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Is President Biden gaining in the polls? There have been signs of it ever since his State of the Union address last month, and a New York Times/Siena College poll released Saturday morning is the latest hint.

Donald J. Trump led Mr. Biden by one percentage point among likely voters nationwide, 46 percent to 45 percent. It represents a modest improvement for the president since February, when Mr. Trump led our poll by four points among likely voters.

You can’t exactly call a one-point deficit the “Biden comeback,” but the result adds to a growing list of polls finding him inching up over the last month.

So far, 16 national pollsters (of varying quality) have taken polls before and after the State of the Union. On average, Mr. Biden is running about 1.4 points better in the post-State of the Union polls than in earlier surveys by the same pollsters.

A 1.4-point shift in the polls wouldn’t usually merit much attention. It’s small enough that it may not last, even if it’s real. But it carries greater significance against the backdrop of the last six months — and the doubts among some Democrats about Mr. Biden’s candidacy.

Mr. Trump has held an uninterrupted lead in the polling since October, even though a rising stock market and surging consumer confidence seemed to create the conditions for a Biden comeback. The president’s inability to capitalize on an improving economy against a candidate accused of several federal crimes was a powerful reason for pessimism about his chances. It seemed to raise the possibility that his age (81) was disqualifying for many voters, or even that a big part of the country had written him off.

The movement in Mr. Biden’s direction over the last month is slight, but it may be just enough to suggest that he’s beginning to benefit from improving political conditions. The last month was full of the kinds of events and news that seemed potentially favorable for him:

• The primaries are over. The reality of a Trump-Biden rematch could be setting in, possibly helping Mr. Biden.

• The State of the Union helped quiet Democratic concerns about his age, which dominated the political conversation in February.

• Abortion is back in the news. Over the last few weeks, a state court ruling allowed Florida’s six-week abortion ban to soon become law, and Arizona’s 19th-century ban was resuscitated. As calls were being made for the Times/Siena poll this week, Google searches for abortion reached their highest levels since the 2022 midterm election.

• The Biden campaign is underway. In the wake of the State of the Union, the campaign launched an aggressive and mostly uncontested early effort in the battleground states, both on the ground and in the air.

• Consumer sentiment is up. This was already true back in February, but it’s plausible to expect a lag between improved economic conditions and political gains for Mr. Biden.

Yet Mr. Biden still trails in the poll, despite these favorable trends. His approval rating is stuck in the upper 30s, and just 41 percent say they have a favorable view of the president — far lower than four years ago, and lower than voters’ views of Mr. Trump now. Voters still believe the economy is poor, and disapprove of Mr. Biden’s handling of the economy by nearly a two-to-one margin.

But if the last month hadn’t helped Mr. Biden at all, the doubts about his candidacy would have only grown. Instead, a slight shift his way makes it easier to imagine further gains ahead.

With seven months to go until the election, that’s not unrealistic to contemplate, even if it’s not at all assured. Many voters still aren’t tuned in — especially the less engaged, young and nonwhite voters who are currently propelling Mr. Trump’s strength in the polling.

On paper, an incumbent president running with a healthy economy should be favored to win.

You can read our full write-up of the poll here.

What about Kennedy?

We didn’t list Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as an option in the presidential race. He has gotten on the ballot in very few states, and adding him makes it harder to compare our results with those from previous surveys.

That said, this could easily be the last time he’s omitted from a Times/Siena poll. For one, he may succeed in obtaining greater ballot access in the weeks ahead. For another, it’ll become less important to compare our surveys with our polls from 2023, and more important to facilitate a later comparison with our surveys in the fall, by which time Mr. Kennedy hopes to be on the ballot everywhere.

With that possibility in mind, we took a small interim step: We made it possible for the interviewer to record when respondents said they supported Mr. Kennedy, even though we didn’t list him as an option. Overall, just under 2 percent of respondents said they backed Mr. Kennedy when we asked them about the Biden vs. Trump matchup.

The federal judge presiding over Hunter Biden’s gun case in Delaware on Friday rejected Mr. Biden’s claim that he was being subjected to selective prosecution, saying it was “nonsensical” that the Biden Justice Department would target the president’s son.

