HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: After several professors were filmed heckling a conservative student on campus, several Republican state senators criticized the school for being hostile to conservatives, but the professors say it is a “manufactured crisis.”

AT AMAZON, Hot New Releases, Updated Hourly.

Plus, new Kindle Daily Deals.

And, today’s Digital Deals.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Mueller, Israel Announcement, Alleged Predator Update and Much, Much More.

WALL STREET JOURNAL: Mueller’s Credibility Problem: The special counsel is stonewalling Congress and protecting the FBI.

Donald Trump is his own worst enemy, as his many ill-advised tweets on the weekend about Michael Flynn, the FBI and Robert Mueller’s Russia probe demonstrate. But that doesn’t mean that Mr. Mueller and the Federal Bureau of Investigation deserve a pass about their motives and methods, as new information raises troubling questions.

The Washington Post and the New York Times reported Saturday that a lead FBI investigator on the Mueller probe, Peter Strzok, was demoted this summer after it was discovered he’d sent anti- Trump texts to a mistress. As troubling, Mr. Mueller and the Justice Department kept this information from House investigators, despite Intelligence Committee subpoenas that would have exposed those texts. They also refused to answer questions about Mr. Strzok’s dismissal and refused to make him available for an interview.

The news about Mr. Strzok leaked only when the Justice Department concluded it couldn’t hold out any longer, and the stories were full of spin that praised Mr. Mueller for acting “swiftly” to remove the agent. Only after these stories ran did Justice agree on Saturday to make Mr. Strzok available to the House.

This is all the more notable because Mr. Strzok was a chief lieutenant to former FBI Director James Comey and played a lead role investigating alleged coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 election. Mr. Mueller then gave him a top role in his special-counsel probe. And before all this Mr. Strzok led the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails and sat in on the interview she gave to the FBI shortly before Mr. Comey publicly exonerated her in violation of Justice Department practice.

Oh, and the woman with whom he supposedly exchanged anti-Trump texts, FBI lawyer Lisa Page, worked for both Mr. Mueller and deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe, who was accused of a conflict of interest in the Clinton probe when it came out that Clinton allies had donated to the political campaign of Mr. McCabe’s wife. The texts haven’t been publicly released, but it’s fair to assume their anti-Trump bias must be clear for Mr. Mueller to reassign such a senior agent.

There is no justification for withholding all of this from Congress, which is also investigating Russian influence and has constitutional oversight authority. Justice and the FBI have continued to defy legal subpoenas for documents pertaining to both surveillance warrants and the infamous Steele dossier that was financed by the Clinton campaign and relied on anonymous Russian sources.

This whole thing stinks to high heaven.

LIVE ORDNANCE EXERCISE IN THE PACIFIC, WITH THE USS NIMITZ IN THE FOREGROUND: Strike aircraft from the Nimitz air wing drop live munitions. Impressive splashes mark the dozen or so holes in the sea. The photo was taken December 1. It had to be a great show for the guys on the flight deck.

“PROSECUTORIAL DISCRETION:” Clinton Aides Went Unpunished After Making False Statements To Anti-Trump FBI Supervisor. Think of him as a Democratic operative with a badge and a gun and you won’t go far wrong.

FLASHBACK: Senate Democrats falsely claim GOP tax plan will raise taxes for most working-class families. “In their haste to condemn the GOP tax plan, Democrats have spread far and wide the false claim that families making less than $86,100 on average will face a hefty tax hike. Actually, it’s the opposite. Most families in that income range would get a tax cut. Any Democrat who spread this claim should delete their tweets and make clear they were in error.”

SHE’S STILL GOT IT: Voyager 1 just fired up some thrusters for the first time in 37 years.

Voyager 1 is an important vessel. It’s the fastest spacecraft we’ve got, traveling at around 11 miles per second. It’s also the farthest. Its twin, Voyager 2, is nearly 11 billion miles away from the Sun, pushing through the last layer of our host star’s influence on the space around our system. But Voyager 1 is over 13 billion miles away from the Sun, and has the incredible distinction of being the first human-made object to enter interstellar space.

Yet even from that great distance, the probe still sends messages back to Earth. That’s where the thrusters come in. For decades, a set of thrusters has served to set out tiny, split-second pulses to keep the craft’s antenna pointed toward us. Now those thrusters are getting old, and it’s taking more effort to make Voyager 1 move. The solution? See if the TCM thrusters—which on the one hand haven’t been worn out by constant use over the last few decades, but on the other hand haven’t even been turned on — could take on some of the legwork.

“The Voyager flight team dug up decades-old data and examined the software that was coded in an outdated assembler language, to make sure we could safely test the thrusters,” Chris Jones, chief engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, said in a statement.

It takes 19 hours and 35 minutes for a signal from Voyager 1 to bounce back to Earth, but after a day of waiting the scientists confirmed that the hardware had fired right up.

Incredible.

THIS IS BIG NEWS: Japan Airlines Partners with Boom Supersonic. “With a $10M investment and pre-order of 20 aircraft, this is not just a milestone for Boom, but one for civil aviation. JAL is the first airline in history to make a material financial commitment to a faster future. Concorde had dozens of pre-orders — but none carried any financial commitment, and ultimately British Airways and Air France got their Concordes for just £1 apiece.”

Related: A new dawn in Supersonic Transport and technological innovation.

BECAUSE THAT WOULD INVOLVE GIVING TRUMP CREDIT? Islamic State’s ‘caliphate’ has been toppled in Iraq and Syria. Why isn’t anyone celebrating?

