Since then, the company has scrambled to appease lawmakers by promising to hire more than 1,000 people to manually review political ad purchases and to make public the funding behind those ads.

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“The foreign interference we saw was reprehensible,” Colin Stretch, Facebook’s general counsel, told senators.

The companies also acknowledged that they were struggling to keep up with the threat of foreign interference.

“The abuse of our platform to attempt state-sponsored manipulation of elections is a new challenge for us — and one that we are determined to meet,” said Twitter’s acting general counsel, Sean Edgett.

At the heart of the companies’ problems are business models that reward viral content — which can include misinformation — and an enormous advertising business that is automated and unable to easily spot ads purchased by foreign governments.

In a sign of the shifting political winds for tech giants, Republicans, who have been more restrained in their criticism of the companies, were more skeptical on Tuesday. In one contentious exchange, Senator John Kennedy, Republican of Louisiana, pressed Mr. Stretch on whether Facebook could possibly police all of its advertisers.

“I’m trying to get us down from La-La Land here,” Mr. Kennedy said. “The truth of the matter is, you have five million advertisers that change every month. Every minute. Probably every second. You don’t have the ability to know who every one of those advertisers is, do you?”

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Mr. Stretch acknowledged that Facebook could not track all those advertisers.

Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, the chairman of the crime and terrorism subcommittee that held the hearing, said the risk went beyond Russia to other American adversaries. Talking to reporters afterward, he alluded to potential regulation of political advertising online.

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“It’s Russia today; it could be Iran and North Korea tomorrow,” Mr. Graham said. “What we need to do is sit down and find ways to bring some of the controls we have on over-the-air broadcast to social media to protect the consumer.”

Facebook, Twitter and Google have not publicly opposed a bipartisan proposal to require reports on who funds political ads online, similar to rules for broadcast television. In private, their lobbyists have praised voluntary efforts to disclose political ad funding and have resisted many aspects of the bill.

Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota, said the legislation was essential before the midterm elections in 2018.

“Our midterms are 370 days away, and we don’t have time to mess around with dialogue anymore,” Ms. Klobuchar said in an interview after the hearing. Ms. Klobuchar introduced the bill with Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia, and Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona.

During the hearing, some Republicans also sought to play down the Russian effort to tip the election in favor of President Trump, stressing incorrectly that the Kremlin’s agents did not favor a particular presidential candidate in last year’s election.

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“Russia does not have loyalty to a political party in the United States,” said Senator Charles E. Grassley, the Republican chairman of the Judiciary Committee. “Their goal is to divide us and discredit our democracy.”

That assertion was at odds with the conclusion of American intelligence agencies that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia tried to sway the election in favor of Mr. Trump, going beyond just posting disruptive content on social media. Russian operatives also hacked Democratic email accounts and released messages embarrassing to Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

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Mr. Graham asked Mr. Stretch of Facebook to confirm that the pattern of activity the site saw from Russia was more focused on sowing chaos in the United States than in bolstering Mr. Trump’s candidacy.

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“During the election, they were trying to create discord between Americans, most of it directed against Clinton,” Mr. Graham said, addressing Mr. Stretch. “After the election, you saw Russian-tied groups and organizations trying to undermine President Trump’s legitimacy. Is that what you saw on Facebook?”

Mr. Stretch agreed. But the question was narrowly tailored, apparently intended to distance the broader Russian interference from the backing of Mr. Trump.

Though the companies promised to work with government officials, Mr. Stretch stopped short of agreeing to some suggestions.

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In one heated exchange, Senator Al Franken, Democrat of Minnesota, asked him to reject political ad purchases in foreign currencies.

“How did Facebook, which prides itself on being able to process billions of data points and instantly transform them in the personal connections with its user, somehow not make the connection that electoral ads, paid for in rubles, were coming from Russia?” Mr. Franken said.

But Mr. Stretch hemmed, saying the rejection of a foreign currency to buy political ads would not solve the problem of foreign interference.

“The reason I’m hesitating on foreign currency is it’s relatively easy for bad actors to switch currencies,” Mr. Stretch said. “So it’s a signal, but not enough.”

That response failed to satisfy Mr. Franken, who interrupted with exasperation.

“My goal is for you to think through this stuff a little bit better,” Mr. Franken said, raising his voice.

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This week, the companies admitted that the abuse of their platforms was much greater than previously acknowledged. In addition to Facebook’s admission, Google said that agents who were also from the Internet Research Agency uploaded more than 1,000 videos on its YouTube platform. Twitter said the agency published more than 131,000 messages on Twitter.

On Wednesday, the top lawyers for all three companies will appear before the House and Senate intelligence committees, which are conducting their own investigations into the Russian election meddling.

Tuesday’s hearing exposed a much deeper struggle for Facebook, which is trying to tread a delicate line as a technology platform while also fighting against hate speech, violence and misinformation on its site.

“I like that they are contrite, but these issues are existential and they aren’t taking any structural changes,” said Tim Wu, a professor of law at Columbia University. “These are Band-Aids.”

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NEW YORK — A 29-year-old man driving a rental truck plowed down people on a Manhattan bike path Tuesday in what authorities described as a terrorist attack that killed eight and injured 11 before the suspect was shot and arrested by police.

A sunny fall day along the Hudson River erupted in chaos just around the time students were getting out from nearby Stuyvesant High School, when a rented Home Depot truck turned on to the bike path along the West Side Highway.

Witnesses say the speeding truck struck unsuspecting bicyclists and pedestrians while onlookers screamed and scattered. The truck then veered left toward Chambers Street, where it collided with a small school bus, injuring two adults and two children inside, officials said.

