping small employers and their workers endure the pandemic’s economic shocks.

But Mr. Biden’s most immediate and sweeping small-business initiative — changes he made last month to the Paycheck Protection Program — has been mired in logistical challenges. With the relief program scheduled to end in just two weeks, the effect of his modifications will be blunted unless Congress extends it.

Despite the concerns, Mr. Biden was met with praise in Chester, Pa., when he visited Smith Flooring, a Black-owned business that supplies and installs flooring. White House officials said the shop cut payroll over the last year, from 22 union employees to 12, after revenues declined by 20 percent during the pandemic. It has survived, the officials said, thanks in part to two rounds of loans from the Paycheck Protection Program, which Congress established last year during the Trump administration to help small businesses.

“This is a great outfit. This is a union shop,” Mr. Biden said in brief remarks. Its employees, he said, “work like the devil, and they can make a decent wage, a living wage.”

Vice President Kamala Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, were in Denver on Tuesday, also highlighting the administration’s small-business spending during a trip that will include meetings with small business owners.

Last month, Mr. Biden abruptly altered the rules of the $687 billion program to make business owners who employ only themselves eligible for more money. The move was intended to address a clear racial and gender disparity in the relief effort: Female and minority owners, who are much more likely to run tiny businesses than larger ones, were disproportionately hobbled by an earlier rule that based the size of sole proprietors’ loans on their annual profit.

Many companies were shut out of the program because of that restriction, while others got loans as small as $1. The administration switched to a more forgiving formula that lets those businesses instead use their gross income, a change that significantly increased the money available to millions of business owners. Its implementation, though, has been a mess.

The program’s government-backed loans are made by banks. The largest lender, JPMorgan Chase, refused to make the change, saying it lacked the time to update its systems before March 31, the program’s scheduled end date. The second-largest lender, Bank of America, decided to update all of its applications manually, causing anxiety and confusion among its borrowers. Wells Fargo released its revised application on Tuesday and told borrowers with pending applications that they had just three days to reapply using the new form.

Compounding the problem is that Mr. Biden’s change was not retroactive, which has prompted backlash from the hundreds of thousands of borrowers who got much smaller loans than they would now qualify for. Many have used social media or written to government officials to vent their anger.

JagMohan Dilawri, a self-employed chauffeur in Queens, got a $1,900 loan in February. Under the new rules, he calculates that he would have been eligible for around $15,000. That wide gulf frustrated Mr. Dilawri, who has struggled to keep up on his mortgage, car loan and auto insurance payments since the pandemic took hold.

“When the Biden administration came, they said, ‘We will be fair with everyone,’” he said. “But this is unfair.”

Officials at the Small Business Administration, which manages the program, said only Congress could fix that disparity. Absent legislative action, loans that were completed before the rule was revised “cannot be changed or canceled,” said Matthew Coleman, an agency spokesman.

In a sweeping bipartisan effort, the Republican-controlled Kentucky State Senate on Tuesday passed a bill expanding access to voting, a move that came as G.O.P. legislators in nearly every other state legislature where the party holds power have pushed aggressively to roll back voting rights.

The bill, which passed by a 33-3 vote in the Senate after breezing through the House, 93-4, makes permanent many of the emergency measures that were enacted during last year’s election because of the coronavirus pandemic.

While Republicans in other states have sought new restrictions on voting like limiting early voting and banning drop boxes, the bill in Kentucky would add three days of early voting, allow people who use absentee voting to fix problems with their signatures, and establish an online portal for absentee ballot requests.

The bill also includes some policies favored by Republicans, like a ban on ballot collection, or when one person picks up ballots from different voters and drops them off. And while the bill does include many new measures that expand ballot access, they still fall far short of the goals of many voting rights groups, particularly by only having three days of early voting.

“It doesn’t have everything I’d like,” Joshua Douglas, a professor of election law at the University of Kentucky, wrote on Twitter. “I want to see state reduce current 29-day voter registration deadline, expand absentee voting, increase early voting days, etc.”

“Still,” Mr. Douglas added. “This is a HUGE step forward. When other states are restricting voting, KY is expanding voter access.”

Because the bill was slightly amended, it will now head back to the House for final passage before advancing to the desk of Gov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat.

President Biden will hold the first formal news conference of his term on March 25, the White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, announced Tuesday.

The event will take place more than two months into Mr. Biden’s presidency, and it comes after the White House had faced scrutiny because Mr. Biden had yet to take questions from the news media in a formal setting.

Mr. Biden’s predecessor, Donald J. Trump, held his first news conference as president a week after taking office in 2017, appearing with Theresa May, the former prime minister of Britain. Mr. Trump held his first solo news conference in mid-February of 2017.

Gov. Ralph Northam of Virginia on Tuesday restored voting rights to more than 69,000 people who have served time in the state’s prisons — bucking a nationwide push in Georgia and other Republican-run states to restrict ballot access.

