WASHINGTON (AP) — The Pentagon’s top leaders are going before Congress for the first time in months to face a long list of controversies, including their differences with President Donald Trump over the handling of protests near the White House last month during unrest triggered by the killing of George Floyd in police hands.

The House hearing Thursday will provide the first congressional testimony by Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, since March 4, when they appeared to discuss the administration’s defense policy proposal. That was before the full impact of the coronavirus pandemic became apparent and before nationwide civil unrest threw the Pentagon’s relations with Trump into crisis.

Trump’s push for an aggressive response to the civil unrest led to an extraordinary clash with Esper and Milley, who on June 1 accompanied the president when he walked from the White House to St. John’s Church on Lafayette Square, where he held up a Bible for photographers. That day, a National Guard helicopter was flown at extremely low altitude to help disperse protesters from the capital’s streets, prompting a Pentagon investigation into whether that was a proper use of military resources.

Esper drew Trump’s ire for telling a Pentagon news conference that he opposed invoking the Insurrection Act to permit the president to use the armed forces to put down domestic civil unrest. Esper said he saw no need for such an extreme measure, a clear counterpoint to Trump’s threat to use force.

Esper also made known his regret at having accompanied Trump to the presidential photo opportunity in front of St. John’s on the day of the Lafayette Square confrontations.

Milley later expressed public regret that he also had been part of the scene with Trump. He said he had been wrong to stride in uniform with Trump after protesters had been cleared from Lafayette Square. Milley said his presence “created a perception of the military involved in domestic politics.”

“I should not have been there,” he told a National Defense University commencement ceremony.

Esper and Milley also are likely to be grilled by members of the House Armed Services Committee on a simmering debate over removing the names of Confederate Army officers from U.S. Army bases and banning other Confederate symbols. That also puts them potentially at odds with Trump, who has said he opposes removing the Confederate names from bases like Fort Bragg in North Carolina.

The House and Senate versions of the 2021 defense policy bill require name changes at those 10 Army bases. Trump has said he will veto the bill if it reaches his desk with that provision intact.

Neither Esper nor Milley has spoken publicly about two other controversies likely to be raised at the House hearing — intelligence reports that Russia may have offered bounty money to the Taliban in exchange for killing American and coalition troops in Afghanistan, and reported White House resistance to permitting the Army to promote Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman to the rank of colonel.

Vindman, who played a central role in the impeachment case against Trump, announced Wednesday that he will retire. A statement by his lawyer accused Trump of engaging in a “campaign of bullying, intimidation, and retaliation” that meant Vindman’s future in the Army would “forever be limited.”

Vindman’s name was on a promotion list sent to Esper earlier this year, according to two U.S. officials familiar with the matter. But that list was delayed for weeks because the White House asked for an investigation of Vindman, one of the officials said. The Pentagon did a review and found that any suggestion of misconduct was unfounded. One official said the list was resent to Esper about a month ago, but again was delayed.

A senior defense official said the list was held up by a routine personnel review not related to Vindman. Esper received the final promotion list on Monday and approved it, with Vindman’s name included, and it was expected to be sent to the White House in the next day or two, the defense official said.

The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an internal personnel matter.

RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — After months of touting an unproven anti-malaria drug as a treatment for the new coronavirus, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro is turning himself into a test case live before millions of people as he swallows hydroxychloroquine pills on social media and encourages others to do the same.

Bolsonaro said this week that he tested positive for the virus but already felt better thanks to hydroxychloroquine. Hours later he shared a video of himself gulping down what he said was his third dose.

“I trust hydroxychloroquine,” he said, smiling. “And you?”

On Wednesday, he was again extolling the drug’s benefits on Facebook, and claimed that his political opponents were rooting against it.

A string of studies in Britain and the United States, as well as by the World Health Organization, have found chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine ineffective against COVID-19 and sometimes deadly because of their adverse side effects on the heart. Several studies were canceled early because of adverse effects.

U.S. President Donald Trump has promoted hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID-19 but chloroquine — a more toxic version of the drug, produced in Brazil — has been even more enthusiastically promoted by Bolsonaro, who contends the virus is largely unavoidable and, what is more, not a serious medical problem.

“He has become the poster boy for curing COVID with hydroxychloroquine,” said Paulo Calmon, a political science professor at the University of Brasilia. “Chloroquine composes part of the denialist’s political strategy, with the objective of convincing voters that the pandemic’s effects can be easily controlled.”

