Louisiana Republican Sen. John Kennedy now has company among Senate Republicans in his efforts to infest the impeachment debate with pro-Putin talking points that Ukraine was the real culprit in election interference in 2016. That's despite all the evidence. That's despite the entire intelligence community telling them otherwise. That's despite David Hale, the No. 3 official at the State Department, testifying Tuesday to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that he is not aware of a single scrap of evidence that Ukraine had anything to do with the election.
But still they persist. Sen. John Barrasso, a Wyoming Republican who is also a member of the Senate leadership and is close to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, told reporters that Kennedy "has pointed out I think eight different stories" to show Ukraine and Russia "both meddled," but wouldn't elaborate on what he called meddling. "I'm not going to get in the middle of a fight that you want to have picked," he said when pressed for details.
McConnell himself refused to slap the conspiracy theory down. "The intelligence committees have the ability to look at any of these suggestions," he said Tuesday. "My view is that's something for Senate Intelligence to take a look at it, and I don't have a particular reaction to it." His particular reaction is deeds, not words—refusing to take up election security legislation from the House to protect the next election from malign foreign interference.
The most alarming comments, though, came from Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr of North Carolina. His committee has actually conducted an investigation that found, definitively, that Russia was the culprit in interference in the 2016 election, "that [Internet Research Agency] social media activity was overtly and almost invariably supportive of then-candidate Trump," and that the IRA worked "at the direction of the Kremlin."
Additionally, the report said that the "Committee found that the Russian government tasked and supported the IRA' s interference in the 2016 U.S. election." But on Tuesday, Burr said, “There’s no difference in the way Russia put their feet, early on, on the scale—being for one candidate and everybody called it meddling—and how the Ukrainian officials did it."
"No difference," he said. He also said, "Every elected official in the Ukraine was for Hillary Clinton. Is that very different than the Russians being for Donald Trump?" The ranking member on Burr’s committee, Virginia Democratic Sen. Mark Warner, was not amused. "The idea that any other country had that kind of effort is just plain false," he told reporters. "There is absolutely no factual basis for this Ukrainian election interference/CrowdStrike nonsense. None," he tweeted. "Spreading this discredited conspiracy theory only serves to advance Russia's ongoing disinformation campaign against the United States."
Not every Republican is doing Putin's bidding. Sens. Lindsey Graham, John Thune, and Mitt Romney all pushed back on the idea that Ukraine made any attempt to influence the election. But it's telling and frightening that their leader, Mitch McConnell, and their intelligence chair are leaving the question open. Just as Putin wants it. "Thank God," he told a group last month, "no one is accusing us of interfering in the U.S. elections anymore; now they’re accusing Ukraine."