Mr. Northam, a Democrat, used his executive authority to reverse restrictions that deprive anyone convicted of a felony of their right to vote, run for office, become a notary or serve on juries.

The state “would automatically restore voting rights to individuals upon completion of their sentence of incarceration,” Mr. Northam said in a statement announcing the change — technically a rewrite of the state’s “eligibility criteria” for certain rights.

“Too many of our laws were written during a time of open racism and discrimination, and they still bear the traces of inequity,” Mr. Northam said.

He added: “We are a Commonwealth that believes in moving forward, not being tied down by the mistakes of our past. If we want people to return to our communities and participate in society, we must welcome them back fully — and this policy does just that.”

The move comes about two weeks after the state legislature passed a sweeping voting rights bill that prevents any action that restricts ballot access to an individual or group on the basis of their race, color or for speaking languages other than English.

Virginia is one of only three states to disenfranchise people with felony convictions unless a governor steps in to restore their rights on a case-by-case basis.

In 2016, Terry McAuliffe, the former governor and a Democrat, tried to issue a similar executive order restoring the rights of 200,000 formerly incarcerated Virginians. He was blocked by the courts, but eventually restored the rights of about 173,000 people, one by one, the biggest mass voting rights restoration of any governor in history.

It is not clear whether opponents of Mr. Northam’s policy will try to keep the order from being implemented, or whether it will pass judicial muster before courts.

But Mr. Northam and legislative leaders hope it never gets to that point — they want to enshrine the changes in the state’s Constitution.

That will take time.

Earlier this year, the state’s General Assembly approved a constitutional amendment that would restore the civil rights to people upon completion of their sentence of incarceration, but it must be passed again, in the 2022 session, before being presented to the public as a voter referendum.

Mr. Northam, who is restricted by the state’s constitution from serving consecutive terms, basked in the praise of civil rights groups and his fellow Democrats for his order.

It was a remarkable turnaround from two years earlier, when many in his party called for his resignation in the wake of a report that he had appeared in blackface at a party when he was in medical school.

Peter Thiel, one of former President Donald J. Trump’s few big tech industry donors, has pumped $10 million into a super PAC bankrolling a possible campaign for one of Ohio’s Senate seats in 2022 by J.D. Vance, the author of “Hillbilly Elegy.”

Mr. Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal who once employed Mr. Vance at his hedge fund, was the first donor to Protect Ohio Values PAC, a committee founded in Virginia last month, allowing Mr. Vance to explore a possible run for the seat being vacated in by Senator Rob Portman.

The Mercer family, also contributors to Mr. Trump, are expected to write a big check to the PAC shortly, said Bryan Lanza, a veteran Republican strategist working with the group.

“Trump, J.D. and Peter see these communities in a much different light than the Republican establishment,” said Mr. Lanza in an interview. “J.D. and Peter share the same vision.”

The donation, made last Friday, was first reported by the Cincinnati Inquirer.

Mr. Vance, whose 2016 memoir chronicled his rise from a hardscrabble Appalachian childhood to Yale Law School, has positioned himself as the voice of a frustrated white underclass energized by Mr. Trump’s defiance and disruptions. His book was turned into a 2020 movie starring Glenn Close and Amy Adams.

Mr. Vance, 36, briefly considered a challenge to Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, a Democrat, in 2018 after the Republican favorite, Josh Mandel, dropped out. Mr. Brown defeated his Republican opponent, former Representative Jim Renacci, by seven points that year, in a state Mr. Trump won handily in 2016 and 2020.

The field in 2022 is expected to be crowded, well-financed and highly competitive.

Mr. Mandel, the former state treasurer, is expected to run, as is former Ohio Republican Party chairwoman Jane Timken, another big Trump donor.

Potential Democratic candidates include Representative Tim Ryan — a fiery orator whose pitch, like that of Mr. Vance, is rooted in a populist appeal to the working class; Amy Acton, the state’s former health director; and Emilia Sykes, the state House minority leader.

The German-born Mr. Thiel and Mr. Vance have been friends for years, and talk often about politics and their views on the country’s problems, a person close to Mr. Vance said.

Shortly after graduating from Yale, Mr. Vance began working for Mr. Thiel’s Mithril Capital Management. When he began his own Cincinnati-based firm focused on projects in the Midwest, Narya Capital, he raised about $93 million from Mr. Thiel, tech entrepreneur Marc Andreessen, Eric Schmidt of Google and ExactTarget co-founder Scott Dorsey.

Video

transcript

Back

transcript

U.S. Officials Decry ‘Coercion’ by China In Visit to Japan

Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III and Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken criticized China’s “destabilizing actions” in the Pacific during a visit to Tokyo on Tuesday.