Abbe Lowell, Hunter Biden’s lawyer, has filed a flurry of motions in the Delaware gun case and a separate indictment in California on tax charges, accusing the government of unfairly singling out his client at the instigation of Republicans and seeking to dismiss the charges. None of those challenges have been successful so far.

Judge Maryellen Noreika, who scuttled a plea deal reached between prosecutors and Mr. Biden last summer, said that Mr. Lowell failed to provide evidence that prosecutors had been motivated by animus against Hunter Biden.

The “defendant’s claim is effectively that his own father targeted him for being his son, a claim that is nonsensical under the facts here,” Judge Noreika wrote in her 25-page decision.

The judge also rejected Mr. Lowell’s claim that David C. Weiss, the special counsel and U.S. attorney in Delaware, had only decided to bring charges against Hunter Biden because of pressure from Republicans in Congress who claimed attempts to reach a plea agreement last year were a “sweetheart deal” intended to protect the Bidens.

“Regardless of whether congressional Republicans attempted to influence the executive branch, there is no evidence that they were successful in doing so,” she wrote.

A federal grand jury in Wilmington indicted Hunter Biden in September on charges that he lied about his drug use on an application for a Colt pistol in 2018.

In response to a question on the form about whether he was using drugs, Mr. Biden said he was not, an assertion that prosecutors concluded was false. Mr. Biden has publicly acknowledged his struggles with addiction to crack cocaine and alcohol and had been in and out of rehab around the time of the gun purchase.

If convicted, Mr. Biden could face up to 25 years in prison and $750,000 in fines. But nonviolent first-time offenders who have not been accused of using the weapon in another crime rarely get serious prison time for the charges.

The decision to file criminal charges against President Biden’s troubled son was an extraordinary step for the Justice Department and Mr. Weiss after the last-minute collapse of a deal that would have granted Hunter Biden broad immunity from future prosecution on gun and tax charges without serving prison time.

In December, a separate federal grand jury in Los Angeles charged the president’s son with a scheme to evade federal taxes on millions in income from foreign businesses.

Hunter Biden faces three counts each of evasion of a tax assessment, failure to file and pay taxes, and filing a false or fraudulent tax return, according to the 56-page indictment.

Both trials are scheduled to begin in June, although the schedules are subject to change.

Former President Donald J. Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson are expected to make a joint announcement on Friday about “election integrity,” a broad term often used by Mr. Trump and other Republicans to cast doubt on elections the party lost.

The remarks, scheduled to take place at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s private club and residence in Palm Beach, Fla., will come as Mr. Johnson faces criticism from the right over his handling of issues such as aid to Ukraine, and a threat to his speakership from a top Trump ally, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia.

Neither Mr. Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, nor Mr. Johnson has publicly elaborated on the subject of the announcement, but the former president has made his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him a major focus of his 2024 campaign.

At rallies and campaign events, Mr. Trump continues to declare falsely that he won in 2020, referring to the election as “rigged” or “stolen.” He repeatedly pushes baseless assertions of voter fraud and, without evidence, accuses Democrats of cheating.

In a statement released by the Biden campaign, Representative Bennie Thompson, a Democrat of Mississippi, called the expected announcement a “sham” and criticized Mr. Trump for repeating his election lies.

“Donald Trump and Mike Johnson don’t care about election integrity,” Mr. Thompson said. “They care only about helping Trump’s campaign of revenge and retribution to regain power at all costs.”

Mr. Johnson played a significant role in supporting Mr. Trump’s false claim that he won in 2020, recruiting House Republicans to sign a legal brief that supported a lawsuit seeking to overturn the election results. He repeated claims about voter fraud in interviews, and he provided Republicans with arguments that some used to object to certifying Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory on Jan. 6, 2021.

Well ahead of Election Day this November, Mr. Trump — who faces criminal charges related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 race — has already tried to sow doubt about the 2024 election. He routinely insists at his campaign rallies that Democrats cannot possibly win in November without cheating and has more recently urged his supporters to turn out in droves to ensure that his vote total is “too big to rig.”

As he and his campaign took over the Republican National Committee earlier this year, Mr. Trump backed a new chair, Michael Whatley, who he believed held views about election fraud more in line with his own. Such fraud is exceedingly rare despite Mr. Trump’s insistence to the contrary.

