The hawkish Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., believes one can draw a straight line between the Obama administration’s years of acquiescence to Russia and Russian interference in this year’s election.

Specifically, today in Politico, he points to a bipartisan panel involving several federal agencies that he and others in Congress tried to create earlier this year. The purpose was “to counter Russian efforts “to exert covert influence,” including by exposing Russian “falsehoods, agents of influence, corruption, human rights abuses, terrorism, and assassinations.” One of the panel’s goals would have been to lay bare Russia’s “funding of agents of influence” — a perhaps important and still-mostly-untold story.