Fusion is known for doing opposition research. During the Republican primaries, a conservative website funded, in large part, by Paul Singer, a Republican billionaire who didn’t want Trump to win the nomination, hired Fusion to look into Trump. After he did win the nomination, the Clinton campaign and the D.N.C. hired Fusion and, through the law firm, paid for the research.

Fusion worked with a well-regarded former British spy named Christopher Steele to produce a dossier that accused the Trump campaign of colluding with Russia. The dossier also included salacious — and unproven, if not false — stories about Trump’s personal behavior.

Trump and his media allies have tried to downplay his campaign’s Russia dealings by saying the Clinton campaign’s financing of the dossier was even worse. It’s classic whataboutism, and it’s part of Trump’s effort to sow confusion about the allegations against him.

It’s also a silly comparison. Clinton’s campaign was engaging in the usual, if tough, practice of trying to uncover information that makes an opponent look bad. Trump’s campaign, by contrast, was potentially colluding with a foreign government hostile to the United States to disseminate stolen material — with Trump then lying about it and trying to prevent a federal investigation of it.

“Trump’s entire defense amounts to elementary school taunt: ‘I know you are, but what am I?’” writes Max Boot, summarizing a piece he’s written for Foreign Policy.

The dossier intrigue is part of a “frantic effort to distract attention from what we do know, which is … that Russia tried to meddle in the election,” Ruth Marcus has said on CBS. “Not for the first time,” The Los Angeles Times’s editorial board notes, “the president and his allies are seizing on a sideshow to distract attention from the main event.”

In The Times. Regular readers know that I consider the lack of economic diversity at the nation’s top public and private colleges to be inexcusable. In an op-ed, Paul Glastris of The Washington Monthly offers another good idea for improving the situation: these colleges should admit more adults — people who have spent years working before enrolling in (or returning to) college. Also, for the latest news on the New York terror attack, follow The Times’s news coverage.