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The senators used previous comments from Mr. Trump’s handpicked F.B.I. director to disprove the Trump team’s theory.

“That is something the F.B.I. would want to know about,” the agency’s director, Christopher Wray, told senators in May when speaking about offers of foreign election assistance.

American intelligence agencies concluded that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election.

Mr. Trump, at the time, responded that Mr. Wray was wrong. And weeks later, Mr. Trump said “I’d take it” if Russia offered him damaging information on a rival candidate.

The president’s defense team on Wednesday made the point again. “Mere information is not something that would violate the campaign finance laws,” said Patrick Philbin, one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers.

On Thursday, Democrats pushed back on that view emphatically.

“It would send a terrible message to autocrats and dictators and enemies of the democracy and the free world,” said one of the House managers, Representative Hakeem Jeffries, Democrat of New York. “For the president and his team to essentially put out there for all to consume that it is acceptable in the United States to solicit foreign interference in our free elections or accept political dirt — simply to try to cheat in the next election.”

The Federal Election Commission is on the side of Mr. Wray and the House managers.

“Anyone who solicits or accepts foreign assistance risks being on the wrong end of a federal investigation,” the commission’s chair, Ellen Weintraub, wrote in a memo last summer, adding that any such offer should be reported to the F.B.I.

Is there a right way to ask another country to investigate a political rival?

Senator Susan Collins, of Maine, and three other Republican senators raised a key question about whether there is an appropriate way for a president to “request a foreign country to investigate a U.S. citizen, including a political rival, who is not under investigation by the U.S. government.”