Foreign ministries of Belgium and Argentina said five Argentines and a Belgian were among the victims. The Argentine nationals were part of a group of friends celebrating the 30th anniversary of their high school graduation, the Argentine Foreign Ministry said in a statement Tuesday.

According to a video from the scene, the man then jumped out of the wrecked vehicle brandishing what appeared to be handguns. Some witnesses said he shouted “Allahu akbar’’ meaning “God is great’’ in Arabic.

Law enforcement officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss an open investigation, identified the suspect as Sayfullo Saipov, an Uzbek immigrant who had been living in Tampa.

The attack could intensify the political debate over immigration and security. President Trump has argued for much tougher screening of immigrants to prevent terrorism, and opponents of those policies have sought to block his efforts in the courts. Uzbekistan was not among the countries named in any version of the president’s travel ban, which largely targeted a number of majority-Muslim countries.

[ New York vehicle attack: Everything you need to know ]

Trump responded to the attack on Twitter, saying it “looks like another attack by a very sick and deranged person.’’ He tweeted a short time later: “We must not allow ISIS to return, or enter, our country after defeating them in the Middle East and elsewhere. Enough!” ISIS is an acronym for the Islamic State.

On Tuesday night Trump said he was tightening immigrant screening, tweeting: “I have just ordered Homeland Security to step up our already Extreme Vetting Program. Being politically correct is fine, but not for this!”

I have just ordered Homeland Security to step up our already Extreme Vetting Program. Being politically correct is fine, but not for this!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 1, 2017

There was no immediate indication that the attack had been directed by the Islamic State. However, the group has called on its supporters in Western countries to launch their own attacks, using anything at hand as weapons, including vehicles.

Inside the rental truck, investigators found a handwritten note in which Saipov had declared his allegiance to the Islamic State, according to officials.

Saipov is expected to survive, meaning investigators will likely have a chance to question him about his motive for the attack, but so far, they said, he appears to have been a “lone wolf’’ suspect – someone who acted alone after being inspired, but not directly instructed, by the Islamic State.

He had been living in Paterson, New Jersey before the attack, and rented the vehicle in that state before driving it into Manhattan, officials said.

The violence was terrifyingly similar to vehicle attacks carried out in Europe, where Islamic State supporters have used cars and trucks to strike pedestrians in crowded streets, a tactic that has been employed in France, Britain, Germany, Sweden and Spain.

“This certainly bears all the hallmarks of an ISIS-inspired or al-Qaeda-inspired attack,” said Rep. Adam B. Schiff (Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, whom the FBI briefed on the attack Tuesday evening. “We have to expect that as the capital of the caliphate has now fallen, there are going to be increasing efforts to show that they remain dangerous and lethal, and to expand the virtual caliphate.”

Antonio Valasquez, 28, said he saw the truck speed by as he left a restaurant and then heard a crash. “I didn’t really understand, you know, at first what was happening,” he said. Valasquez said he heard what appeared to be gunshots shortly after but couldn’t be sure. “I was running away.”

An officer from the 1st Precinct approached Saipov and shot him in the abdomen, police said. He has been taken to a hospital, but officials did not discuss his condition or location. The weapons he was brandishing turned out to be a pellet gun and a paintball gun, police said.

Rabbi Chaim Zaklos was picking up about half a dozen children from school to escort them to Hebrew school nearby when he encountered the scene. Police were pushing people away, and he could see abandoned bikes and what appeared to be uprooted trees nearby. “It was obvious something drastic was happening, so I just wanted to get the kids someplace safe,” said Zaklos, 35.

“This is a very painful day in our city,’’ New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) said. “Based on the information we have at this moment, this was an act of terror, a particularly cowardly act of terror aimed at innocent civilians.”

Saipov moved to the United States from Uzbekistan about six years ago, said Dilnoza Abdusamatova, 24, who said Saipov stayed with her family in Cincinnati for his first two weeks in the country because their fathers were friends. Some officials said he arrived in 2010.

Abdusamatova said Saipov then moved to Florida to start a trucking company. Her family members think he got married about a year after arriving in the United States and may now have two children. Around that time, she said, he cut off contact with them.

“He stopped talking to us when he got married,” Abdusamatova said.

[ Vehicles as weapons of terror: U.S. cities on alert as attacks hit the West ]

Saipov had lived in an apartment complex, Heritage at Tampa, near the Hillsborough River. On Tuesday evening, two plainclothes investigators were seen departing the community, having interviewed several residents and others in the surrounding neighborhood. The investigators declined to answer any questions.

“Four FBI agents came and told me he used to live here,” said Venessa Jones, who said she lives in an apartment above the one Saipov rented. Neighbors at the complex said they didn’t know Saipov.

Officials said they had no information to suggest that the attacker had any accomplices or that there was a further threat to the city.

Nevertheless, they said, extra police would be posted around the city as a precaution, particularly along the route of the Halloween Parade, a long-standing tradition in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village that attracts big crowds. Officials said sand trucks, police vehicles and other equipment would be used to deter any vehicle attacks at the parade.

The investigation is being led by the FBI with the assistance of the New York Police Department.

“We have recently seen attacks like this one throughout the world,’’ said acting homeland security secretary Elaine Duke. “DHS and its law enforcement partners remain vigilant and committed to safeguarding the American people.’’

