Whereas, at the summit in Helsinki, Finland, on July 16, 2018, President Donald Trump embarrassed the United States, undermined the values of the United States, and openly sided with the authoritarian leader of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin, against the unanimous assessment of the United States intelligence community that the Russian Federation interfered in the 2016 United States presidential election; Whereas Senator John McCain stated, [It] was one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory. The damage inflicted by President Trump’s naiveté, egotism, false equivalence, and sympathy for autocrats is difficult to calculate. But it is clear that the summit in Helsinki was a tragic mistake. ; Whereas, on July 17, 2018, in response to the international backlash, President Trump, while claiming he misspoke and blaming the media for reporting what he said, still sowed doubt about the electoral interference by the Russian Federation by claiming it could be other people also and not just the Russian Federation; Whereas the United States faces an unprecedented situation in which the President of the United States refuses to acknowledge an attack on the democracy of the United States; Whereas the Russian Federation has been interfering not only in the elections of the United States, but also in the elections of other democracies, such as the United Kingdom, France, and Germany, to name a few; Whereas the goal of the Russian Federation is to advance its own interests by weakening the transatlantic alliance of democracies that arose after the Second World War, while also inflaming internal divisions in each of those countries; Whereas, on July 13, 2018, Special Counsel Robert Mueller announced indictments of 12 members of the military intelligence service of the Russian Federation known as the Glavnoe Razvedyvatel'noe Upravlenie (referred to in this preamble as the GRU )