So, let's be clear

MARGARET BRENNAN: Do you think it was a misstep for one of the president's lawyers, Jay Sekulow, to stand on the floor of the Senate and repeat the conspiracy theory that Ukraine meddled in the 2016 election?

SEN. COTTON: Margaret, that's not a conspiracy theory. pic.twitter.com/KWrVvoN3q9

— Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) January 26, 2020

What the Senator said, per TPM:

“It’s the Democratic talking point that the President and his lawyers have argued that it was Ukraine who interfered in our elections, not Russia,” Cotton said. “You can read the President’s brief. They make it very clear that, yes, you can accept that Russia interfered in a systematic, organized top-down fashion in our election.”

While mentioning that he’s been “part of the Intelligence Committee that’s been investigating it for years,” Cotton added that “you can also say that it’s clear some Ukrainian officials tried to influence the outcome of the election in 2016” and that “both of those things can be true.”

The facts, plain and simple:

While Russia has worked diligently to make Ukraine the target, Trump has eagerly consumed and regurgitated the conspiracy theory as a way to accuse former challenger Hillary Clinton of causing all of it. Trump accused cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike of taking the Democratic Party server to Ukraine, a false claim given the server was a cloud-based server, not a physical one. Once it became clear that former Vice President Joe Biden would be one of Trump’s potential opponents, the president shifted the conspiracy theory to Biden and his last surviving son, Hunter. Trump claimed that the two were part of a corrupt deal in Ukraine in 2015, while Biden’s eldest son was dying of brain cancer.

“What we found is the president, yet again, seems to be echoing Russian disinformation when he says Ukraine meddled in the 2016 election, and the DNC was hacked not by Russia but Ukraine, that debunked conspiracy theory, that that the server, the DNC server, was in Ukraine and being protected by forces there,” Politico reporter Natasha Bertrand said on MSNBC. 

“Anything he associated with the intel community, he rejected pretty much out of hand because his sense was that the ‘Deep State’ had decided in some star chamber or secret meeting that they would feed intelligence to him that would cause him to make mistakes, and disprove a lot of his theories about what happened in the election,” the person told Politico.

Bertrand hunted down the conspiracy, only to find that the Russians were the ones floating the conspiracy as early as 2015, long before it was even known the DNC server was hacked. On July 22, 2016, a person or group called “Guccifer 2.0” claimed on a blog to have been responsible for hacking the DNC server. Guccifer 2.0 then admitted he was a Russian Intelligence Officer.

“They threw everything they could against the wall and settled on this idea that [Clinton] was receiving help from oligarchs [in Ukraine] in terms of her election campaign,” Bertrand continued. “The Kremlin floated this, saying because this information against Paul Manafort was released, forcing him to resign from the campaign, that was evidence of some kind of Ukrainian operation to hurt Trump’s campaign. But of course, there’s no evidence that there was any kind of top-down interference campaign like the Russians waged.”

This is so widely known and acknowledged you might as well be saying "And the sun rose in the east this morning."  Except Sen. Cotton says that's a Democratic talking point, and it could simultaneously be true that the sun rose in the west at the same moment.  Because it's on a physical server held in Ukraine, who has shipped it to China for safekeeping.  China, where Hunter Biden did some business.  Coincidence?  Sen. Cotton thinks not.

Note that:  Sen. Cotton thinks not.  That, too, seems to be beyond argument.