WELL IF THEIR GOAL WAS SOWING CHAOS, THEY’VE CERTAINLY HAD A LOT OF HELP FROM THE MEDIA AND THE “RESISTANCE.” BUT I REPEAT MYSELF. Were The Russians Playing Both Sides?

It is now widely known that the Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election to weaken Hillary Clinton, both by hacking and releasing emails and by spreading disinformation on social media and state-funded news outlets.

But yesterday’s Senate Intelligence Committee hearings suggest that this may not be the whole story.

In the clip below, Senator Lindsay Graham asks Bill Browder—American businessman who has successfully lobbied for sanctions against Russia after his attorney was abused and likely murdered in a Moscow jail—about Russian involvement in the 2016 election. Browder notes that Fusion GPS—the opposition research behind the infamous “pee tape” dossier about Donald Trump—was at the time being paid by Russians to produce opposition research about him and undermine support for the Magnitsky Act, the bill Browder backed that froze the assets of a few dozen Russian oligarchs.

Fusion GPS is relevant to the Russia investigation for two reasons. First, as Browder says above, it was under contract by Russian oligarchs at the same time that it produced “dirt” on Trump. Second, Christopher Steele—the British former spy who produced the dossier on Fusion’s behalf—gathered much of his information from Russians.

The web of connections involved in this whole affair can get convoluted (if you want to be more confused, recall that the Russian firm that hired Fusion GPS, Prevezon Holdings, also retained Natalia Veselnitskaya—the lawyer who met with Don Jr. in Trump Tower last July). But the information we have now at least raises the possibility that powerful Russians were involved—as sources of information or money or both—in the creation of the Steele Dossier, perhaps the most influential piece of opposition research in history. . . .

As Graham says, it’s quite possible that the Russians were collecting dirt on both sides in a bid to sow chaos above all else. We are likely to learn more as the Congressional investigations proceed.

Oh, I hope so.

Related: Kimberley Strassel: Who Paid for the ‘Trump Dossier’? Democrats don’t want you to find out—and that ought to be a scandal of its own.

It has been 10 days since Democrats received the glorious news that Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley would require Donald Trump Jr. and Paul Manafort to explain their meeting with Russian operators at Trump Tower last year. The left was salivating at the prospect of watching two Trump insiders being grilled about Russian “collusion” under the klieg lights.

Yet Democrats now have meekly and noiselessly retreated, agreeing to let both men speak to the committee in private. Why would they so suddenly be willing to let go of this moment of political opportunity?

Fusion GPS. That’s the oppo-research outfit behind the infamous and discredited “Trump dossier,” ginned up by a former British spook. Fusion co-founder Glenn Simpson also was supposed to testify at the Grassley hearing, where he might have been asked in public to reveal who hired him to put together the hit job on Mr. Trump, which was based largely on anonymous Russian sources. Turns out Democrats are willing to give up just about anything—including their Manafort moment—to protect Mr. Simpson from having to answer that question.

Make him talk. Under oath. “What if, all this time, Washington and the media have had the Russia collusion story backward? What if it wasn’t the Trump campaign playing footsie with the Vladimir Putin regime, but Democrats? The more we learn about Fusion, the more this seems a possibility.”

THIS IS PRETTY MUCH TRUE WHENEVER THE SJWs ATTACK AN INSTITUTION: Politicize Sports, Pay the Price.

Evergreen tweet:

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: “A former Johns Hopkins University professor claims he was suspended from teaching after making a politically incorrect joke about a call center in Pakistan, saying he was viewed ‘like a criminal’.”

AT AMAZON, fresh New Releases, updated hourly.

Plus, today’s new Kindle Daily Deals.

And shop the Digital Deals of the Day.

NEW SANCTIONS IMPOSED ON IRAN AFTER ITS LATEST BALLISTIC MISSILE TEST: Good. Now take the next step.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: It’s not just people on the right complaining, as this from The New Republic demonstrates: Don’t Send Your Kid to the Ivy League: The nation’s top colleges are turning our kids into zombies. “Our system of elite education manufactures young people who are smart and talented and driven, yes, but also anxious, timid, and lost, with little intellectual curiosity and a stunted sense of purpose: trapped in a bubble of privilege, heading meekly in the same direction, great at what they’re doing but with no idea why they’re doing it. . . . There are exceptions, kids who insist, against all odds, on trying to get a real education. But their experience tends to make them feel like freaks. One student told me that a friend of hers had left Yale because she found the school ‘stifling to the parts of yourself that you’d call a soul.'”

The Ivy League’s position appears unassailable, but it ultimately depends on prestige, and that can evaporate quickly, leaving you with an overpriced product that doesn’t sell nearly as well without the prestige.