The Argentine Foreign Ministry identified the five dead Argentine nationals as Hernán Diego Mendoza, Diego Enrique Angelini, Alejandro Damián Pagnucco, Ariel Erlij and Hernán Ferruchi. It added that a sixth member of the group, Martin Ludovico Marro, sustained injuries and is being hospitalized in the Presbyterian Hospital of Manhattan. He is in stable condition, the government said, citing medical officials.

The group of friends hailed from the city of Rosario, the largest city in the central province of Santa Fe. They graduated from the Instituto Politécnico, a technical high school in Rosario, in 1987.

The Argentine government expressed its “sincere condolences” and said the General Consulate remains in contact with police authorities, hospital staff and the victim’s relatives in Argentina.

“We accompany the families in this terrible moment of deep pain, which all Argentines share,” the government statement read.

Argentina’s president, Mauricio Macri, tweeted that he was “deeply moved by the tragic deaths” in New York. “We are available to the families of the Argentine victims,” he added.

Rosario’s local newspaper, La Capital, described the vacation to New York as the “trip of their dreams,” and reported that they were riding bicycles in Lower Manhattan before the attack.

The local newspaper’s headline read:  “A trip of camaraderie among friends from Rosario turns into tragedy.”

Barrett, Lowery, Siegel, and Schmidt reported from Washington. Philip Bump in New York, Jon Silman in Tampa, and Julie Tate, Ellen Nakashima, Jennifer Jenkins, Mark Berman in Washington contributed to this report.

Read more:

Washington prepares for the unexpected as Russia investigation unfolds

Russia investigation charges complicate Trump’s Asia trip, ability to sell tax cuts

Facebook, Google and Twitter testified on Capitol Hill. Here’s what they said.

Chat with us in Facebook Messenger. Find out what’s happening in the world as it unfolds.

Just a day before tech’s big Russia-focused Congressional hearings begin, Google is out with a new report on the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in the U.S. presidential election across its platforms.

“While we have found only limited activity on our services, we will continue to work to prevent all of it, because there is no amount of interference that is acceptable,” Google wrote in its latest blog post on the issue, titled “Security and disinformation in the U.S. 2016 election.”

Google’s report appears to be limited to accounts with observable ties to the Internet Research Agency, a Russian state-affiliated organization that produces political disinformation and sock puppet accounts. That narrowed scope is possibly an effort to appease Congress with some hard numbers, so it’s worth keeping in mind that we don’t yet know the scope of these disinformation campaigns beyond those pre-defined parameters.

Google reports that in an examination of its ad products, it discovered only two accounts with ties to the Internet Research Agency. The two accounts had invested $4,700 into Google’s ad network (search and display ads) during the timeframe of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Google doesn’t specify how it defined that timeframe in this particular batch of numbers.

Unlike razor-sharp ad targeting on a platform like Facebook, these ads weren’t even targeted by location or by political affiliation. Google does offer political ad segments that face “left-leaning” and “right-leaning” audiences, though in this instance the Internet Research Agency did not appear to use the feature.

Google’s report breaks its YouTube findings into their own category. Here, it found 18 channels it believed to be linked to the Russian government that featured public political videos in English. While that isn’t very many channels, they did create a cumulative 1,108 videos with 309,000 views in the U.S. from June 2015 to November of the following year. The vast majority of videos had fewer than 5,000 views.

The report also included Google’s other products, though those examinations didn’t turn up much. There’s no evidence (yet, anyway) that state-sponsored accounts used “improper methods” to boost search rankings, though anyone who’s seen fake news featured high up in their search results might rightfully have questions about how the company decides what flies in search and what doesn’t.

To wrap up its report, Google even did an analysis of Google+ that seems to suggest that Russian state actors might be posting vacation pics on the mostly abandoned social network:

“We ​found ​no ​political ​posts ​in ​English ​from ​state-linked ​actors ​on ​Google+ (there ​were some ​posts ​in ​Russian ​and ​a ​very ​small ​number ​of ​non-political ​posts).”

All three companies set to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Senate and House Intel Committees this week put out an early report previewing their expected testimony. Google’s relatively small scale findings put into perspective Facebook’s new assertion that similar content reached 126 million users on its own platform, though the situation on Twitter also appears to be at least somewhat worse than previously reported. 

We’ll be following tech’s testimony to Congress this week as the companies expand on their own unwitting role in foreign disinformation campaigns during the 2016 election.

Newly released court documents show that Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos communicated with several senior campaign officials about his outreach to the Russian government over a period of months. The recipients of Papadopoulos’s emails are not named in the filings, but The Washington Post has identified several individuals based on interviews and other documents. Papadopoulos pleaded guilty this month to lying to federal agents about his outreach to Russia.

“The Campaign Supervisor”: Trump campaign national co-chairman Sam Clovis

Victoria Toensing, an attorney for Sam Clovis, confirmed that several references in court filings to “the campaign supervisor” refer to the onetime radio host from Iowa, who served as Trump’s national campaign co-chairman.

At one point, Papadopoulos emailed Clovis and other campaign officials about a March 24, 2016, meeting he had in London with a professor, who had introduced him to the Russian ambassador and a Russian woman he described as “Putin’s niece.” The group had talked about arranging a meeting “between us and the Russian leadership to discuss U.S.-Russia ties under President Trump,” Papadopoulos wrote. (Papadopoulos later learned that the woman was not Putin’s niece, and while he expected to meet the ambassador, he never did, according to filings.)

Clovis responded that he would “work it through the campaign,” adding, “great work,” according to court documents.

In August 2016, Clovis responded to efforts by Papadopoulos to organize an “off the record” meeting with Russian officials. “I would encourage you” and another foreign policy adviser to the campaign to “make the trip, if it is feasible,” Clovis wrote.

