HOUSE OFFICIALS MUM ON NEW CYBERSECURITY MEASURES: Remember Jackson Cosko and Imran Awan, the congressional Information Technology (IT) aides who committed serious abuses of the Senate and House computer systems? Select Committee on Modernization of Congress recommends half a dozen IT reforms but won’t say if they will prevent future such abuses.

DEMOCRATS TAKE CARE OF EACH OTHER. YOU GOTTA PROBLEM WITH THAT? Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo is chairman of the Democratic Governors’ Association (DGA). Lobbyist Donald Schweitzer is the DGA’s treasurer and represents IGT, a Brit gambling company. Guess who just got a $1 billion contract to manage Rhode Island’s lottery? Where I’m from in the South (Oklahoma and Texas), that’s called the Good Ole Boys network in action.

WASHINGTON POST SHOULD PREPARE TO LOSE THE COVINGTON APPEAL: A federal judge dismissed Nicholas Sandman’s defamation suit Friday, but don’t assume that’s the end of the case. It’s not and the once-respected newspaper’s attorneys and editors better prepare to lose on appeal.

UPDATE: Charles Glasser, than whom there is no better when it comes to Jags and media law, doesn’t think there will be an appeal.

SEVEN TIMES MUELLER PLAYED DUMB: Margot Cleveland of The Federalist demonstrates with crushing clarity that former Special Counsel Robert Mueller was using feigned ignorance to avoid responding to seven key questions he was asked by Republicans on the House judiciary and intelligence panels.

CONGRATS TO THE FILMMAKERS AT CAPITAL RESEARCH CENTER: “No Safe Spaces,” directed by Justin Folk and produced by Mark Joseph, won the Grand Prize at the Anthem Film Festival in Las Vegas. The event is held in conjunction with FreedomFest.

The film is one of the growing list of high-quality productions from Capital Research Center’s (CRC) Dangerous Documentaries, led by Joseph Klein. The CRC has an ambitious agenda for its filmmaking group, but then what’s the point of not doing so if the preservation of liberty is the aim?

MAYBE THE ATMOSPHERE IN CONGRESS ISN’T SO UNCIVIL AFTER ALL: They don’t call it the “lower chamber” for nothing, but maybe Members of the House of Representatives are more civil than the MSM claims. On the other hand, they don’t make two-day long speeches these days, either

THE MOST VIP QUESTION REPUBLICANS MUST ASK MUELLER: When former Special Counsel Robert Mueller appears before the House judiciary and intelligence committees Wednesday, Democrats have made sure to make it as difficult as possible for Republicans to ask probing questions.

Even so, there is one question at the heart of Mueller’s two-year investigation that GOP congressmen must ask, according to Margot Cleveland, writing today on The Federalist. It has to do with whether Michael Flynn’s original lawyers and Mueller were given all of the evidence possessed by the U.S. intelligence community. It’s complicated but well worth following.

RANK RUDENESS, HYPOCRISY ON DISPLAY BY CBS “NEWS:” Check out the contrast between how often CBS Host Margaret Brennan interrupts Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wy.) and the way she lets Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) drone on and on. I’m old enough to remember when CBS News actually knew what the word “journalism” meant and even practiced it on occasion.

WHAT’S WRONG WITH THIS (DIVERSE) PICTURE? America’s colleges and universities are dumping hundreds of millions of tax dollars into staffs and programs designed to make them more diverse. Is it working?

“Colleges and universities have not realized much progress toward ethno-racial and gender faculty diversity in recent years — the exception being a modest increase (between 1-2%) in tenured Asians across institutional types,” claims a study published by the Hispanic Journal of Law and Policy and analyzed this morning by Issues & Insights.

That likely doesn’t surprise you, but Issues & Insights piles up the illustrations that make clear the situation is so much worse: “The University of Texas at Austin has eight vice presidents in its Division of Diversity and Community Engagement, at an annual cost of $9.5 million. UC Berkeley has 175 diversity bureaucrats.” Unfortunately, there are many, many more.

HOW TO GET A JOB ON CAPITOL HILL: Here’s where to look for openings, how to get a foot in the door, what your resume should include, and why the “golden reference” is key.

Bret Bernhardt was chief of staff for Senators Don Nickles (R-Okla.) and Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), so he knows the Hill. And wouldn’t Congress be improved if more Instapundit readers or Instapundit reader-approved folks were advising the senators and representatives?

THIS IS HOW THEY TOOK OVER PORTLAND: John Glynn, writing at The American Thinker, lays out the process by which the “City of Roses” (which also used to have a great Indy car race) became Antifa’s favorite American city. Coming soon to your city?

WERE HILL DEMS (MAYBE SOME REPS, TOO) BEING BLACKMAILED? By Imran Awan, the former House IT aide who worked for a fifth of the Democratic House Caucus and used his position to hack Congress, the Democratic National Committee and who knows what else?

Luke Rosiak, the investigative reporter who broke the Awan scandal, tells The Epoch Times he is convinced that Awan blackmailed Members of Congress before his arrest and may yet be blackmailing it today. But House Democrats don’t want to talk about it? Guess what, neither does former Republican Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, who looked the other way for months despite abundant evidence of what was going on under his nose.

