“My party is very interested in deficits when there is a Democrat in the White House. The worst thing in the whole world is deficits when Barack Obama was the president. Then Donald Trump became president, and we’re a lot less interested as a party,” Mulvaney said at the Oxford Union to a group of several hundred people…

The acting chief of staff said, without offering specificity, that he’d had other conversations with the president about Ukraine — but those were the two reasons the president withheld the aid. He joked about his news conference last year in which he conceded, from the White House podium, that there was a “quid pro quo” and that it was normal in foreign policy and that people should “get over it.”

Mulvaney said he realized he’d made a mistake when he walked away from the podium. Another White House official, he said, “came up to me and said, ‘Do you know you just said X?’ I said, ‘No I didn’t say that.’ ”

Soon, he realized, “S–t, I said X.” Mulvaney issued a statement later that day attacking the media for mischaracterizing his comments.