Toensing said Clovis “always vigorously opposed any Russian trip for Donald Trump and/or the campaign.” She said his responses to Papadopoulos were courtesy by “a polite gentleman from Iowa.”

“High-Ranking Campaign Official”: Campaign manager Corey Lewandowski

Emails previously described to The Post indicate that the “high-ranking campaign official” described in court documents is onetime campaign manager Corey Lewandowski. The emails were among more than 20,000 pages that the Trump campaign turned over to congressional committees after review by White House and defense lawyers.

Lewandowski, who was pushed out of his post in June 2016, did not respond to requests for comment.

Papadopoulos wrote to Lewandowski several times to let him know that the Russians were interested in forging a relationship with the campaign, court filings show.

In one email on April 27, 2016, Papadopoulos wrote “to discuss Russia’s interest in hosting Mr. Trump.”

“Have been receiving a lot of calls over the last month about Putin wanting to host him and the team when the time is right,” he added.

In May, Papadopoulos forwarded to Lewandowski an offer of “cooperation” from a Russian with links to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. “Is this something we want to move forward with?” he asked.

There is no indication if or how Lewandowski responded to those messages. But in June, when Papadopoulos emailed him again about Russia, Lewandowski referred him to Clovis because he “is running point,” according to court documents.

[Top campaign officials knew of Trump adviser’s outreach to Russia]

“Another high-ranking campaign official”: Campaign chairman Paul Manafort

The court filings indicate that Papadopoulos emailed “another high-ranking campaign official” on May 21, 2016, with the subject line “Request from Russia to meet Mr. Trump.”

The Post has previously identified this official as Paul Manafort, who was indicted Monday on unrelated criminal charges.

Manafort forwarded Papadopoulos’s email to another campaign official, stating: “We need someone to communicate that DT is not doing these trips,” referring to a trip to Russia. “It should be someone low level in the campaign so as not to send any signal.”

Manafort spokesman Jason Maloni in August told The Post that the campaign chairman’s response indicated that “any invitation by Russia, directly or indirectly, would be rejected outright.”

“Another campaign official”: Manafort deputy Rick Gates

The Post has previously identified the official who received the May 21, 2016, email from Manafort as his deputy, Rick Gates. Gates was indicted Monday on unrelated criminal charges.

“Senior Policy Advisor”: Unknown

The court filings indicate that on April 27, 2016, Papadopoulos emailed a “senior policy advisor” and wrote, “Have some interesting messages coming in from Moscow about a trip when the time is right.”

The Post has not identified this official.

“The Professor”: Joseph Mifsud, director of the London Academy of Diplomacy

According to emails previously described to The Post, the London-based professor who was a key contact for Papadopoulos in his Russian outreach is Joseph Mifsud, who formerly served as a government official in Malta.

Mifsud did not respond to a request for comment Monday. In an email to The Post in August, he wrote that he had “absolutely no contact with the Russian government” and said his only ties to Russia were through academic links.

Papadopoulos met Mifsud in March 2016 while traveling in Italy, according to court records. The professor “seemed uninterested” in Papadopoulos until he learned that he was a campaign adviser, according to court filings.

Five days after Trump named Papadopoulos as one of his advisers during a meeting at The Post, Papadopoulos and Mifsud met in London. The professor brought with him a Russian woman who was introduced as a relative of President Vladi­mir Putin who had connections to senior Russian government officials.

The following month, Mifsud told Papadopoulos that he had just returned from Moscow, where he had learned from high-level Russian government officials that Russia had “dirt” on Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, including “thousands of emails.”

“The Female Russian National”: Unknown

Court documents show that Papadopoulos corresponded with a “female Russian national” whom he initially believed was Putin’s niece.

At one point, she wrote to him, “The Russian Federation would love to welcome [Trump] once his candidature would be officially announced.”

The Post has not identified the woman.

“A Russian National Connected to the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs”: Ivan Timofeev

In April 2016, Mifsud introduced Papadopoulos over email to a man in Moscow who told Papadopoulos that he had connections to the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, court records show.

Emails previously described to The Post indicate that the man is Ivan Timofeev, a program director at a Russian government-funded think tank called the Russian International Affairs Council.

Papadopoulos communicated via Skype and email with Timofeev to discuss establishing ties between Russian officials and the Trump campaign.

On Monday, Timofeev declined to comment, referring a reporter to a statement the Russian International Affairs Council posted in August in response to a Post story. The statement said that Papadapoulos had contacted the council and “put forth the idea of a possible visit to Russia by Mr. Trump or his team members.”

“Given the RIAC’s established practice of hosting public meetings with prominent politicians and public figures from the U.S. and other countries, the U.S. initiative was a matter of routine for the Council,” the statement said, pointing out that among the council’s guest speakers was former U.S. ambassador Michael McFaul.

Timofeev told The Post in August that the idea of a meeting with Trump officials was dropped after he received no official request from the Trump campaign for a meeting.

David Filipov in Moscow, Karla Adam in London, and Tom Hamburger and Robert Costa in Washington contributed to this report.

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BUSHNELL TOWNSHIP, Mich. — Michigan State Police say a collision between a buggy and a pickup truck has killed three children and critically injured six other people.

WOOD-TV reports that State Police say the pickup truck crashed into the rear of the buggy about 8:30 a.m. Sunday in Bushnell Township, just southeast of the village of Sheridan in central Michigan.

State Police say the buggy was carrying nine people. Children ages 7, 9 and 12 died in the crash.

The six other people who were riding in the buggy were taken to a hospital in critical condition. Troopers say their injuries are life-threatening.