Listen to Rosiak lay it out in stark, documented detail and you will find yourself nodding agreement with him that this is the biggest scandal in the entire history of Congress. It is an extraordinary story and Rosiak is the only Washington journalist who cared enough to dig out the details. It’s all in his book, too — “Obstruction of Justice.”

SIR DARROCH WAS A LEAKER: And now the rest of the story is told on why Sir Kim Darroch is leaving as Britain’s Ambassador to the U.S. According to the Washington Examiner’s Tom Rogan, Sir Darroch leaked U.S. intelligence like a sieve. Betcha there’s more to come, too.

AMERICA’S FIVE MOST-STRESSED CITIES: Detroit tops the list compiled by WalletHub, followed by Cleveland, Newark, Baltimore and Philadelphia. Next five are St. Louis, Cincinnati, Birmingham, Wilmington and Shreveport. Maybe that’s why four of top five are also top five for divorces?

INCOMING! That’s the message from Sundance at The Last Refuge, after sorting through the tea leaves following China’s decision to re-start those trade talks with the U.S. Beijing’s chief negotiator is back but this time there’s a handler to stiffen his spine for full-on, all-out trade war with the Trump team.

IS HONG KONG’S EMBATTLED LEADER ABOUT TO QUIT? The Epoch Times’ Frank Fang says Carrie Lam offered to resign but Communist authorities in Beijing said no. Fang cites a Financial Times report that the response was: ““No one else can clean up the mess and no one else wants the job.”

ANOTHER SIGN OF SECULAR HUMANISM’S FAILURE? America is rapidly becoming more secular as scientific enlightenment and progressive education dispel religious ignorance from the past, right? Wrong.

The numbers just don’t add up to anything remotely like an emerging godless paradise on Earth, according to two accomplished data jockeys, Rodney Stark and Glenn Stanton.

They dug deeply into multiple data sources, including the General Social Survey, Gallup World Poll and Pew Research Center, and found America is becoming more, not less, religious. Ditto for most of the rest of the world where Christianity is growing extremely quickly, Hinduism and Islam less so but still increasing, while Buddhism is declining.

BETO SAYS AMERICA FOUNDED ON WHITE SUPREMACY. THIS FORMER SLAVE SAW IT DIFFERENTLY: Frederick Douglass was unmatched in his fiery denunciations of slavery, but he and Beto saw two completely different American foundings.

AND SPEAKING OF THE PC POLICE: Jaelene Hinkle is a vocal Christian, according to Fox News, so clearly she should not have been on the U.S. Women’s World Cup Soccer team, even if she did play a key role in her professional teams winning two National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) championships, in 2016 and 2018.

IF BILL CLINTON DISAPPEARS, THIS MAY BE WHY: The Epoch Times’ Jeff Carlson details the extensive links between the former president and Jeffrey Epstein. Tic-Toc-Tic-Toc …

IT’S NOT JUST POLITICS, JOURNALISM BEING SUFFOCATED BY THE PC POLICE: The same repressive forces Glenn spotlights at CNN are at work in the scientific community, too. Just ask the Discovery Institute about the response to its “Scientific Uprising” video series.

PEROT WAS A BIG TRUMP FAN: Federal Election Commission (FEC) records show Ross Perot contributed the maximum legal amount to President Donald Trump during the 2016 Republican presidential primary and in the general election against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

UPDATE: The Epoch Times has corrected its original story to say it was Perot’s son, not Perot, who made the contributions to Trump in 2016.

AI CHURCH FOUNDER DROPS GOD, RESTORES DRIVERS: Well, this was certainly unexpected – Artificial Intelligence (AI) church founder and driver-less car pioneer Anthony Levandowski has dropped God from his congregational statement of beliefs.

But he’s found a renewed faith in drivers, at least for now. And therein lies a couple of takeaways for senators, representatives and normal people working in Congress on transportation and technology issues.

HAVING WEISSMANN TESTIFY MAY BE DEMS’ BIGGEST BLUNDER: Too little attention is being paid to what happens the day after former Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s July 17 public testimony before the House judiciary and intelligence committees, according to Margot Cleveland. Mueller’s deputy, Andrew Weissman, and other Mueller staffers will testify behind closed doors on July 18.

“But, far from damaging Trump, Weissmann’s closed-door testimony—if handled properly—will assist Republicans in unraveling the Russia-collusion-turned-obstruction witch hunt and inflict far greater damage on the Democrats,” Cleveland writes in The Federalist.

Weissmann’s prosecutorial dirty tricks in the Enron case, which resulted in the Arthur Anderson accounting firm closing down, among much else, aren’t well-known to the public now. Neither are his contributions to Democrats or his appearance at Hillary Clinton’s election night “victory” party.

That will change, beginning the afternoon of his testimony when the flood of leaks begin, along with the predictable explosion of Trump tweets. And I can’t wait to watch Sydney Powell and Joe diGenova doing their analyses.

33 TOUGH QUESTIONS MUELLER SHOULD BE ASKED: The Epoch Times’ Jeff Carlson has broken multiple stories in the Spygate epic, so answers to these queries will shine new light in numerous important places that remain dank and dark.

Questions nine and 14, for example, probe, respectively, Mueller’s ignoring the ties between the Hillary campaign and the DNC to Fusion GPS, Christopher Steele and the Steele Dossier, and the Russian ties of Fusion GPS.