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“So somebody ought to look into that and you wouldn’t because he’s a Democrat,” Mr. Trump said.

He also defended his conduct in the conversation with Mr. Zelensky, saying it was “totally appropriate.”

“For me, it’s crystal clear” that the Trump administration was seeking to trade military aid for Ukraine’s war against Russian-backed separatists for political favors, Daria M. Kaleniuk, the executive director of the Anti-Corruption Action Center in Kiev, said in an interview.

The hold on the aid was lifted on Sept. 12, after three congressional committees opened investigations into whether the Trump administration had misappropriated foreign policy tools to try to help the president politically. Those investigations were started in response to reporting on Mr. Giuliani’s activities in Ukraine.

Much was at stake in the delayed military assistance. More than 13,000 people, most of them civilians, have been killed in Ukraine’s five-year war with Russian-backed separatists, Europe’s only active military conflict.

Mr. Trump has suggested he would like Attorney General William P. Barr to look into material gathered by the Ukrainian prosecutors. But under a bilateral legal assistance agreement, American law enforcement can only ask for evidence if a criminal investigation is underway in the United States, which is not the case.

“It is a very unfortunate situation for Zelensky,” Svitlana Zalishchuk, a former member of the foreign affairs committee in Ukraine’s Parliament, said in a telephone interview. “Obviously, he wants to build good relations with the American administration. At the same time, he doesn’t want to play American politics.”