The actions of your employees should be held against you. But you can't treat that as evidence of a plot ordered from the top.This paragraph is of course laden with qualifications and clarifications about Trump's level of involvement. None of which were present earlier for Clinton.
Had someone simply said "Trump paid Giuliani to pressure Ukraine into investigating Biden"-- no added clarifications minimising the level of Trump's knowledge or involvement!-- you'd absolutely have regarded that as misleading at best and outright dishonest at worst on the question of Trump's own culpability. And you know you would've done. You spent so much time and effort making absolutely crystal clear that the actions of Trump's employees in service of Trump shouldn't be held against Trump.
If you find a need for clarification of a comment and receive that clarification in the conversation, just accept the clarification. If our roles were reversed right now, you'd be telling me how there is no possible way to read that sentence differently than you wrote it and you shouldn't need to clarify.