The conspiracy theory that Ukraine meddled in the 2016 election, therefore somehow justifying the president’s attempts to extort the nation, has been thoroughly, roundly debunked. One of the Trump administration’s top State Department officials told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee just this week that Russia, not Ukraine mounted an operation intended to influence the 2016 election results.

Still, Trump’s defenders continue to push the president’s pet conspiracy theory. There are few people more intimately familiar with the president’s fondness for weaponizing conspiracy theories than Ted Cruz—and even he pushed the Ukraine interference line Sunday on Meet the Press, to audible laughter from the show’s studio audience.

“Do you believe Ukraine meddled in the American election in 2016?” host Chuck Todd asked the Texas Senator.

“I do, and I think there’s considerable evidence of that,” said Cruz, to titters from the off-screen audience.

"Senator, this sort of strikes me as odd because you went through a primary campaign with this president,” Todd responded. “He launched a birtherism campaign against you. He went after your faith, he threatened to quote ‘spill the beans’ about your wife about something. He pushed a National Enquirer story, which we now know he had a real relationship with the editors.”

"Let me ask you this,” Todd asked. “Is it not possible that this president is capable of creating a false narrative about somebody in order to help him politically?”

“Except that’s not what happened,” said Cruz, dodging the question. He then continued to insist that Ukraine interfered in the election, citing an anti-Trump op-ed in The Hill from the nation’s ambassador.

It’s no secret that some in the Ukraine weren’t pleased at the prospect of a Trump win in 2016—the nation is at war with Russia, the country Trump spent much of his campaign cozying up to. But individual Ukrainian officials criticizing Trump doesn’t constitute election meddling. Russia’s hacking of the DNC server and its highly orchestrated campaign of social media disinformation, all directed by the Kremlin, does. So naturally, the only person who can match Trump’s enthusiasm for the Ukraine conspiracy theory is Vladimir Putin himself.

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Gabrielle Bruney Gabrielle Bruney is a writer and editor for Esquire, where she focuses on politics and culture.

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