WASHINGTON • A top White House official for the first time linked President Donald Trump’s decision to hold up aid to Ukraine to his desire for Kyiv to probe a Democratic National Committee server related to the 2016 election, then hours later issued a statement contradicting his remarks.

The initial comments at a White House briefing by acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney caused alarm among White House aides and the president’s legal team. Trump has repeatedly denied there was quid pro quo related to the aid. Late Thursday afternoon, Mulvaney issued a statement, reviewed by Trump, reversing his remarks and saying there was no connection.

In a briefing Thursday afternoon, Mulvaney said the president’s concerns about corruption in Ukraine — including an unfounded suspicion the president has expressed that the hacked DNC server from the 2016 U.S. election has since been hidden in Ukraine — were partly responsible for Trump’s order to withhold nearly $400 million in aid to Ukraine in July.

Trump has repeatedly said that the driving forces behind his decision to hold up the aid were concerns about corruption and his feeling that European nations weren’t doing enough to help Ukraine, issues that Mulvaney repeated on Thursday. In addition to those concerns, he said, “Did (the president) also mention to me in passing the corruption related to the DNC server? Absolutely. No question about that. That’s it, and that’s why we held up the money.”

He also tied the hold in aid to Ukraine’s cooperation in a Justice Department review of the origins of the investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election, a probe that was later taken over by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. “The look back to what happened in 2016 certainly was part of the thing that he was worried about in corruption with that nation,” Mulvaney said. “And that is absolutely appropriate.”

A Justice Department official said the department wasn’t aware of any effort to hold up aid in return for better cooperation by Kyiv in its review. If the White House was withholding aid for that reason, “that is news to us,” the official said. The official declined to say whether the DNC’s computer server is a focus of the review.

Mulvaney’s comments at the briefing surprised some aides in the White House, where officials said they had never heard Mulvaney describe Trump’s decision to suspend military aid as conditioned on new investigations by Kviv. Mulvaney had been tasked by Trump with halting that aid.

The president’s personal legal team also distanced itself from Mulvaney’s remarks on Thursday. Jay Sekulow, a lawyer for Trump, said: “The president’s legal counsel was not involved in acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney’s press briefing.”

Just hours after the briefing, Mulvaney changed course, issuing a statement declaring there was “absolutely no quid pro quo” between aid and any investigations — a position at odds with what he told reporters earlier. “There was never any condition on the flow of aid related to the matter of the DNC server,” he said.

Trump agreed on the need for Mulvaney to walk back his comments and approved his chief’s statement, a White House official said. But Trump blamed the media’s handling of the press briefing, not Mulvaney, the official said. The president called his chief a “good man” later Thursday.

Mulvaney was pressed on the matter multiple times during his press briefing, and declined at the time to clarify his comments. When a reporter said that what Mulvaney had described sounded like a quid pro quo between halting aid and probing the DNC server, Mulvaney responded: “We do that all the time with foreign policy.”

Mulvaney’s initial assertion that the held aid was explicitly linked to investigations came in stark contrast to Trump’s repeated denial of any quid pro quo — a central focus of House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry. In recent days, several U.S. diplomats have testified to House committees that they believed it was necessary for Ukraine to commit to certain investigations before Trump would agree to meet with Ukraine’s president.

Mulvaney’s news conference, which came at Trump’s direction, was designed to announce the decision to hold next year’s Group of Seven summit at the Trump property in Doral, Fla., and answer a few questions about the administration’s dealings with Ukraine. On that issue, some White House officials said they had expected Mulvaney to repeat the administration’s message that the House inquiry has been unfair to Trump, and that there was no quid pro quo in his conversation with the Ukrainian president.

Mulvaney said that Trump’s desire for Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden — which the president brought up in a July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky — wasn’t related to the hold on aid. That call prompted House Democrats to begin an impeachment inquiry last month.

Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and one of the leaders of the impeachment inquiry, said Mulvaney’s comments at the briefing Thursday indicated that “things have gone from very, very bad to much, much worse.”

In addition to denying the existence of a quid pro quo publicly, Trump also did so in at least two private conversations. He told Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., in August that there was no link between the hold on aid and new probes by Kyiv regarding U.S. elections, Johnson told The Wall Street Journal. Johnson said Trump told him: “No way. I would never do that. Who told you that?”

Mulvaney said at the briefing that quid pro quos and political considerations are a standard practice in foreign policy. “I have news for everybody: Get over it,” he said. “There is going to be political influence in foreign policy.”

Mulvaney’s claim about the DNC server — which Trump asked Zelensky to investigate in their July call — relates to an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory that proposes it was Ukraine, not Russia, that hacked Democratic networks during the 2016 election. There is no evidence to support the claim that any Democratic server wound up in Ukraine.

The U.S.-based cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike concluded the hack was carried out by Russian intelligence officers, a finding corroborated by U.S. intelligence agencies and Mueller. But Trump has repeatedly cast doubt on the conclusion of Russian involvement in the Democratic hacks, and said in an April 2017 interview that CrowdStrike’s findings may not be credible because the company is “Ukrainian-based,” which is false.

The efforts by Trump and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani to push Ukraine to investigate matters related to the 2016 election and the Bidens has been the subject of almost daily testimony in front of House lawmakers by present and former Trump administration officials.

House Democrats charge that Trump’s request for Ukraine to investigate the Bidens was an attempt to use the power of the White House to undercut a political rival. Trump has called the probe a witch hunt and denied wrongdoing.

Mulvaney defended the administration’s right to discuss the president’s political opponents with foreign leaders, and said that the White House in no way tried to cover up Trump’s July call with Ukraine’s president.

The call had been stored on a top secret server, in a break with standard protocol for calls that don’t pertain to military operations or other highly sensitive matters. A rough transcript of the call was released by the White House the day after the House announced its impeachment inquiry, which was set off by a whistleblower complaint that mentioned the call with Ukraine.

Mulvaney pushed back on suggestions that keeping the call transcript on the top secret server implied a “cover-up.” He asked, “If we wanted to cover this up, would we have released it to the public?”

White House acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney

the associated press