IN DEFENSE OF THE BAD, WHITE WORKING CLASS: “The habits of progressive social and political discourse almost seem calculated to alienate and aggravate lower class whites. I confess that if a well-dressed, university-educated middle-class person of any gender or ethnicity so much as hinted at my ‘white privilege’ while I was a lumpen child, or my ‘male privilege’ while I was an unskilled labourer who couldn’t afford basic necessities, or my ‘hetero-privilege’ while I was a homeless solitary, I’d have taken special pleasure in voting for their nightmare. And I would have been right to do so.”

I’M AMAZED HOW MANY PEOPLE MISSED THIS: Donald Trump Just Stole Jerry Seinfeld’s Old Bit About Police Brutality.

THE MYTH OF ISIS’ STRATEGIC BRILLIANCE: I never thought ISIS was particularly brilliant, just extremely vicious. All the Islamic State did was take advantage of Obama, but then everyone else did as well.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: How ‘Insta-bragging’ could soon invalidate your insurance.

EVALUATING NORTH KOREA’S LATEST MISSILE TESTS: Analysis from 38North.org.

On July 28, North Korea launched a ballistic missile that reportedly flew for 45 minutes, reaching a peak altitude of 3,000 km, and a slightly longer range than the previous test. While the type of missile tested is yet unconfirmed, these data, if accurate, are fully consistent with a Hwasong-14 tested with a larger second stage that is powered by a high-thrust engine. If flown on a flatter trajectory, this missile could reach as far as 9,000 to 10,000 km. More information, including videos and photographs, will help identify the new second stage engine, and pinpoint its performance capacity.

However, if the above assessment is correct, North Korea seems to have made a logical step forward, as it tries to perfect the technologies to build and field an operationally-viable ICBM that can threaten the mainland United States. More tests are needed to assess and validate the reliability of the Hwasong-14, so North Korea is sure to follow this launch with many more.

Not good news, is it? Step by step Pyongyang proceeds until it obtains ICBMs and nuclear weapons. That’s why Rex Tillerson and Mike Pence said strategic patience is over. The fat kid and his noxious regime must be stopped.

ANDREW MCCARTHY ON THE DEMOCRATS’ PAKISTANI IT SCANDAL:

Asking no more questions, the credit union wired the money . . . to Pakistan. As you let all that sink in, consider this: Awan and his family cabal of fraudsters had access for years to the e-mails and other electronic files of members of the House’s Intelligence and Foreign Affairs Committees. It turns out they were accessing members’ computers without their knowledge, transferring files to remote servers, and stealing computer equipment — including hard drives that Awan & Co. smashed to bits of bytes before making tracks. . . .

Why were they paid so much for doing so little? Intriguing as it is, that’s a side issue. A more pressing question is: Why were they given access to highly sensitive government information? Ordinarily, that requires a security clearance, awarded only after a background check that peruses ties to foreign countries, associations with unsavory characters, and vulnerability to blackmail. These characters could not possibly have qualified. Never mind access; it’s hard to fathom how they retained their jobs.

The Daily Caller has also discovered that the family, which controlled several properties, was involved in various suspicious mortgage transfers. Abid Awan, while working “full-time” in Congress, ran a curious auto-retail business called “Cars International A” (yes, CIA), through which he was accused of stealing money and merchandise. In 2012, he discharged debts in bankruptcy (while scheming to keep his real-estate holdings). Congressional Democrats hired Abid despite his drunk-driving conviction a month before he started at the House, and they retained him despite his public-drunkenness arrest a month after. Beyond that, he and Imran both committed sundry vehicular offenses. In civil lawsuits, they are accused of life-insurance fraud.

Democrats now say that any access to sensitive information was “unauthorized.” But how hard could it have been to get “unauthorized” access when House Intelligence Committee Dems wanted their staffers to have unbounded access? In 2016, they wrote a letter to an appropriations subcommittee seeking funding so their staffers could obtain “Top Secret — Sensitive Compartmented Information” clearances. TS/SCI is the highest-level security classification. Awan family members were working for a number of the letter’s signatories. Democratic members, of course, would not make such a request without coordination with leadership. Did I mention that the ranking member on the appropriations subcommittee to whom the letter was addressed was Debbie Wasserman Schultz?

This stinks to high heaven.

SO IT WASN’T YOU IN THE PICTURE HOLDING TRUMP’S SEVERED HEAD? Kathy Griffin: I’ve been ‘completely exonerated’ in federal investigation of beheaded Trump photo.

There was never anything to “investigate” anyway. As I said at the time, it wasn’t a threat, just a nasty, tasteless piece of viciousness. You can’t be jailed for that, but you can’t be exonerated by the legal system either.

