House investigators are questioning a former White House Russia aide as the impeachment inquiry gains speed.
Fiona Hill, President Trump’s former top Russia and Europe adviser, is on Capitol Hill today to testify that she and other officials objected strenuously to the removal of the ambassador to Ukraine, only to be disregarded.
Ms. Hill, who stepped down from the White House’s National Security Council staff over the summer, viewed the recall of Ambassador Marie L. Yovanovitch from Kiev as an egregious abuse of the system by allies of Mr. Trump who were seeking to remove a perceived obstacle, according to a person familiar with Ms. Hill’s account.
The removal of Ms. Yovanovitch has emerged as a key episode in the narrative under examination by the House as part of its impeachment inquiry against Mr. Trump. A career diplomat, Ms. Yovanovitch was targeted by Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, and other allies who were seeking to press Ukraine to investigate Mr. Trump’s Democratic rivals.
The White House condemned a violent video as the president pressed his attack on one of its subject.
The White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham said on Monday that Mr. Trump “strongly condemns” a violent video shown at a pro-Trump event at his Miami golf resort, even as the president continued to attack one of the video’s subjects.
In the video, the president’s face is superimposed on a character in the movie “Kingsman: The Secret Service” as he rampages through a church killing all the parishioners, who sport the logos of media companies or the Photoshopped faces of political opponents. One of those opponents is Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.
Mr. Trump continued to press his attack on Mr. Schiff for paraphrasing the reconstructed transcript of the July conversation between Mr. Trump and the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky. That reconstructed transcript, released by the White House, appears to show Mr. Trump demanding his Ukrainian counterpart investigate a domestic political rival, Joseph R. Biden Jr., but Mr. Trump has tried to use Mr. Schiff’s paraphrase to say that the demand that fueled an impeachment inquiry was fabricated by the California Democrat. (It wasn’t.)