WHAT MUELLER’S BIGGEST OMISSION MEANS: It’s not news that Special Counsel Robert Mueller included nothing about the Steele Dossier’s Russian sources or its indirect funding by Hillary Clinton. But there remains much to be grasped fully regarding the significance of Mueller’s omission, according to Margot Cleveland in The Federalist.

“Even though Mueller was authorized, as he put it in the special counsel report, to investigate ‘the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election,’ the report is silent of efforts to investigate Russia’s role in feeding Steele misinformation,” Cleveland writes.

But then she raises a deeply interesting possibility: “Or did Mueller investigate this question? It’s possible, maybe even likely, given this acknowledgement in the special counsel report: ‘From its inception, the Office recognized that its investigation could identify foreign intelligence and counterintelligence information relevant to the FBI’s broader national security mission.’”

One suspects that Mueller’s reputation — and those of a host of other worthies — will be irretrievably damaged before Attorney General William Barr and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham are finished.

BIDEN AND BERNIE: It’s Not Their Age — It’s the Age of Their Ideas.

Bernie’s partying like it’s 1919, and Joe doesn’t know that FDR wasn’t president in 1929. What could go wrong?

BUT OF COURSE: Rashida Tlaib Attempts To Spin Hamas’ Attack On Israel.

MATTHEW BRODSKY: Iran’s Hand Behind the Latest Flare Up in Gaza, Israel.

This latest escalation is significant for several reasons. First is the deliberate increase in range in the rockets fired from Gaza. Hamas and PIJ began by targeting Israeli communities in the Strip’s periphery, such as Sderot and Ashkelon. According to the IDF, after the Home Front Command instructed residents living within 40 km of the Gaza Strip to consult with local authorities and remain near protected spaces, the terrorist groups turned to rockets with increased ranges of up to 70 km. By Sunday, several longer-range projectiles were fired, growing to encompass Ashdod further north. On Sunday, city officials opened bomb shelters as far up the coast as Netanya, which lies north of Tel Aviv.

The kinds of weapons used by terrorists in Gaza are also noteworthy. Interrupting a short lull in the rocket fire, terrorists fired a guided Kornet anti-tank weapon, targeting a car and killing a civilian in Israel. According to the IDF, militants in Gaza also tried carrying out an attack using a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) attached to a drone, which landed on a tank but failed to detonate. The IDF, working with Israel’s internal security the Shin Bet, also thwarted a Hamas cyberattack against Israeli infrastructure and responded by destroying the building housing the headquarters of the terror group’s cyber unit. It was the first such attack while fighting was ongoing.

Much more at the link.

QUESTIONS NOBODY IS ASKING: Are you ready for the Summer of Biden?

His latest slip, in which he said that he had been contacted by the late Margaret Thatcher (d. 2013), expressing concerns about President Donald Trump, was great fun. It’s particularly amusing because Biden’s last known big British politician gaffe concerned Neil Kinnock, Thatcher’s great rival, whom he plagiarized horribly during his 1988 run.

We should be fair: the Thatcher-May error was hardly big, especially by Biden’s standards. It’s not comparable, for instance, to the time he called out ‘stand up Chuck, let ’em see ya’ to wheelchair-bound Sen. Chuck Graham. Biden obviously meant to name Britain’s current and second woman Prime Minister, Theresa May, and, hey, it’s hard to tell the difference between two women when you aren’t sniffing them.

He quickly corrected himself, called it a ‘Freudian slip’, which in itself is a Freudian slip – and pointed out that he ‘knew her too.’ Oh Joe, you wily old cad.

Such mistakes aren’t off-putting in a candidate: they can even be endearing. Biden, 76, is bound to say far worse over the coming weeks – and a series of high-profile faux pas could help his campaign suck up lots of airtime that might otherwise be inhaled by a Pete Buttigieg or a Beto O’Rourke. That’s how Trump won, remember? A Summer of Biden might be exactly what the old man needs to stay ahead.

As Brit Hume wrote when Biden was only 43, “The rhetorical fervor of his stump speeches and debating style, have earned him the reputation of a man whose mouth often runs — and runs, and runs — well ahead of his mind.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: ‘Prolonged Institutional Failure’ at Harvard.