Mr. Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, was chosen as the committee’s co-chair. Last month, she told NBC that she believed the party was ready to leave the 2020 election in the “past,” even as Mr. Trump continued to re-litigate it on the stump. And she has said that Republicans need to encourage supporters to vote early where legal, even as her father-in-law denounces the practice.

This year, Mr. Trump has encouraged the Republican National Committee to ramp up its investments in so-called election integrity initiatives, like training poll watchers and filing lawsuits over election procedures both before and after Election Day.

Republicans in key battleground states have also since 2020 pushed for increased restrictions on voting, including laws requiring identification at polling places and more limits on mail-in voting and early voting, practices that have tended to favor Democrats in recent cycles.

Mr. Trump has repeatedly attacked both practices, arguing frequently that mail-in voting is rife with fraud and that elections need to be limited to “one-day voting.” Other prominent Republicans, particularly in battleground states, have said that the party needs to encourage the practice in order to chip away at Democrats’ advantages.

As speaker, Mr. Johnson has made a public show of his continued support for Mr. Trump, even as the former president has undermined some of his legislative efforts. His predecessor, Kevin McCarthy, was ousted after a right-wing rebellion, leading to days of chaos as House Republicans struggled to pick a replacement.

Shortly after congressional leaders met with Japan’s prime minister in Speaker Johnson’s ceremonial office in the Capitol on Thursday morning, the conversation turned to Ukraine aid.

Mr. Johnson was in the middle of another agonizing standoff with the ultraconservatives in his conference, after they had blocked legislation to extend a major warrantless surveillance law that is about to expire. His chief Republican antagonist, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, had intensified her threat to oust him. But on Ukraine, he offered his counterparts an assurance.

“We’re going to get this done,” he vowed.

His comments, confirmed by multiple people familiar with the meeting, were consistent with what Mr. Johnson has been saying for weeks, both publicly and privately: that he intends to ensure the House will move to assist Ukraine, a step that many members of his party oppose.

Even as right-wing Republicans have sought to ratchet up pressure on their speaker, Mr. Johnson has continued to search for a way to win the votes to push through a Ukraine aid. He is battling not only stiff resistance to the idea among House Republicans, but also mounting opposition among Democrats to sending unfettered military aid to Israel given the soaring civilian death toll and humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in Gaza.

Mr. Johnson has yet to make any final decisions on how he plans to structure a new round of American military assistance to Ukraine.

Some Republicans have increasingly expressed interest in structuring the aid as a loan, an idea that Mr. Johnson has publicly floated and that former President Donald J. Trump previously endorsed. Mr. Trump raised again the idea again after a private meeting with Mr. Johnson at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida on Friday.

“We’re thinking about making it in the form of a loan instead of just a gift,” Mr. Trump said. “We keep handing out gifts of billions and billions of dollars and we’ll take a look at it.”

Mr. Johnson earlier this month floated bringing up the $95 billion emergency national security spending package for Ukraine and Israel passed by the Senate in February — and moving it through the House in tandem with a second bill containing policies endorsed by the conservative wing of his party, according to people familiar with the discussions.

That plan envisioned two consecutive votes — one on the Senate-passed bill, and another on a package of sweeteners geared toward mollifying Republicans who otherwise would be infuriated by Mr. Johnson’s decision to push through a bipartisan aid package for Ukraine. The second bill could include the REPO Act, which would pay for some of the aid by selling off Russian sovereign assets that have been frozen, as well as a measure forcing President Biden to reverse a moratorium on new permits for liquefied natural gas export facilities. It could also include some kind of border security measure.

Mr. Johnson’s task at hand is to cobble together an increasingly elusive coalition of mainstream Republicans and Democrats who will support the Senate-passed bill.

Some liberal lawmakers have signaled opposition to approving additional aid for Israel after a strike by the Israeli military that killed seven aid workers in Gaza. At the same time, a growing number of Republicans view approving another aid package for Kyiv as toxic with their voters.

Mr. Johnson is toiling to navigate those dynamics with his own job on the line. Ms. Greene has long said she would seek to oust him were he to bring up legislation to aid Ukraine without securing sweeping policy concessions from Democrats on the border. And ultraconservatives were enraged at him on Friday when he broke with custom and cast a decisive vote to kill a proposal that would have required U.S. officials to obtain warrants before searching the messages of Americans swept up by the warrantless surveillance program.