Bolsonaro publica vídeo tomando hidroxicloroquina e se diz melhor da Covid-19. Saiba mais: https://t.co/FKsb7TLtqa pic.twitter.com/exUp5J0vyI

— CNN Brasil (@CNNBrasil) July 7, 2020

Trump first mentioned hydroxychloroquine on March 19 during a pandemic briefing. Two days later, and a month after Brazil’s first confirmed case, Bolsonaro took one of his only big actions to fight the coronavirus. He announced he was directing the Brazilian army to ramp up output of chloroquine.

The army churned out more than 2 million pills — 18 times the country’s normal annual production — even as Brazil’s intensive care medicine association recommended it not be prescribed and doctors mostly complied.

The White House on May 31 said it had donated 2 million hydroxychloroquine pills to Brazil. Two weeks later the U.S. Food & Drug Administration revoked authorization for its emergency use, citing adverse side effects and saying it is unlikely to be effective.

Brazil’s audit court on June 18 requested an investigation into alleged overbilling from local production of chloroquine, which it called unreasonable given the drug’s ineffectiveness and cited the FDA decision. Meantime, stocks of sedatives and other medications used in intensive care ran out in three states, according to a late-June report from Brazil’s council of state health secretariats.

A former defense minister, Aldo Rebelo, told The Associated Press that he is concerned the army will be wrongly blamed for its involvement in production of a drug that most experts call ineffective against the coronavirus.

“All they did was to follow a legal order and produce the pills,” said Rebelo. “The problem is the health ministry and the decision that the president made.”

Brazil’s interim health minister, an army general with no health experience before April, endorsed chloroquine as a COVID-19 treatment days after assuming the post in May. His predecessor, a doctor and health consultant, quit rather than do so.

As Brazil’s death toll continued to climb — nearing 68,000 on Wednesday, the second-most in the world — the health ministry distributed millions of chloroquine pills across Brazil’s vast territory. They have reached small cities with little or no health infrastructure to handle the pandemic and even a far-flung Indigenous territory.

“They’re trying to use the Indigenous people as guinea pigs to test chloroquine, use the Indigenous to advertise for chloroquine like Bolsonaro has done on his live broadcasts, like a poster boy for chloroquine,” Kretã Kaingang, an executive coordinator of the Indigenous organization APIB, said by phone from Brazil’s capital, Brasilia.

In Brazil’s largest city, Sao Paulo, three doctors treating COVID-19 in different hospitals told AP that patients routinely requested chloroquine as the pandemic spread, often citing Bolsonaro. In recent weeks, inquiries about the drug were less frequent after scientific doubts arose about its effectiveness, two physicians said.

All say they worry Bolsonaro’s cheerleading will spur a new wave of desperate patients and relatives clamoring for chloroquine.

“I tell them that I don’t prescribe it because there’s no study proving it improves patients, that there are important risks with the indiscriminate use of this drug,” said Dr. Natalia Magacho, an attending physician at the Hospital das Clinicas. “Some even get angry at first. But all prescriptions are the doctor’s responsibility and, as the risk outweighs the benefit, I don’t prescribe it.”

Most doctors oppose any protocols for the use of chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine, but some physicians continue to believe and have pressured local authorities to permit its use, said João Gabbardo, the former No. 2 official at Brazil’s health ministry.

“This issue has been framed in a very polarizing, politicized manner,” said Gabbardo, who is now executive coordinator of Sao Paulo’s COVID-19 contingency center. “We are moving away from the discussion of science, of scientific evidence, toward a discussion of political positions.”

Bolsonaro’s supporters and aides have amplified his message. Eduardo Bolsonaro, the president’s son and a federal lawmaker, said his father will beat the disease because he is taking the anti-malarial drug.

“Treatment with chloroquine is rather effective at the start of the illness (and should be available for any Brazilian who needs it),” the younger Bolsonaro wrote on Twitter, without distinguishing between the two types of the drug.

Margareth Dalcolmo, a clinical researcher and prominent respiratory medicine professor at the state-funded Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, said she has no objection to Bolsonaro and his doctor agreeing on hydroxychloroquine treatment. The problem, she said, is broadcasting that information to an impressionable public that, if he recovers, will believe a potentially dangerous drug was responsible.

Dalcolmo treats patients and contracted COVID-19 herself. Before she bounced back, some friends asked if she would authorize administration of either chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine were she unable to grant consent.

“Over my dead body, dear,” she said. “I said if I’m in a coma, intubated, none of you are authorized to put me on chloroquine. I would never authorize its use on me. And I haven’t used it on my dozens of patients.”

This story first appeared at ProPublica. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.