The driver of the pickup was not injured, and troopers say he was cooperative following the crash.

The crash is under investigation.

No one has been charged in Sergeant Melgar’s death, which a military medical examiner ruled to be “a homicide by asphyxiation,” or strangulation, said three military officials briefed on the autopsy results. The two Navy SEALs, who have not been identified, were flown out of Mali shortly after the episode and were placed on administrative leave.

The biggest unanswered question is why Sergeant Melgar was killed. “N.C.I.S. does not discuss the details of ongoing investigations,” Ed Buice, the agency’s spokesman, said in an email, confirming that his service had taken over the case on Sept. 25.

Neither the Army nor the military’s Africa Command issued a statement about Sergeant Melgar’s death, not even after investigators changed their description of the two SEALs from “witnesses” to “persons of interest,” meaning the authorities were trying to determine what the commandos knew about the death and if they were involved.

The uncertainty has left soldiers in the tight-knit Green Beret community to speculate wildly about any number of possible motives, from whether it was a personal dispute among housemates gone horribly wrong to whether Sergeant Melgar had stumbled upon some illicit activity the SEALs were involved in, and they silenced him, according to interviews with troops and their families. Other officials briefed on the inquiry said they had heard no suggestion that the Navy commandos had been doing anything illegal.

When contacted separately by telephone on Saturday, Sergeant Melgar’s widow, Michelle, and his brother, Shawn, declined to comment.

Lawmakers have criticized top officers and Pentagon officials for offering a shifting timeline of the events in the Niger attack, and for failing to respond with timely, accurate information about the American military’s role on the continent at a time when President Trump has loosened restrictions on the armed forces to intensify attacks against the Islamic State and Al Qaeda around the world.

Sergeant Melgar, a graduate of Texas Tech University who joined the Army in 2012, was assigned to the 3rd Special Forces Group, based at Fort Bragg, N.C., the same unit whose soldiers were attacked by a much larger and heavily armed group of Islamic State fighters near the border between Niger and Mali on Oct. 4.

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According to military officials, Sergeant Melgar was part of a small team in Bamako assigned to help provide intelligence about Islamic militancies in Mali to the United States ambassador there, Paul A. Folmsbee, to protect American personnel against attacks. The sergeant also helped assess which Malian Army troops might be trained and equipped to build a counterterrorism force.

Sergeant Melgar, a native of Lubbock, Tex., was about four months into what military officials said was a six-month tour in Mali, and was living with three other American Special Operations troops in a house provided by the American Embassy.

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Two of those housemates were members of the Navy’s SEAL Team 6, which has over the past decade carried out kill-or-capture missions in Libya, Yemen, Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia, as well as the one that killed bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in 2011.

According to two senior American military officials, the two SEAL commandos were in Mali at the request of Mr. Folmsbee in a previously undisclosed and highly unusual clandestine mission to support French and Malian counterterrorism forces battling Al Qaeda’s branch in North and West Africa, known as Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, as well as smaller cells aligned with Al Qaeda or the Islamic State. The Americans helped provide intelligence for missions, and had participated in at least two such operations in Mali this year before Sergeant Melgar’s death.

Much is unknown about what happened around 5 a.m. on June 4 in the team house. The initial reports to Sergeant Melgar’s superiors in Germany said he had been injured while wrestling or grappling with the two Navy commandos, according to three officials who have been briefed on the investigation.

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According to one version of events, one of the SEALs put Sergeant Melgar in a chokehold. When the sergeant passed out, the commandos frantically tried to revive him. Failing that, they rushed him to an emergency clinic, where he was pronounced dead.

Spokesmen for the Africa Command, the Special Operations Command, the Defense Department and the Army and Navy investigative services declined to comment, citing the continuing investigation, or did not respond to emails and phone calls on Sunday.

A spokesman for the State Department’s Africa Bureau and Mr. Folmsbee, Nicholas A. Sadoski, directed all questions to the Pentagon. Mr. Sadoski declined to answer questions about what kind of oversight the ambassador exercised over the American military personnel in Mali, how frequently was he briefed on Special Operations missions there and when he learned about Sergeant Melgar’s death.

Why American Special Operations forces are in Mali at all is a story in a nutshell of the American military’s successes and failures in Africa.

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Mali had been one of West Africa’s most stable nations before 2012, and was held up by the Pentagon as a model partner in combating Islamic militants. But when secular Tuareg separatists began an uprising, as they had done in the past, insurgents linked to Al Qaeda took advantage of the deteriorating security situation.

When the militants surged across Mali’s northern desert in 2012, American-trained commanders of the country’s elite army units defected at a critical time, taking troops, trucks, weapons and their newfound skills to the enemy. A confidential internal review completed by the Africa Command after the debacle concluded that there were critical gaps in the American training for Malian troops and senior officers.

With Mali’s army in collapse, the rebels were pushed out by French and Chadian troops early in 2013, and the United Nations established a peacekeeping mission. But the chaos continues today. Various armed insurgents regularly attack Malian forces and the United Nations peacekeepers. To date, 149 peacekeepers have been killed in Mali, making it one of the most dangerous peacekeeping missions in the world.

And terrorists continue to mount deadly attacks, including an assault in June on a resort outside Bamako that killed at least five people.

For the 3rd Special Forces Group, the past year has served as a reminder that Africa remains a dangerous assignment. In addition to Sergeant Melgar and the four soldiers killed in Niger, one soldier committed suicide in Kenya last October and another died in a vehicle accident while on patrol in Niger in February.

