President Trump did not use aid as leverage to push Ukrainian officials to launch a politically explosive investigation, a top adviser said just hours after telling reporters the opposite.

“Let me be clear, there was absolutely no quid pro quo between Ukrainian military aid and any investigation into the 2016 election,” acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney said Thursday. “There was never any connection between the funds and the Ukrainians doing anything with the server - this was made explicitly obvious by the fact that the aid money was delivered without any action on the part of the Ukrainians regarding the server.”

Mulvaney maintained that his comments earlier Thursday afternoon were “misconstrued,” hours after Justice Department officials distanced Attorney General William Barr from his remarks. Mulvaney had cited suspicions that Ukrainian officials had worked against him during the 2016 election as an example of the corruption reforms that Trump sought.

“The look back to what happened in 2016 certainly was part of the things that he was worried about in corruption with that nation, and that is absolutely appropriate,” Mulvaney, a former South Carolina Republican lawmaker, told reporters in the White House briefing room.

When a reporter observed that “what you just described is a quid pro quo, it is, ‘funding will not flow, unless the investigation into the Democratic server happens as well,'" Mulvaney was unworried.

“We do that all the time with foreign policy,” Mulvaney replied during the briefing. “We were holding up money at the same time for . . . the Northern Triangle countries, so that they would change their policies on immigration.”

Those comments drew criticism from Trump’s allies and surprised Justice Department officials. “If the White House was withholding aid in regards to the cooperation of any investigation at the Department of Justice, that is news to us,” a DOJ official told the Washington Examiner.

Mulvaney maintained that he was a victim of unfair reporting. “Once again, the media has decided to misconstrue my comments to advance a biased and political witch hunt against President Trump,” he said. “The president never told me to withhold any money until the Ukrainians did anything related to the server. The only reasons we were holding the money was because of concern about lack of support from other nations and concerns over corruption.”

The overlap between traditional U.S. concerns about corruption in Ukraine and Trump’s apparent belief that this corruption involved his political rivals is central to the impeachment inquiry that threatens the administration. Trump urged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate whether Ukrainian officials worked with Hillary Clinton’s campaign during the 2016 election and to help former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani in his effort to implicate former Vice President Joe Biden in a scandal involving Burisma, a Ukrainian company that had hired his son.

“I understood that Burisma was one of many examples of Ukrainian companies run by oligarchs and lacking the type of corporate governance structures found in Western companies,” Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, told lawmakers earlier Thursday. “I did not know until more recent press reports that Hunter Biden was on the board of Burisma.”

Most of Mulvaney’s comments focused on corruption inquiries unrelated to Trump’s political interests. “President Trump is not a big fan of foreign aid -- never has been, still isn’t,” Mulvaney told reporters. “[He] doesn’t like spending money overseas, especially when it’s poorly spent, and that is exactly what drove this decision.”