Mr. Johnson nodded to the challenges at a news conference on Wednesday, saying he was sifting through “a lot of different ideas” raised by his colleagues for aiding Ukraine.

“It’s very complicated matter, and a very complicated time,” he said. “And the clock is ticking on it and everyone here feels the urgency of that. But what’s required is that you reach consensus on it.”

When members of Congress return to Washington from their home districts, they often trudge to Capitol Hill for a tally known as a “bed check,” a low-stakes vote series that is mostly aimed at taking attendance.

On Tuesday night, even though Republicans ostensibly control the House, more Democrats were actually present in the chamber for both of those votes — making the exercise a temporary reminder of just how painful this moment is for Speaker Mike Johnson.

The majority led by Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, keeps shrinking. Restive members of the far-right Freedom Caucus frequently derail his plans. And he is on a collision course with former President Donald Trump and a broader swath of the Republican rank and file over issues like aid to Ukraine, while Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene dangles a threat to oust him.

“The Lord Jesus himself could not manage this conference,” Representative Troy Nehls of Texas, a Republican, said on CNN this week. “You just can’t do it.”

Amid the tumult, Johnson appeared at Mar-a-Lago on Friday in an apparent effort to shore up his support from the former president. The hope, it seemed, was that the two could see past their differences if they united around something that fires up the Republican base: stoking unfounded distrust in the election.

During the joint appearance, Johnson said he would introduce a bill that would “require proof of citizenship to vote” and baselessly claimed that undocumented voters could tip American elections, even though voting by people who are not citizens is exceedingly rare. And he got what he had most likely come for: a full-throated endorsement from the former president.

“I stand with the speaker,” Trump said.

I spoke with my colleague Catie Edmondson, who covers Congress for the The New York Times, about Johnson’s delicate dance with Trump as the speaker faces his most precarious moment yet in a tenuous term.

JB: Let’s start with a simple question. What is the fundamental problem facing Johnson as speaker?

CE: The ouster of former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy in October showed that, regardless of who is the leader of the Republican conference, it is an unwieldy group of people that is, in some ways, ungovernable.

It’s not a functioning majority. There are members of the Freedom Caucus preventing Johnson from even bringing legislation to the floor for a vote, which is what we saw Wednesday as he attempted to extend a key surveillance tool. Greene is using the threat of ouster to torment him. It’s a world of hurt for him right now.

JB: Johnson cut a deal to reauthorize that surveillance law this morning. He says he is looking for a way to advance Ukraine aid after refusing to put the issue to a vote. He has also kept government open with the help of Democrats. These are all the kinds of things he generally would have voted against as a rank-and-file member, as you’ve observed. How has being the speaker shifted his priorities?

CE: Johnson has described the experience of receiving classified briefings about intelligence and volatile situations abroad as sobering. He’s no longer solely responsible for representing his very conservative district. He is second in line to the presidency. He has to make sure government functions in a smooth fashion. He’s also responsible for protecting frontline Republicans in politically vulnerable districts. I think all of that has changed his worldview on some of these big decisions.

JB: How much sway does Trump hold over Johnson, and the House Republican conference writ large? What is the dance that Johnson has to do with Trump right now?

CE: Trump’s real power on the Hill, with House Republicans, has always been destructive in nature. He’s someone who blocks things from happening rather than someone who builds consensus. So far, Johnson hasn’t really brought up anything that Trump really cares about. But any vote on Ukraine aid will be a major test of this dynamic.

Many of Johnson’s members, particularly in the Freedom Caucus, are averse to voting for anything that can be signed into law by a Democratic president, so Johnson knows he will have to rely on Democrats to pass basic governance measures. At the same time, he has to make sure he’s right with the base, right with the Freedom Caucus and, of course, right with Trump.

JB: Is Johnson’s speakership really hanging in the balance?

CE: Every vote that the Freedom Caucus feels like they’ve been betrayed on just ratchets up the anger and the frustration a little bit more. I don’t anticipate this getting better for him.

If Greene calls a motion to vacate, the question becomes what Democrats will choose to do. We’ve seen a lot of Democrats openly weigh the idea of saving him if he puts a Ukraine package on the floor for a vote. But if he survives for that reason, it would cut the legs out from under him. He would be viewed as the speaker only because the opposition party decided to save him.

