Washington • Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, said Thursday that the Trump administration withheld nearly $400 million in military aid to pressure Ukraine to investigate what the president has long insisted was Kyiv’s assistance to Democrats during the 2016 election.
The declaration by Mulvaney undercut President Donald Trump’s repeated denials of a quid pro quo that linked security aid for Ukraine’s battle against Russian-backed separatists to Trump’s unsubstantiated theory that a server with missing Democratic emails was being held by a company based in Ukraine.
His homeland security adviser at the time told Trump repeatedly that the theory had been “completely debunked.