GOOD OLD-FASHIONED LOVER BOY: “X Men” Director Bryan Singer Fired from Freddie Mercury-Queen Movie.

MORE: New Accuser Says Conyers Groped Her in Church.

IT’S ABOUT GRAFT: America’s first bullet train is already a failure and it hasn’t even been built.

WHAT COULD GO WRONG? University to Place 400 Cameras on Campus to Catch ‘Hate Crimes.’

HMM: Congress Stalling Trump Ambassadors, Harming U.S. Effort to Combat N. Korea, Conduct Diplomacy.

Amid a global showdown over North Korea’s repeated and increasingly dangerous nuclear tests, Republican leaders in the Senate have declined to hold a vote on several of President Donald Trump’s picks for U.S. ambassador, most notably Richard Grenell, the former U.S. spokesman at the United Nations who was tapped in September to serve as the next American ambassador to Germany.

With no indication that Congress will move in the near future to confirm Trump’s picks, congressional and administration insiders are expressing growing concerns that the holdup is interfering with U.S. attempts to rein in North Korea’s nuclear program, according to multiple sources who spoke to the Washington Free Beacon about the situation.

What’s the holdup, Senator McConnell?

FEMALE PRIVILEGE: “Who gets to do the social kiss?”

FLORIDA WOMAN: Former Dem Congresswoman Sentenced To Five Years In Prison On Corruption Charges.

Former Florida Democratic Rep. Corrine Brown was sentenced to five years in federal prison Monday on number of charges including tax fraud and tax crimes.

A judge sentenced Brown to five years in prison and a 3-year supervised release. Brown will be forced to surrender to authorities sometime after Jan. 8., according to CBS 47.

The jury convicted Brown of stealing money from a fake charity, One Door For Education. The “charity” was supposed to give scholarships to children who could not afford school but instead the Democratic congresswoman used the donations to go on trips and purchase expensive items. She also used the money to host parties.

Five years seems lenient.

EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN: German government wants ‘backdoor’ access to every digital device: report.

As Mark Steyn wrote last year regarding Angela Merkel, “You can take the girl out of East Germany, but you can’t take the East Germany out of the girl.”

EXPLAINER: Five things to know about Trump’s national monuments order.

Here’s one:

Trump eliminated about 84 percent of Bears Ears and nearly half of Grand Staircase-Escalante, but that doesn’t mean the land will be sold to private owners.

The parts of the monuments that are no longer protected are still owned by the federal government, mostly the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management.

That means any proposals by private companies to develop the land, mine on it, drill for oil or natural gas or other major activities, will have to go undergo environmental and other reviews.

Grand Staircase-Escalante had been eyed in the 1990s for a potential mine. At Bears Ears, the main new activity may simply be grazing.

Oil and gas producers frequently want to increase drilling on federal land, but the industry says it’s not interested in the Bears Ears land.

The formerly protected lands in Utah are also unlikely to get into private hands anytime soon. Zinke has made a point of pushing back strongly against conservatives who want to sell large parcels of federal land or give them to states, and Trump has agreed with him.

The Feds own huge swathes of land in the Western states, which should be auctioned off to pay for the transition to privatized Social Security and Medicare — and anything left over applied to debt.

ROGER SIMON: Trump’s Right — the FBI Is in Tatters (UPDATED):

What’re we supposed to think when it’s revealed the man running the Hillary Clinton email server investigation (Peter Strzok) was a married Hillary supporter conducting an adulterous affair with a government lawyer, while dissing Donald Trump in his clandestine billet-doux text messages?

(Was he auditioning for Harvey Weinstein’s next movie, assuming Weinstein is ever allowed to make a movie again or even would make one that in any way besmirched his good friend Hillary?)

As an FBI agent, Strzok’s use of text messaging for such an enterprise was nothing short of moronic in this digital age, but nevertheless he was not fired but simply and quietly sent to FBI “Siberia” last summer, his activities only miraculously coming to public attention last week.

Why the secrecy? Many reasons, probably yet to be determined, but it comes down to this: the FBI, like the Mafia, practices omertà. . . .

Apparently my attack on the FBI was understated. Peter Strzok, it turns out, was the man who was responsible for changing “grossly negligent” to “extremely careless” in Comey’s final report on the Clinton email investigation, thus setting Hillary free for a crime the world knows she committed. How do I know this is true? In this instance, consider the source.

This is a disgrace. After this, nobody can take charges seriously. Trump should dismiss Mueller and fire a bunch of people in the FBI.

LIFE IN OUR MULTICULTURAL SOCIETY:

Recently I went out with some friends I hadn’t seen in years, one of whom turned the conversation to religion and eventually the Holocaust. It turns out he believes that the Holocaust never happened. I was embarrassed that someone I went to school with all my life could believe such a thing. He further claimed that God was black and racist against whites and therefore we should hate whites, too. (He is neither white nor black.)

The 21st Century isn’t turning out as I’d hoped.

INDEED AT LONG LAST, THEY HAVE NO DECENCY:  The Indecency of the Left.

OBJECTION, YER ‘ONOR. THEY HAVE NO MIND LEFT TO LOSE:  Supreme Court Allows Full Trump Travel Ban 3.0 And The Left Loses It’s Mind, Again.

THE LITTLE RODENTS PROBABLY WORSHIP SATAN:  Squirrel menace really, really hates Christmas.