We believe in democracy and human rights, the rule of law, because we’ve seen how our own countries are stronger, because we adhere to those values and because they are under threat in many places, including in this region. China uses coercion and aggression to systematically erode autonomy in Hong Kong, undercut democracy in Taiwan, abuse human rights and Xinjiang and Tibet, and assert maritime claims in the South China Sea that violate international law. We’re united in the vision of a free and open Indo-Pacific region, where countries follow the rules, cooperate whenever they can and resolve their differences peacefully. And in particular, we will push back, if necessary, when China uses coercion or aggression to get its way. I know Japan shares our concerns with China’s destabilizing actions. And as I have said before, China is a pacing challenge for the Department of Defense. And we know that competing in today’s shifting global dynamics can only be done through the spirit of teamwork and cooperation, which are the hallmarks of our alliance with Japan.

Just days before the Biden administration’s first face-to-face encounter with Beijing, two senior American envoys used a visit to Tokyo on Tuesday to set a confrontational tone for the talks, rebuking what they called “coercion” and “destabilizing actions” by China in its increasingly aggressive military forays in the region.

Following a flurry of meetings, U.S. and Japanese officials issued a two-page statement that left little doubt that President Biden would defy China in territorial disputes, challenges to democracy and other regional crises. Its robust censure of Beijing represented the kind of vigorous approach that Japan has been seeking from the United States after four years of skepticism worldwide about whether America would remain a reliable ally.

Accusing Beijing of violating the “international order” with maritime claims and activities, the statement defended Japan’s right to control the uninhabited Senkaku Islands, which are also claimed by China. It also called for stability in the Taiwan Strait, as some U.S. military officials see a growing chance that China will move to assert sovereignty over self-governing Taiwan in the coming years.

After the Japanese defense minister, Nobuo Kishi, referred to an “increasingly tense security environment” at the start of a meeting on Tuesday, the two U.S. officials, Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III and Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, offered reassurance.

“We will push back when necessary when China uses coercion or aggression to try to get its way,” Mr. Blinken said.

Mr. Austin noted Beijing’s “destabilizing actions” in the South and East China Seas, saying, “Our goal is to make sure that we maintain a competitive edge over China or anyone else that would want to threaten us or our alliance.”

Taken together, the Americans’ statements amounted to the most explicit admonishment in recent years by U.S. diplomats of Chinese provocations toward Japan and the rest of the region. They offered a taste of what is likely to come on Thursday, when Mr. Blinken is to meet in Alaska with two top Chinese officials in the Biden administration’s opening bid to define the limits of its relationship with Beijing.

For Japan, the meetings — the highest-level foreign travel so far by the new administration — offered comfort for those who had worried that Mr. Biden might back down from the Trump administration’s tough stance against Beijing.

“I think the message is directed to the Japanese people,” said Toshiyuki Ito, a retired vice admiral who is now a professor of crisis management and international relations at Kanazawa Institute of Technology. He added that the visit by Mr. Blinken and Mr. Austin signaled that “America has changed from ‘America First’ to putting importance on the alliance.”

North Korea issued a stern first warning to the Biden administration on Tuesday, denouncing Washington for going forward with military exercises with South Korea and raising “a stink” on the Korean Peninsula.

The statement, the first official comment on the Biden administration from North Korea, is part of a series of early maneuvers by both sides to recalibrate the relationship between the countries following former President Donald J. Trump’s fruitless attempt at personal diplomacy with North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un.

On Monday, White House officials acknowledged that the administration had attempted to reach North Korea through multiple channels in recent weeks, but that Pyongyang had been unresponsive. Analysts said the silence was part of the North’s pressure tactic.

“We take this opportunity to warn the new U.S. administration trying hard to give off a powder smell in our land,” Kim Yo-jong, the sister of the country’s leader, said in a statement carried by state-run North Korean media, referring to the odor emitted by exploding ammunition.

“If it wants to sleep in peace for the coming four years, it had better refrain from causing a stink at its first step,” she added.

Tuesday’s statement from Pyongyang came hours before Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III began meetings in Japan. Later in the week, they head to South Korea, a trip that will coincide with annual joint military exercises, which often draws over-the-top reactions from North Korea.

The meetings this week are meant to strengthen alliances in the region, where the threat of North Korean nuclear weapons and China’s growing influence have been cast as major foreign policy challenges.

While bellicose, Ms. Kim’s comments were relatively tame in comparisons to the taunts thrown at Mr. Biden during the 2020 election campaign, after he suggested Mr. Trump had been too accommodating.

At the time, North Korean officials called Mr. Biden a “rabid dog” who should be “beaten to death.”

Her statement was the first indication that North Korea may try to influence the new administration’s policies by raising the prospect of renewed tension on the peninsula, analysts said.

Ms. Kim, who serves as her brother’s spokeswoman in North Korea’s relations with Seoul and Washington, dedicated most of her statement to criticizing Seoul for pushing ahead with its annual military drills with the United States this month, despite warnings from her brother.