HMM: Liberal megadonors plan $100 million swing-state blitz to beat Trump.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: ROUNDUP: The campus free speech stories this week you may have missed.

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LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: U.S. Sends Muscle to Middle East After Word Spreads of Possible Iran Attack. “It’s something we’ve been working on for a little while,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told reporters traveling with him to Europe. “It is absolutely the case that we have seen escalatory actions from the Iranians, and it is equally the case that we will hold the Iranians accountable for attacks on American interests.”

NEWS YOU CAN USE: How to Talk to Millennials About Capitalism.

THAT’S THE PROBLEM WITH OTHER PEOPLE’S MONEY: Donations to Sanders cut in half after Biden entry, begs donors to ‘dig a little deeper.’

CHANGE: Paul Krugman on Election Night: “If the question is when markets will recover, a first-pass answer is never.”

New York Times this weekend: The Economy That Wasn’t Supposed to Happen: Booming Jobs, Low Inflation.

THE MASK SLIPS: Rep. Al Green: If We Don’t Impeach Trump, He Will Get Re-Elected.

ANDREW MCCARTHY: The FBI’s Trump-Russia Investigation Was Formally Opened on False Pretenses.

FLASHBACK, SPYING EDITION: Top Dem: Obama team compiling ‘information about everything on every individual.’

Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., believes that the 2016 Democratic nominee has a good chance to win because President Obama’s campaign team has been compiling a database about the American people containing “information about everything on every individual on ways that it’s never been done before.”

Hmm.

COLD WAR II: The Overlooked Military Implications of the 5G Debate.

There are economic implications for which entities can secure the greatest global market share of 5G technology. Technological innovation drives economic growth, job creation, and global economic influence. Huawei may have a long-term market advantage over U.S and Western telecoms because the former has been able to offer 5G products at far cheaper rates than the latter. Furthermore, there are also concerns that Chinese-built 5G technology is likely to contain backdoors that could be used to enable Chinese economic or national security espionage. It is unlikely that Beijing would actively monitor all of the content of the data that comes across Huawei owned or operated infrastructure (although it may collect and analyze metadata). However, it is conceivable that Huawei would get a proverbial “tap on the shoulder” from Beijing to share pertinent information in specific instances. This may include individually targeting senior corporate executives, which is enabled by the millimeter wave frequency that 5G networks employ.

The military applications of 5G technology have vital strategic and battlefield implications for the U.S. Historically, the U.S. military has reaped enormous advantages from employing cutting edge technology on the battlefield. 5G technology holds similar innovative potential. Perhaps most obviously, the next generation of telecommunications infrastructure will have a direct impact on improving military communications. However, it will also produce cascading effects on the development of other kinds of military technologies, such as robotics and artificial intelligence. For instance, artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities, such as those used in the Department of Defense’s Project Maven, could be greatly enhanced when leveraging the data processing speeds made possible through 5G infrastructure. As an era of great power competition emerges between the United States and China, the United States has a compelling strategic interest in being at the forefront of these new technologies.

Indeed.

OUT: DON’T BE EVIL. In: Algorithms of Suppression.

NICE: The F-35 is about to get a lot more lethal in air-to-air combat — without losing its stealth. “The new weapons rack — Sidekick — is designed to allow the fifth-generation fighters to carry an additional AIM-120 Amraam in each of its two internal weapons bays, increasing the weapons capacity to six from four.”

KIMBERLEY STRASSEL: For Fear Of William Barr: The attorney general gets attacked because his probe endangers many powerful people.

These attacks aren’t about special counsel Robert Mueller, his report or even the surreal debate over Mr. Barr’s first letter describing the report. The attorney general delivered the transparency Democrats demanded: He quickly released a lightly redacted report, which portrayed the president in a negative light. What do Democrats have to object to?

Some of this is frustration. Democrats foolishly invested two years of political capital in the idea that Mr. Mueller would prove President Trump had colluded with Russia, and Mr. Mueller left them empty-handed. Some of it is personal. Democrats resent that Mr. Barr won’t cower or apologize for doing his job. Some is bitterness that Mr. Barr is performing like a real attorney general, making the call against obstruction-of-justice charges rather than sitting back and letting Democrats have their fun with Mr. Mueller’s obstruction innuendo.