JB: Is there any sign that voters care about Congress being so dysfunctional?

CE: I would assume Republicans in swing districts have a lot of agitation over the fact that chaos dominates the headlines every day, and it’s laid at the feet of their party.

But if you talk to Democratic strategists about what their message is, I think it’s going to rely less on Republican chaos, and it will be more about Republican extremism, especially on abortion.

ON THE MAp

The Nebraska Republicans who still want to tweak the map in 2024

For President Biden, the simplest recipe for re-election might be this: Win Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and add a single electoral vote from Nebraska. That, plus other states that have gone blue in recent years, would get Biden to exactly 270 electoral votes, just enough to clinch a victory.

Nebraska is one of two states that allocate some of their electoral votes by congressional district, and the district containing Omaha went blue in 2020. (The other state that does this is Maine.) But after a push by the conservative media personality and activist Charlie Kirk, Gov. Jim Pillen, a Republican, says he is open to calling a special legislative session to convert the state to winner-take-all when there are sufficient votes to pass such a bill. Lawmakers there blocked a similar measure this month.

My colleague Astead Herndon, a friend of this newsletter and the host of the Times’s excellent politics podcast, “The Run-Up,” spoke with State Senator Merv Riepe, a Republican, as part of his episode about the matter, which you can listen to here.

Riepe supports switching to winner-take-all and told Astead that was because it was a “risk” to let Omaha remain a “blue dot” that could potentially tip an election. Here’s an edited excerpt from their conversation:

AH: What do you mean by risk? I get what you’re saying, that it does create the possibility that this one congressional district could back someone different than the state overall. But why is that necessarily all that bad?

MR: Well, Nebraska is a conservative state. If it makes a difference in who gets elected president, that’s an incredibly big difference.

AH: Why isn’t it just that the people of that district, you know, are having their voices heard?

MR: Let’s turn it on its heels. If you took it by district, California is not going to get all Democrats and leftists. So, same story here. The Omaha area is what I would call a very purple district. That one vote could swing the entire election. And if the other states aren’t going to play by the same rules, Nebraska shouldn’t either.

Reporter notebook

A war mobilizes the left

President Biden avoided a bruising primary fight, but his party is divided over the Gaza war and American support for Israel in the conflict. My colleagues Katie Glueck, Katie Benner and Sheera Frenkel took a deep look at the sprawling protest movement that reflects some of that angst. I asked Katie Glueck to tell us how it has grown.

Initially, the protest movement comprised organizations including campus groups, left-wing Jewish organizations and hard-line groups heavily involved in street protests, which in many cases blamed Israel for the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack on Israelis — a position broadly denounced at the time.

But as Israel’s military retaliation intensified and casualties in Gaza mounted, opposition to its war effort increasingly became a central tenet of the Democratic left in America, as a broad constellation of advocacy groups, activists and some voters pushed Biden to take a harder line against Israel.

“These are all groups that I would describe as part of the Democratic coalition,” said Representative Ro Khanna, a California Democrat and Biden ally. “They helped President Biden win.”

Convincing those disillusioned, often younger, progressive voters to mobilize for Biden again will be one of his campaign’s central challenges this year.

—Katie Glueck

Bennett Braun, a Chicago psychiatrist whose diagnoses of repressed memories involving horrific abuse by devil worshipers helped to fuel what became known as the “satanic panic” of the 1980s and ’90s, died on March 20 in Lauderhill, Fla., north of Miami. He was 83.

Jane Braun, one of his ex-wives, said the death, in a hospital, was from complications of a fall. Dr. Braun lived in Butte, Mont., but had been in Lauderhill on vacation.

Dr. Braun gained renown in the early 1980s as an expert in two of the most popular and controversial areas of psychiatric treatment: repressed memories and multiple personality disorder, now known as dissociative identity disorder.

He claimed that he could help patients uncover memories of childhood trauma — the existence of which, he and others said, were responsible for the splintering of a person’s self into many distinct personalities.

He created a unit dedicated to dissociative disorders at Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Medical Center in Chicago (now Rush University Medical Center); became a frequently quoted expert in the news media; and helped to found the what is now the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation, a professional organization of over 2,000 members today.

