Yet for all of her scholarly work, it was an appearance on television that landed Dr. Hill her White House job. After Mr. Trump was elected, K.T. McFarland, a Fox News commentator, recommended her to Gen. Michael T. Flynn, Mr. Trump’s first national security adviser.
General Flynn, whose tenure ended in scandal after 24 days, offered her the job as the National Security Council’s senior director for Europe and Russia, though she came on after he left. Some friends warned her against it. Among them was Marvin Kalb, a senior fellow at Brookings, who thought Dr. Hill might have trouble in part because she was an immigrant.
“I was concerned that she might run into problems that others might not run into, and I thought that her judgment of Putin might not sit well with the president,” he said, adding: “My recommendation to her was to stay away. But she believed very strongly in the opportunity to serve.”
She got off to an uncertain start; Mr. Trump once mistook her for a low-level member of support staff. And if there was any doubt that the president had little interest in national security protocol and would rely on no one but himself, it was erased when he took notes away from his interpreter during a private meeting with Mr. Putin in Hamburg, Germany, in 2017.
Then came the disastrous Helsinki, Finland, summit in 2018, where Mr. Trump accepted the Russian president’s denial that his country had interfered in the 2016 race. In a stunning break with protocol, he also told Mr. Putin that he might let Russia interrogate a former American ambassador, Michael A. McFaul, a staunch critic of Russia’s record on human rights.
Mr. McFaul visited her at the White House to complain.
“I thought they were going to clean it up when they got back to Washington, and they didn’t,” Mr. McFaul said. “They just doubled down.”
Some colleagues of Dr. Hill’s wondered why she did not quit then. Others, like Angela Stent, a Russia expert at Georgetown University and mentor to Dr. Hill, said she contemplated leaving at times, but stayed because she wanted “to minimize the damage of some things that were happening with Russia.”