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: “What’s the word on Jane Sanders? ‘Bernie’s wife?’ he says. ‘She really put the screws to this place.’”

TYLER O’NEIL: Imran Awan Scandal Shows Just How Much Dirt Dems Wanted to Hide By Focusing on Trump-Russia.

When U.S. Capitol Police, the FBI, and Customs and Border Protection teamed up to arrest Imran Awan, an IT staffer for Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) and other congressional Democrats, Americans began to realize just how broken and corrupt the Democratic Party has become. Indeed, such scandals beg the question of whether the Trump-Russia hype has not been a desperate attempt to distract the country from a long train of scandals on the Left.

Awan was arrested Monday night on charges of bank fraud, to which he has pled not guilty. As Forbes’ Frank Miniter argued, however, his strange case “has all the feeling of the opening scene of a movie that might soon include political corruption and so much more.”

Politico reported that Awan is “at the center of a criminal investigation potentially impacting dozens of lawmakers.” He was arrested after wiring $283,000 from the Congressional Federal Credit Union to Pakistan, The Daily Caller reported.

PJ Media’s Debra Heine has been on the story since it broke in February of this year. Imran Awan and his Pakistani-born brothers, Abid and Jamal Awan, are under criminal investigation by the U.S. Capitol Police and the FBI on suspicion that they accessed congressional computers without permission and stole equipment.

The Awan brothers worked for more than 30 House and Senate Democrats, as well as former Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who only fired Imran Awan on Tuesday after his arrest. News of the investigation broke in February, but Schultz kept Awan on staff for five months before firing him. Schultz even threatened Capitol Police Chief Matthew Verderosa about the investigation in May.

Weird how, since the connection to Democratic dirty-tricks firm Fusion GPS came up, the press stopped talking about the Russia “collusion” story overnight.

SO IT SEEMS TO ME THAT THE THING TO FOCUS ON IS THE 2018 ELECTIONS. The press will continue to go crazy over Trump’s latest tweet, but what happens will ultimately turn on whether the GOP keeps its majority — and whether, if it does, the majority that it keeps is as lame as this one. I think that people who want small government will want to primary Senators and Representatives who don’t, while still trying to keep a majority. As tempting as it is to just wash your hands, we learned in 2006 that a determined Democratic Congress is a lot more destructive than a wishy-washy Republican one, as irritating as the latter is.

CHANGE: Trump, Congress Reach Agreement on “Skinny Tax Reform.”

DOES SHE HAVE ANY OTHER KIND? Another Shameful Moment For Maxine Waters.

WHO SAYS WE CAN’T CHANGE THE CULTURE? Walmart Sells Concealed Carry Clothing. “It comes in Coyote Brown and black and sells for for $60 to $78. I haven’t examined one, but its existence in WalMart’s inventory is a powerful statement about the normalization of the exercise of Second Amendment rights.”

You can get it at Amazon, too.

ELIMINATIONIST RHETORIC: Assassination Fantasies: At a Times Square rally, an open call for Trump’s murder is ignored by elected officials.

THEY TOLD ME IF DONALD TRUMP WERE ELECTED, WE’D SEE OPEN RACIAL SEGREGATION RETURN. AND THEY WERE RIGHT! University of Minnesota Bans White And Straight Students From Safe Space.

This sort of blatant racial segregation seems like it should command the attention of the Department of Education or the Department of Justice.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Professor Who Called for ‘White Genocide’ Says Leftist Profs Are Being Targeted.

IF YOU’RE NOT HAPPY WITH HOW YOUR MEMBER ACTED, LET THEM KNOW WHILE THEY’RE HOME: Frustrated House GOP to begin five-week recess.

ALAN DERSHOWITZ: Can Trump, or any other president, pardon himself?

President Trump’s tweets about his broad power to pardon have raised the ultimate question: Can the president pardon himself? The answer is crystal clear! And anyone who gives you a different answer is misleading you, because there is only one correct answer.

Here it is: Nobody knows!

No president has ever tried it. No court has ever ruled on it. The framers of our Constitution never opined on it. History provides no guidance. There is a clean slate.

Yet pundits and academic know-it-alls will express certainty on both sides of this issue. That’s what pundits and academics do. Rarely do they acknowledge they don’t know, because as experts they are supposed to know. But this is one question whose answer they cannot know.

They will have opinions, as we all do. But many will deliberately confuse the is with the ought. If they want the answer to be no, they will pretend the answer is no. If they want the answer to be yes, they will pretend it is yes. That’s the way some pundits and academics advocate: by claiming to be describing what they are not so subtly prescribing.

This has been the case especially with regard to Trump.

So true.