Under Mr. Trump, Washington and Seoul suspended or scaled down the joint military drills to support diplomacy with Mr. Kim. After three meetings, Mr. Trump’s talks with Mr. Kim collapsed without a deal on how to end North Korea’s growing nuclear and missile capabilities.

Mr. Biden is overseeing a comprehensive review of U.S. policy on North Korea. This year’s exercises remain relatively scaled back in comparison to those conducted in the pre-Trump years.

The Army is promoting Lt. Col. Yevgeny Vindman, an Army officer who was dismissed from the Trump White House last year as part of its reprisal campaign against his twin brother, Alexander S. Vindman, who had testified in President Donald J. Trump’s first impeachment.

The promotion is the latest twist in the saga of the Vindman twins, who together raised concerns about a July 2019 call between Mr. Trump and the president of Ukraine, which was at the core of the first impeachment proceeding against Mr. Trump. In the end, Mr. Trump was acquitted in 2020 of the charges against him, as he was during his second impeachment in 2021.

While not playing as prominent a role as his brother, who accused Mr. Trump of pressuring the Ukrainian president to dig up dirt on President Biden when he was a presidential candidate, Yevgeny Vindman, then a top ethics lawyer detailed to the National Security Council from the Pentagon, did raise ethical and legal concerns about Mr. Trump’s aides.

Alexander Vindman, who was also a lieutenant colonel with the Army, chose to retire last summer after repeated White House efforts to punish him for his impeachment testimony, but Yevgeny Vindman remained in the military. His name was on a list of promotions to colonel that is expected to be submitted to the Senate this week.

Last August, Yevgeny Vindman filed a whistle-blower complaint in which he said he was improperly fired in retaliation for both his role in the impeachment of Mr. Trump and lodging previously undisclosed allegations of ethical and legal wrongdoing against Robert C. O’Brien, Mr. Trump’s national security adviser.

The complaint outlined a half-dozen times that Yevgeny Vindman reported various legal and ethical concerns to superiors at the National Security Council and Defense Department between July 2019 and February 2020, communications that his lawyers argued met the criteria for protection from reprisal. It also disclosed that Yevgeny Vindman repeatedly raised concerns about Mr. O’Brien and Alex Gray, the National Security Council chief of staff, to top White House lawyers.

Yevgeny Vindman never testified before impeachment investigators in the House, but he appeared in person to support his brother. The brothers also privately raised concerns with top White House lawyers about Mr. Trump’s conduct on the call with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, in which Mr. Trump pressured Mr. Zelensky to conduct investigations that would benefit him politically.

The Army’s decision to promote Yevgeny Vindman comes as Mr. Biden’s Defense Department moves swiftly to undo Trump-era policies affecting the military, including reversing Mr. Trump’s ban on transgender people serving in the military and promoting female generals whose nominations were stalled because of fears over how Mr. Trump would react.

In a statement Tuesday, Yevgeny Vindman said the Army and Pentagon investigators “stood their ground despite intense pressure during the last administration.”

Richard Blum, a wealthy investor and the husband of Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, has indicated to President Biden’s advisers that he’s interested in being appointed to an ambassadorship, a move that would renew questions about Ms. Feinstein’s political future.

Mr. Blum, according to Democrats in California and Washington, is eyeing a European capital, a posting that could pave the way for the 87-year-old Ms. Feinstein to leave the Senate. In November, she agreed to relinquish her ranking position on the Judiciary Committee under pressure from Senator Chuck Schumer, now the majority leader, and other Democrats.

Should Mr. Blum, 85, be appointed and Ms. Feinstein join him overseas, it could solve an increasingly awkward problem for Democrats.

Senior party officials have been blunt in private about what they describe as the senator’s diminished acuity and are eager to replace her with a Black woman, of which there are none in the Senate after the departure of Vice President Kamala Harris.

Progressive Democrats have also suggested that Ms. Feinstein’s decorous approach was ill-suited for dealing with the increasingly acrimonious partisan politics in Congress. They were particularly upset during the Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Justice Amy Coney Barrett last fall when Ms. Feinstein praised the way Republicans had handled the hearings. Soon afterward, Mr. Schumer and other Democrats others persuaded her not to seek the leadership role on the Judiciary Committee.

On Tuesday, Ms. Feinstein was emphatic that she would serve the remainder of her term, which lasts until 2025, and brushed aside questions about her fitness.

“Absolutely,” she told reporters in the Capitol when asked if she was able to serve fully. “I think that’s pretty obvious.”

Mr. Biden has not been involved in any effort to sideline Ms. Feinstein. He has a longstanding relationship with her and Mr. Blum, who hosted a fund-raiser for Mr. Biden at his and Ms. Feinstein’s San Francisco home in 2019.