It was from that sizable platform that Dr. Braun publicized his most explosive findings: that in dozens of cases, his patients discovered memories of being tortured by satanic cults and, in some cases, of having participated in the torture themselves.

He was not the only psychiatrist to make such a claim, and his supposed revelations keyed into a growing national panic.

The 1980s saw a vertiginous rise in the number of people, both children and adults, who claimed to have been abused by devil worshipers. It began in 1980 with the book “Michelle Remembers,” by a Canadian woman who said she had recovered memories of ritual abuse, and spiked following allegations of abuse at day care centers in California and North Carolina.

Elements of pop culture, such as heavy metal music and the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons, were looped in as supposed entry points for cult activity.

Such stories were fodder for popular TV formats that reveled in the salacious, including talk shows like “Geraldo” and newsmagazines like “Dateline,” which broadcast segments that promoted such claims uncritically.

The psychiatric profession bore some responsibility for the growing panic, with respected researchers like Dr. Braun giving it a gloss of authority. He and others ran seminars and distributed research papers; they even gave the phenomenon a quasi-medical abbreviation, S.R.A., for satanic ritual abuse.

Dr. Braun’s inpatient unit at Rush became a magnet for referrals and a warehouse for patients, some of whom he kept medicated and under supervision for years.

Among them was a woman from Iowa named Patricia Burgus. After interviewing her, Dr. Braun and his colleague, Roberta Sachs, claimed that she was not only the victim of satanic ritual abuse, but was also herself a “high priestess” of a cult that had raped, tortured and cannibalized thousands of children, including her two young sons.

Dr. Braun and Dr. Sachs sent Mrs. Burgus and her children to a mental health facility in Houston, where they were held apart for nearly three years with minimal contact with the outside world.

By then Mrs. Burgus, heavily medicated, had come to believe the doctors, telling them she recalled torches, live burials and eating the body parts of up to 2,000 people a year. After her parents served her husband meatloaf, she had him get it tested for human tissue. The tests came back negative, but Dr. Braun was not convinced.

Dr. Braun kept other patients under similar conditions at Rush or elsewhere. He persuaded one woman to have an abortion because, he convinced her, she was the product of ritualistic incest; he persuaded another to undergo tubal ligation to prevent having more children within her supposed cult.

The satanic panic began to wane in the early 1990s. A 1992 F.B.I. investigation found no evidence of coordinated cult activity in the United States, and a 1994 report by the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect surveyed over 12,000 accusations of satanic ritual abuse and found that not a single one held up under scrutiny.

“The biggest thing was the lack of corroborating evidence,” Kenneth Lanning, a retired F.B.I. agent who wrote the 1992 report, said in a phone interview. “It’s the kind of crime where evidence would have been left behind.”

Many people distanced themselves from their earlier enthusiasms; in 1995, Geraldo Rivera apologized for his episode covering the falsehood. However, even in 1998, “Dateline” ran an episode on NBC claiming to show widespread satanic activity in Mississippi.

Mrs. Burgus sued Rush, Dr. Braun and her insurance company over claims that he and Dr. Sachs had implanted false memories in her head. They settled out of court in 1997 for $10.6 million.

“I began to add a few things up and realized there was no way I could come from a little town in Iowa, be eating 2,000 people a year, and nobody said anything about it,” Mrs. Burgus told The Chicago Tribune in 1997.

A year later Dr. Braun’s unit at Rush was shut down, and the Illinois medical licensing board opened an investigation into his practices. In 1999, he received a two-year suspension on his license — though he did not admit wrongdoing.

Bennett George Braun was born on Aug. 7, 1940, in Chicago, to Thelma (Gimbel) and Milton Braun, a professor of orthodontics at Loyola University. He graduated from Tulane University with a bachelor’s degree in psychology in 1963 and earned a master’s in the same subject in 1964. He received his medical degree from the University of Illinois in 1968.

Dr. Braun was married three times. His marriages to Renate Deutsch and Mrs. Braun both ended in divorce. His third, to Joanne Arriola, ended in her death. He is survived by five children and five grandchildren.

After temporarily losing his medical license in Illinois, Dr. Braun moved to Montana, where he received a new license in that state and opened a private practice.