Those who knew Sergeant Melgar described him as a soldier’s soldier — he deployed to Afghanistan twice on training missions between July 2014 and February 2016, according to his Army service record — and a devoted father of two sons, 13 and 15, who texted and talked via Skype multiple times a day with his wife while serving overseas.

More than four months later, his death still has many at Fort Bragg and in Lubbock reeling. An online community bulletin board in Lubbock stated: “A Melgar family representative shared that ‘Staff Sgt. Melgar did what most only dream of and excelled at every turn! His life was epic! He is missed dearly every single day.’”

Sergeant Melgar was also honored at the high school he attended in Wolfforth, Tex., Frenship High, during the homecoming football game on Oct. 6.

A final tribute awaits Sergeant Melgar: He is scheduled to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery on Nov. 20.

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Tensions between Republicans and Democrats over the investigation of Russian involvement in the 2016 presidential election intensified Sunday, with President Trump demanding to know why his campaign is under federal scrutiny while his former opponent Hillary Clinton is not.

The president’s latest outburst over the inquiry led by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III surfaced on Twitter as his administration braced for the possibility that the first batch of charges in the case could be publicly announced as soon as Monday. CNN reported that a federal grand jury had approved an indictment, although details of the possible charges and the name of a defendant remained unclear.

Trump issued four tweets over 24 minutes, attacking the Mueller probe as unfair and citing various Clinton controversies that he said warranted investigation.

“Instead they look at phony Trump/Russia, ‘collusion,’ which doesn’t exist,” the president said. “The Dems are using this terrible (and bad for our country) Witch Hunt for evil politics, but the R’s are now fighting back like never before. There is so much GUILT by Democrats/Clinton, and now the facts are pouring out. DO SOMETHING!”

Later in the morning, Trump added: “All of this ‘Russia’ talk right when the Republicans are making their big push for historic Tax Cuts Reform. Is this coincidental? NOT!”

On Sunday talk shows, Republicans rallied around Trump and questioned how CNN could have received information about secret grand jury proceedings.

“There are very, very strict laws on grand jury secrecy, so depending on who leaked this to CNN, that’s a criminal violation, potentially,” New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R), a longtime friend of Trump’s, said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday. “For us to have confidence in this process, we’ve got to make sure that the grand jury process remains confidential, remains secret, so that the special counsel can work effectively to be able to get to the bottom of all that he’s looking into.”

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) cast doubt on the objectivity of Mueller’s team, noting that the prosecutor’s staff includes “a lot of individuals, attorneys who played in politics, who’ve given money on the Democratic side.” Of the eight attorneys on the team who have been publicly identified, four made donations to Democrats, including President Barack Obama and Clinton.

“This president won the election solely on the idea that he connected with the American people. No other influence involved,” McCarthy said on Fox’s “Sunday Morning Futures.” “But the idea of what I’ve watched, of what the Democrats have been doing, it sure raises a lot of questions.”

Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), chairman of the House Oversight Committee, came to Mueller’s defense and said that he doesn’t agree with Republicans who are calling for Mueller to resign or stop his investigation.

“I would encourage my Republican friends — give the guy a chance to do his job,” Gowdy said on Fox News Sunday. “The result will be known by the facts, by what he uncovers. . . . I would say give the guy a chance to do his job.”

Democratic lawmakers mostly stayed out of the Sunday fray after a week in which Clinton’s 2016 campaign came under fresh scrutiny. The campaign funded political opposition research into Trump that helped create a highly publicized “dossier” on the Republican candidate and fueled some allegations now under scrutiny by Mueller.

The 35-page dossier is composed of 17 memos containing raw intelligence, some of it highly salacious and not independently confirmed. It relies on Kremlin-linked sources and alleges that the Russian government had been trying to support Trump’s candidacy while gathering compromising information that could be used as blackmail. The dossier was published in full by BuzzFeed in January.

It’s unclear how much the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee paid for the opposition research by Fusion GPS, a Washington firm that conducts investigations for private clients. The Clinton campaign paid $5.6 million in legal fees to a law firm from June 2015 to December 2016, according to campaign finance records, and the DNC paid the firm $3.6 million in “legal and compliance consulting’’ since November 2015. It’s impossible to tell from the filings how much of that work was for other legal matters and how much of it related to Fusion GPS.

Trump tweeted Sunday morning that the dossier, which he called “Clinton made Fake Dossier,” could have cost as much as $12 million, although he did not explain how he reached that number.

Compiled by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele, the dossier mirrors a separate conclusion reached by U.S. intelligence agencies that the Russian government intervened in the U.S. election in an effort to bolster Trump and harm Clinton, such as through hacking the DNC and distributing materials to WikiLeaks to publish at key moments.

Fusion GPS, which hired Steele to gather information, was first employed to investigate Trump during the Republican primaries by the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative publication that receives financial support from billionaire GOP donor Paul Singer, according to two people familiar with Singer. The Beacon said in a statement that its research ended before Fusion GPS hired Steele and that none of the research that it commissioned is included in the dossier.

In April 2016, an attorney representing Clinton’s presidential campaign and the DNC hired Fusion GPS, which then hired Steele. Brian Fallon, a former spokesman for the Clinton campaign, said he learned about Steele and the dossier after the election. People familiar with the matter told The Washington Post that the Clinton campaign and the DNC did not direct Steele’s activities.

Rep. Adam B. Schiff (Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said Sunday that “a lot” of the information in the dossier has been corroborated.