But most of it is likely fear. Mr. Barr made real news in that Senate hearing, and while the press didn’t notice, Democrats did. The attorney general said he’d already assigned people at the Justice Department to assist his investigation of the origins of the Trump-Russia probe. He said his review would be far-reaching—that he was obtaining details from congressional investigations, from the ongoing probe by the department’s inspector general, Michael Horowitz, and even from Mr. Mueller’s work. Mr. Barr said the investigation wouldn’t focus only on the fall 2016 justifications for secret surveillance warrants against Trump team members but would go back months earlier.

He also said he’d focus on the infamous “dossier” concocted by opposition-research firm Fusion GPS and British former spy Christopher Steele, on which the FBI relied so heavily in its probe. Mr. Barr acknowledged his concern that the dossier itself could be Russian disinformation, a possibility he described as not “entirely speculative.” He also revealed that the department has “multiple criminal leak investigations under way” into the disclosure of classified details about the Trump-Russia investigation.

Do not underestimate how many powerful people in Washington have something to lose from Mr. Barr’s probe. Among them: Former and current leaders of the law-enforcement and intelligence communities. The Democratic Party pooh-bahs who paid a foreign national (Mr. Steele) to collect information from Russians and deliver it to the FBI. The government officials who misused their positions to target a presidential campaign. The leakers. The media. More than reputations are at risk. Revelations could lead to lawsuits, formal disciplinary actions, lost jobs, even criminal prosecution.

Well, we can hope.

Related: Overwhelming Majority Want Investigation into Obama DOJ Spying of Trump.

Flashback, March 2017: “Hypothesis: The spying-on-Trump thing is worse than we even imagine, and once it was clear Hillary had lost and it would inevitably come out, the Trump/Russia collusion talking point was created as a distraction.” (Bumped).

OH: Muslim American Society investigating ‘oversight’ following controversial video at Philly Islamic center; event organizer ‘dismissed.’

A national Muslim group says it will conduct an investigation into an event at a Philadelphia Islamic center last month during which a group of youngsters sang songs it said were not “properly vetted,” calling that “an unintended mistake and an oversight.”

Youngsters at the Muslim American Society Islamic Center in North Philadelphia are shown in video footage speaking in Arabic during a celebration of “Ummah Day,” said the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), a Middle East monitoring organization. One girl says “we will chop off their heads” to “liberate the sorrowful and exalted Al-Aqsa Mosque” in Jerusalem, according to the MEMRI.

“While we celebrate the coming together of different cultures and languages, not all songs were properly vetted,” the Muslim American Society, based in Washington, said in a statement issued Friday. “This was an unintended mistake and an oversight in which the center and the students are remorseful. MAS will conduct an internal investigation to ensure this does not occur again.”

Uh-huh.

FLASHBACK: Remember when Obama made fun of Trump’s ‘magic wand’ to fix the economy?

CONRAD BLACK: What’s The Matter With Europe?

President Trump has been much criticized, but he told Theresa May she would have trouble leaving the European Union and negotiating to continue in it, and he was correct.

He has criticized Merkel for contributing 1 percent of GDP to defense and leaving the real defense of Germany to the United States and others, while failing to support the sale of defensive weapons to Ukraine and making Germany 70 percent dependent on Russia for energy. He is correct.

Trump advised Macron that he was trying for everything at once and he was correct. Perhaps the U.S. president should have been more discreet and more subtle, but the former presidents with whom he is compared, were generally dealing with more competent European leaders: from Churchill to Thatcher and even Tony Blair, Adenauer to Kohl, de Gaulle to Chirac.

Europe has abdicated. It has no coherence, no leadership, no influence. The president of the United States has cut America loose from the nonsense of the Paris climate and Iran nuclear agreements, popular with the Europeans, and is making direct arrangements with the other major powers—China, Japan, India, and even possibly Russia. We are back to the 1930s in some respects, but fortunately without Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, and the Japanese imperialists.

“New Europe” — a once-mocked term that now seems prophetic — is doing much better than Old Europe, but Old Europe is still where most of the power lies. And most of the dysfunction.