But in 2019, one of his patients, Ciara Rehbein, sued him for overprescribing medication that left her with a permanent facial tic. She also filed a complaint against the Montana Board of Medical Examiners for allowing him a license, despite knowing his past.

Dr. Braun lost his license to practice medicine in Montana in 2020.

Three years ago this month, Vice President Kamala Harris moved into her official residence in northwest Washington, a quiet 73-acre enclave where the U.S. Navy keeps an observatory as well as the nation’s master clock. Early in her stay she saw evidence of digging near her house, and after asking around, learned that an archaeological team had recently found part of a foundation of an Italianate villa, known as North View, that had been there more than a century and a half before.

Near the villa, the team had found something else: A brick foundation of a smokehouse used to cure meat. Ms. Harris did not have to be told who had used it. Well before moving to the new residence, the nation’s first Black vice president had been told by aides about the 34 individuals who once lived on the property against their will. A subsequent opinion essay for CQ Roll Call was the first mention of it in the news media.

The names of the enslaved people were recorded in a document of the era. Peter, Mary and Ellen Jenkins. Chapman, Sarah, Henry, Joseph, Louisa, Daniel and Eliza Toyer. Towley, Jane, Resin, Samuel, Judah and Andrew Yates. Kitty, William, Gilbert and Phillip Silas. Susan, Dennis, Ann Maria and William Carroll. Becky, Milly, Margaret and Mortimer Briscoe. Richard Williams. Mary Young. John Thomas. Mary Brown. John Chapman. William Cyrus.

They ranged in age from four months to 65 years, and in skill from winemaking to carpentry. Five of them would go off to the Civil War as Union soldiers. Another would flee at age 13, destination unknown. For those who remained on a property that was known at the time as Pretty Prospects, the abject conditions of their lives are hinted at in documents now preserved at the National Archives.

Mortimer Briscoe, 30, “had one of his toes frost bitten, but is otherwise sound.” John Thomas, 41, “has three fingers on his left hand injured by a corn sheller” but “can drive the carriage and work as well as before.”

Until these enslaved people and roughly 3,000 others in the nation’s capital were emancipated by an act of Congress on April 16, 1862, the 34 inhabitants of Pretty Prospects were the property of a widow, Margaret C. Barber, who lived in the North View villa. Together they constitute a largely unknown chapter in a historic property whose famous resident today believes herself to be descended from an enslaved Jamaican.

After learning about the smokehouse, aides said Ms. Harris asked if any other evidence about the 34 enslaved people had been uncovered. No, she was told. But the discovery, which has now been documented in a new report that will soon be published by the District of Columbia Historic Preservation Office, prompted Ms. Harris to do some digging of her own.

Aides said she studied the old map that the archaeological team had consulted, dated 1882, which displayed the exact location of North View and the nearby smokehouse. About a quarter of a mile from where she lives now was a long-gone dwelling referred to as “Negro House,” where the 34 enslaved workers lived.

Ms. Harris then began poring over photographs taken on the property during the past half-century. The subjects were vice presidents, all white males, with their families and guests. The images conveyed nothing about the role Black people played in the history of the nation’s capital, much less on the property itself.

A Widow on a Farm

The history of a slave farm that then became the U.S. Naval Observatory and today the residence of the nation’s first Black vice president has previously been told only in fragments. This account is based on interviews with associates of Ms. Harris. It is also based on information provided by the Naval archaeologist who unearthed the smokehouse, Brian Cleven, and on a trove of historical literature, much of it culled from archives and libraries by the Washington historian Carlton Fletcher.

Ms. Harris has never mentioned the residence’s legacy of slavery in public remarks. Aides said the very idea of moving to such a place only became palatable to her once she was assured that her new home was not the same structure where Ms. Barber’s servants once worked, and that they had been emancipated three decades before it was built.

The Obamas could relate. Michelle Obama, in her speech to the 2016 Democratic National Convention, cited the fact that she lived in the White House as a Black first lady as “the story of generations of people who felt the lash of bondage, the shame of servitude, the sting of segregation, but who kept on striving and hoping and doing what needed to be done so that today I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves and I watch my daughters — two beautiful, intelligent, Black young women — playing with their dogs on the White House lawn.”