“I certainly would have liked to know who paid for it earlier, but nonetheless, that’s just one factor to be considered,” Schiff said on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday. “It doesn’t answer the ultimate question, which is: How much of the work is accurate? How much of it is true? And my colleagues don’t seem particularly interested in that question, but that is really the most important question for the American people.”

Schiff said he has not been told anything about any impending indictments in Mueller’s investigation, noting that such notification would not have been appropriate.

Trump also tweeted Sunday about Clinton’s involvement in what he called the “Uranium to Russia deal,” demanding that the matter receive greater scrutiny.

The 2010 deal approved by the Obama administration while Clinton was secretary of state allowed a Russian nuclear energy agency to acquire a controlling stake in a Canadian-based company that had mining licenses for about 20 percent of U.S. uranium extraction capacity. The company cannot export the uranium.

Earlier this month, House and Senate Republican leaders announced they would investigate the uranium deal, and the House Oversight Committee launched a probe into how the FBI investigated Clinton during the campaign. In the latter investigation, Republicans say they want to know why then-FBI Director James B. Comey publicly announced that the bureau was investigating Clinton but waited months before making a similar announcement about its inquiries into the Trump campaign.

Ed O’Keefe and Karoun Demirjian contributed to this report.

And now all this nasty weather has a name.

The National Hurricane Center released its 5 p.m. advisory about 25 minutes early Saturday to call it Tropical Storm Philippe. The depression that has been soaking central and western Cuba and spreading rain and thunderstorms northward across the Florida Keys and South Florida, now has sustained winds of 40 mph.

The storm is moving north at 29 mph and the forecast cone has shifted a bit west, putting South Florida into the cone of concern. On the forecast track, the center of Philippe is predicted to move off of the northern coast of Cuba and into the Florida Straits this evening. The storm will then move across the Florida Keys or the southern tip of the Florida peninsula overnight, and across the northwestern Bahamas Sunday morning, the center said in its advisory.

The tropical storm force winds are on the east end of the storm.

While the system was still a depression Saturday afternoon, it spawned a small, brief tornado that touched down just northeast of the intersection of Bird Road and Southwest 97th Avenue in Miami.

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Tropical Storm watch for parts of coastal South Florida as unnamed storm approaches

The coastal area from Golden Beach at the Miami-Dade/Broward county line all the way down to Craig Key was placed under Tropical Storm Watch as Tropical Depression No. 18 remains on its path to Cuba, South Florida and the Bahamas.

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Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has campaigned for a military buildup against the threat from the North, and Japan sits on a stockpile of nuclear material that could power an arsenal of 6,000 weapons. Last Sunday, he won a commanding majority in parliamentary elections, fueling his hopes of revising the nation’s pacifist Constitution.

This brutal calculus over how to respond to North Korea is taking place in a region where several nations have the material, the technology, the expertise and the money to produce nuclear weapons.

Beyond South Korea and Japan, there is already talk in Australia, Myanmar, Taiwan and Vietnam about whether it makes sense to remain nuclear-free if others arm themselves — heightening fears that North Korea could set off a chain reaction in which one nation after another feels threatened and builds the bomb.

In a recent interview, Henry A. Kissinger, one of the few nuclear strategists from the early days of the Cold War still living, said he had little doubt where things were headed.

“If they continue to have nuclear weapons,” he said of North Korea, “nuclear weapons must spread in the rest of Asia.”

“It cannot be that North Korea is the only Korean country in the world that has nuclear weapons, without the South Koreans trying to match it. Nor can it be that Japan will sit there,” he added. “So therefore we’re talking about nuclear proliferation.”

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Such fears have been raised before, in Asia and elsewhere, without materializing, and the global consensus against the spread of nuclear weapons is arguably stronger than ever.

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But North Korea is testing America’s nuclear umbrella — its commitment to defend its allies with nuclear weapons if necessary — in a way no nation has in decades. Similar fears of abandonment in the face of the Soviet Union’s growing arsenal helped lead Britain and France to go nuclear in the 1950s.

President Trump, who leaves Nov. 3 for a visit to Asia, has intensified these insecurities in the region. During his presidential campaign, he spoke openly of letting Japan and South Korea build nuclear arms even as he argued they should pay more to support the American military bases there.

“There is going to be a point at which we just can’t do this anymore,” he told The New York Times in March 2016. Events, he insisted, were pushing both nations toward their own nuclear arsenals anyway.

Mr. Trump has not raised that possibility in public since taking office. But he has rattled the region by engaging in bellicose rhetoric against North Korea and dismissing talks as a “waste of time.”

In Seoul and Tokyo, many have already concluded that North Korea will keep its nuclear arsenal, because the cost of stopping it will be too great — and they are weighing their options.

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Capability to Build the Bomb

Long before North Korea detonated its first nuclear device, several of its neighbors secretly explored going nuclear themselves.

Japan briefly considered building a “defensive” nuclear arsenal in the 1960s despite its pacifist Constitution. South Korea twice pursued the bomb in the 1970s and 1980s, and twice backed down under American pressure. Even Taiwan ran a covert nuclear program before the United States shut it down.

Today, there is no question that both South Korea and Japan have the material and expertise to build a weapon.

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All that is stopping them is political sentiment and the risk of international sanctions. Both nations signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, but it is unclear how severely other countries would punish two of the world’s largest economies for violating the agreement.

South Korea has 24 nuclear reactors and a huge stockpile of spent fuel from which it can extract plutonium — enough for more than 4,300 bombs, according to a 2015 paper by Charles D. Ferguson, president of the Federation of American Scientists.

Japan once pledged never to stockpile more nuclear fuel than it can burn off. But it has never completed the necessary recycling and has 10 tons of plutonium stored domestically and another 37 tons overseas.

