As the White House trained its attention on the spectacle surrounding the meeting of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, the Trump administration was largely ignoring a more potent danger back home. The Trump-Putin summit, after all, is mostly a media event—an opportunity for Trump to size up his adversary and, in the court of public opinion, try to convert him to a friend. Back in Washington, however, the bureaucrats, analysts, and officials responsible for resisting Russia’s clandestine actions are facing another threat: neglect. For the past 18 months, the Trump administration has been at war with itself over Russia—or, perhaps more accurately, at war with its Russophile president.

At the most prosaic level, the result has been a disorganized and often underfunded effort to counter Russian disinformation and other active measures, such as election hacking. The White House’s election-meddling task force, for instance, recently lost the 18-year F.B.I. veteran who was leading it, leaving some to question whether the group has the focus or support needed to carry out its mission. Last month, as The Wall Street Journal reports, the agent, Jeffrey Tricoli, left the White House to take a job at Charles Schwab. And on Friday, the Journal reported that cybersecurity officials are dropping like flies: Scott Smith, who runs the Bureau's cyber division; __Howard Marshall, his deputy; and David Resch, the executive assistant director of the F.B.I.’s criminal, cyber, response and services branch are all reportedly leaving or have already left, and one official told the Journal that more departures are expected soon. Former F.B.I. agent Clint Watts told the Journal the administration seemed indifferent to responding to such foreign threats. Instead of being pre-emptive, Watts said, the response from the White House to Russian election-meddling attempts had been indifferent, leaving the F.B.I. to be “reactive” in its responses to threats.

Those threats are more pressing now than ever, according to Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence. On Friday, the same day that 12 Russian nationals were indicted for alleged crimes related to the hacking and release of Democratic e-mails in the lead-up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Coats said the indictments were a warning that the Kremlin still poses a threat to the United States’ cyber-security. “The warning lights are blinking red again,” Coats said. “Today, the digital infrastructure that serves this country is literally under attack.” On Thursday, Tom Burt, Microsoft’s vice president for customer security and trust, said said his team had discovered a spear-phishing campaign launched by the G.R.U., Russia’s military intelligence agency, and targeting three candidates running in the 2018 midterm elections. Burt declined to name the candidates, but said “They were all people who, because of their positions, might have been interesting targets from an espionage standpoint, as well as an election disruption standpoint.” At the same security forum, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said that the Justice Department will notify the public, private organizations, and American companies if and when foreign interference occurs. “The Department of Justice investigates and prosecutes malign foreign influence activity that violates federal criminal law,” he said. “Some critics argue against prosecuting people who live in foreign nations that are unlikely to extradite their citizens. That is a shortsighted view.”

Despite the overwhelming proof, Trump reportedly chafes at the mention of Russian election meddling. After meeting with Putin last year, Trump told reporters, “You can only ask so many times. He said he didn’t meddle . . . every time he sees me, he says, ‘I didn’t do that.’ And I really believe that when he tells me that, he means it.” Trump even raised the prospect of forming “an impenetrable cyber-security unit” with Putin, “so that election hacking, and many other negative things, will be guarded and safe.” (The suggestion sparked an immediate bipartisan backlash, and Trump backed down.)

Trump, of course, is more than simply incurious about Russian interference: he sees efforts to address the 2016 hacking as an admission that he didn’t win the election fair and square—and therefore refuses to engage on the issue. “There is no evidence that could ever change Trump’s mind,” sources close to Trump recently told Axios, ahead of Monday’s summit. The president, these people explained, “just seems incapable of taking it seriously, and tells staff that is simply what nations do.” More than half a dozen sources said Trump “doesn’t take it anywhere near as seriously as some senior national security officials would like him to.”

Yet the evidence is clear. While none of the Russians indicted by the Justice Department have been tried—and are unlikely ever to see the inside of a U.S. courtroom—Trump’s own intelligence agencies are unanimous in their finding that Russia did deliberately interfere with the 2016 election. (There is some disagreement over whether Russia was always pulling for Trump to win, or whether Moscow was simply hoping to cause trouble.) Worse, the federal agencies tasked with monitoring and combating Russian spycraft are in agreement that Putin is almost certainly trying to meddle in the 2018 elections, too—and could launch an even more audacious attack in 2020. Last summer, it was revealed that Russian operatives hacked into voting systems in multiple U.S. states. Experts warn that other elements of U.S. electoral infrastructure could be vulnerable, too. “They’re still very active—in making preparations, at least—to influence public opinion again,” Feike Hacquebord, a security researcher at Trend Micro, told the Associated Press in January. The denialism that such interference ever happened, or could happen again, sets a dangerous precedent in the era of cyber-warfare. Trump’s disinterest is practically an invitation to foreign powers—not just Russia, but China, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and other technologically sophisticated nations with an interest in our politics—to put their thumb on the scale again next year. For either party to welcome campaign meddling—“We all do it,” Rand Paul said on Sunday—is to accept a world in which Americans can no longer have faith in the legitimacy of their vote.