C.R. Gibbs, a local historian, said that many tourists are unaware of this chapter in Washington’s history. “What people don’t realize when they come to visit the Smithsonian Museum, the Washington Monument, the Capitol or the White House is that they’re standing on slave-worked land,” he said. “And the same holds true with the vice president’s residence.”

North View was built in the early 1850s for a wealthy Baltimore planter, Cornelius Barber. His wife Margaret was the offspring of a viticulturist, John Adlum, whose vineyard on the banks of Rock Creek drew admirers like Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. Five of the Barbers’ six children perished from disease, as would the father in 1853, leaving the 43-year-old widow to mind the country estate.

But she had help. The 34 enslaved farmhands and domestic servants under Ms. Barber made her second among the city’s slaveholders. (The first, the tobacco planter George Washington Young, owned 68 people of African descent.) Ms. Barber frequently rented out her men to neighbors who owned farms, tanneries and slaughterhouses. Throughout the 1850s, she netted an annual income of around $1,600, or about $61,000 in today’s currency.

One of Ms. Barber’s female domestic servants, Ellen Jenkins, had been bequeathed to her by her viticulturist father in his will, with the stipulation that Ms. Jenkins would be freed from servitude upon turning 50. But Ms. Barber described Ms. Jenkins in a document as a “good cook” and did not relinquish her servant until the 1862 law emancipated Ms. Jenkins, when she was 60.

Ms. Barber gave up Ms. Jenkins and her other enslaved workers only after hiring a lawyer, who argued to a government committee that the widow was entitled to compensation for her loss. She sought $750 each for them. In the end, Ms. Barber settled for $270 per worker, totaling $9,000, or about $336,500 today. She moved out of the villa, whose grand paintings and chandeliered ballrooms were later defiled by Union soldiers. Ms. Barber died of influenza at age 80 in 1892, around the same time North View was torn down.

A Return of Black History

Today Ms. Harris lives in a white turreted Queen Anne-style three-story building, one with a history more less fraught than that of the villa it replaced.

Built in 1893 for the superintendent of the naval observatory and later the home of the Chief of Naval Operations, in 1974 it was designated by Congress as the vice president’s official residence. Walter F. Mondale moved in with his family three years later, abiding with good cheer the not-yet-updated plumbing. He chortled about it in interviews, and said the family became friends with the plumber. The hot water went out a lot.

At some point during the 1980s, Vice President George H.W. Bush added a horseshoe pit to the property. His successor, Dan Quayle, had a putting green and a swimming pool installed, which later endeared Mr. Quayle to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who along with his wife Jill were fond of taking evening dips there. Vice President Dick Cheney preferred the residence’s hammock, where he oversaw the romping of his Labradors, Jackson and Dave. The Pences contributed a beehive and hosted pumpkin-decorating activities on Halloween.

A notable first came two years ago, when Ms. Harris and her husband Doug Emhoff welcomed a gathering of predominantly Black Washington families to celebrate Juneteenth. In her off-the-record remarks that day, the vice president made a passing reference to the 34 individuals who once lived on the property against their will.

Ms. Harris has sought to reconnect the residence with the Black American experience and to showcase the works of minority artists. Last September she hosted a hip-hop concert on the lawn, dancing with 400 guests to performances by Lil Wayne and Q-Tip. She turned to a Harlem-based designer, Sheila Bridge, to reimagine the interior.

In decorating its walls, Ms. Harris passed on landscape paintings offered to her by the Smithsonian and instead installed art that includes works by the Black photographers Carrie Mae Weems and Roy DeCarava, a painting by the Cherokee artist Kay Walkingstick and a quilt by the women of Gee’s Bend, Ala., who are descended from enslaved cotton pickers.

To date, there are no plans by Ms. Harris to commemorate the 34 Black men and women. Their individual histories have all but vanished. The remains of only two have been accounted for.

One of them, Mary Brown, was about 16 at the time of her emancipation and later worked as a housekeeper in Washington before dying in 1886 at the age of 40. The other was Ellen Jenkins, the cook. Ms. Jenkins became a nurse and lived until she was 80.

Both women were buried in a Black cemetery that is now the site of Walter Pierce Park, two miles east of where Ms. Harris lives today.

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 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 planned 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 President 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.