“We keep reminding the Japanese of their pledge,” said Ernest J. Moniz, chief executive of the Nuclear Threat Initiative and an energy secretary in the Obama administration, noting that it would take years if not decades for Japan to consume its fissile material because almost all its nuclear plants have remained offline since the 2011 Fukushima accident.

China, in particular, has objected to Japan’s stockpile, warning that its traditional rival is so advanced technologically that it could use the material to quickly build a large arsenal.

Analysts often describe Japan as a “de facto” nuclear state, capable of building a weapon within a year or two. “Building a physical device is not that difficult anymore,” said Tatsujiro Suzuki, former deputy chairman of the Japan Atomic Energy Commission.

Japan already possesses long-range missile technology, he added, but would need some time to develop more sophisticated communications and control systems.

South Korea may be even further along, with a fleet of advanced missiles that carry conventional warheads. In 2004, the government disclosed that its scientists had dabbled in reprocessing and enriching nuclear material without first informing the International Atomic Energy Agency as required by treaty.

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“If we decide to stand on our own feet and put our resources together, we can build nuclear weapons in six months,” said Suh Kune-yull, a professor of nuclear engineering at Seoul National University. “The question is whether the president has the political will.”

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In Seoul, a Rising Call for Arms

President Moon Jae-in has been firm in his opposition to nuclear weapons. He insists that building them or reintroducing American ones to South Korea would make it even more difficult to persuade North Korea to scrap its own.

Though Mr. Moon has received high approval ratings since his election in May, his view is increasingly a minority one.

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Calls for nuclear armament used to be dismissed as chatter from South Korea’s nationalist fringe. Not anymore. Now people often complain that South Korea cannot depend on the United States, its protector of seven decades.

The opposition Liberty Korea party called on the United States to reintroduce tactical nuclear weapons to South Korea in August after the North tested an intercontinental ballistic missile that appeared capable of reaching the mainland United States.

“If the U.N. Security Council can’t rein in North Korea with its sanctions, we will have no option but to withdraw from the Nonproliferation Treaty,” Won Yoo-chul, a party leader, said in September.

Given the failure of sanctions, threats and negotiations to stop North Korea, South Koreans are increasingly convinced the North will never give up its nuclear weapons. But they also oppose risking a war with a military solution.

Most believe the Trump administration, despite its tough talk, will ultimately acquiesce, perhaps settling for a freeze that allows the North to keep a small arsenal. And many fear that would mean giving the North the ultimate blackmail tool — and a way to keep the United States at bay.

“The reason North Korea is developing a hydrogen bomb and intercontinental ballistic missiles is not to go to war with the United States,” said Cheong Seong-chang, an analyst at the Sejong Institute near Seoul. “It’s to stop the Americans from intervening in armed skirmishes or full-scale war on the Korean Peninsula.”

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The closer the North gets to showing it can strike the United States, the more nervous South Koreans become about being abandoned. Some have asked whether Washington will risk the destruction of an American city by intervening, for example, if the North attempts to occupy a border island, as its soldiers have practiced.

For many in South Korea, the solution is a homegrown nuclear deterrent.

“If we don’t respond with our own nuclear deterrence of some kind, our people will live like nuclear hostages of North Korea,” said Cheon Seong-whun, a former presidential secretary for security strategy.

With nuclear weapons of its own, the South would gain leverage and could force North Korea back to the bargaining table, where the two sides could whittle down their arsenals through negotiations, some hawks argue.

But given the risks of going nuclear, others say Seoul should focus on persuading Washington to redeploy tactical nuclear weapons.

“The redeployment of American tactical nuclear weapons would be the surest way” to deter North Korea, Defense Minister Song Young-moo said last month, but he added that it would be difficult to get Washington to agree to that.

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In Tokyo, Cautious Debate

The discussion in Japan has been more subdued than in South Korea, no surprise after 70 years of public education about the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

But Japan has periodically considered developing nuclear weapons every decade since the 1960s.

In 2002, a top aide to Junichiro Koizumi, the prime minister then, caused a furor by suggesting Japan might one day break with its policy of never building, possessing or allowing nuclear arms on its territory.

North Korea has reopened that question.

Shigeru Ishiba, a former defense minister seen as a potential challenger to Prime Minister Abe, has argued that Japan needs to debate its nuclear policy given the threat from North Korea.

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Mr. Abe has stopped short of calling for a re-evaluation of the country’s position on nuclear weapons. But he has increased military spending and echoed Mr. Trump’s hawkish position against the North.

Mr. Abe’s administration has already determined that nuclear weapons would not be prohibited under the Constitution if maintained only for self-defense.

The Japanese public is largely opposed to nuclear weapons with polls indicating fewer than one in 10 support nuclear armament.

But Japan’s relations with South Korea have long been strained, and if Seoul armed itself, those numbers could shift.

Some analysts say the discussion is aimed at getting additional reassurance from Washington. “We always do that when we become a little upset about the credibility of the extended U.S. deterrence,” said Narushige Michishita, a professor at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies in Tokyo.

Tobias Harris, a Japan analyst at Teneo Intelligence, a political risk consultancy, said Japan would rethink its position on nuclear weapons if it suspects the United States would let it down.

“We’re kind of in uncharted waters as far as this goes,” he said. “It’s hard to know exactly what the threshold is that will lead the Japanese public’s switch to flip.”

Correction: October 28, 2017

An earlier version of this article misstated the amount of plutonium Japan stores overseas. It is 37 tons, not 37 million tons.

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