Cotton: Democrats are ‘upset that their witnesses haven’t said what they want them to say’

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) on Sunday dismissed the idea of calling witnesses in the Senate’s impeachment trial of President Trump, although he said he did not know whether any of his Republican colleagues would vote to hear additional testimony.

“I’m not going to vote to approve witnesses because the House Democrats have had lots of witnesses … we listened to [House Intelligence Committee Chair] Adam Schiff drone on for three days and the president’s lawyers, in just two hours demolished the case they had made,” Cotton said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”

{mosads}“They’re not upset that they haven’t had witnesses, they’re upset that their witnesses haven’t said what they want them to say,” he added.

Cotton sparred with CBS’ Margaret Brennan on Trump’s attorney Jay Sekulow’s invocation of the conspiracy theory that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 presidential election.

“That’s not a conspiracy theory,” Cotton responded, citing individual Ukrainian officials who had expressed support for Hillary Clinton and criticism of then-candidate Trump.

Cotton conceded that Ukraine had not engaged in “systematic, top-down” interference sanctioned at the highest levels like Russia, prompting Brennan to respond “you’re being precise in your words and that’s not what the president’s lawyers said.”

Brennan also pressed Cotton on a recording of Trump instructing Rudy Giuliani associate Lev Parnas to “take out” then-U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch. Cotton noted that Yovanovitch had been recalled over a year after the recording, indicating that Trump “was not hasty, he was not precipitous” but did not answer Brennan’s questions about Trump’s claims not to have known Parnas before the recording was revealed.