[Congressional Record Volume 164, Number 120 (Tuesday, July 17, 2018)]
[Senate]
[Page S4994]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                           Trump-Putin Summit

  Mr. CARPER. Mr. President, as my colleagues and the Presiding Officer 
may know, I spent many years of my life in the Navy. I spent some 23 
years, starting at the age of 21, on Active and Reserve Duty in the 
U.S. Navy as a naval flight officer, and I spent most of those 23 years 
as a P-3 aircraft mission commander. I was even, for a limited period 
of time, the air intelligence officer for my P-3 squadron when we were 
deployed in Southeast Asia.
  I flew hundreds of missions during both the Vietnam war and the Cold 
War, conducting surveillance operations, gathering intelligence on the 
Soviets and on others who undermine and destroy the American way of 
life.
  As a Cold War warrior, watching an American President yesterday 
blatantly ignore attacks on a democracy and our intelligence agencies 
was beyond galling. It was reprehensible--reprehensible.
  Four days ago, Special Counsel Mueller indicted 12 Russian 
intelligence officers for interfering in our democratic elections in 
2016. That same day, last Friday--Friday the 13th--the Director of 
National Intelligence, our old colleague, Dan Coats from Indiana, said 
that our country's digital infrastructure is literally under attack. 
Here is what he said:

       The warning signs are there. The system is blinking. It is 
     why I believe we are at a critical point.

  That was on Friday the 13th.
  Yesterday, our President, with the entire world watching, chose to 
attack not the Soviets, not the Russians, but Bob Mueller. He is one of 
the finest people I have ever known and worked with. He attacked Bob 
Mueller and rebuked the U.S. intelligence community--with whom I have 
worked as a member of the Homeland Security committee for any number of 
years, as has our Presiding Officer--instead of siding with the 17 U.S. 
intelligence agencies, all of whom agreed unanimously, without dissent, 
that the Soviets, the Russians, intervened in our election in 2016 in 
an effort to throw the election to Donald Trump and to take it away 
from Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee. There is no question that 
is what they did.
  Our President chose to ignore that, and instead of admiring and 
speaking to the work of the intelligence agencies and concurring with 
them yesterday, he decided to side with an authoritarian thug, Vladimir 
Putin. That was a defining moment in our Nation's history.
  I think it is a sad moment in our Nation's history. We ought to move 
immediately to pass bipartisan legislation, introduced in the Senate 
earlier this year, to allow Bob Mueller's critical work and that of the 
people working with him to be completed without the constant threat of 
political interference.