Not Secret: Attorney General Merrick Garland yesterday appointed a special counsel to examine the matter of President Biden’s storage of secret documents in non-secure private locations.

  Garland named Robert Hur,  the former US Attorney for the District of Maryland, who was appointed by Donald Trump. Hur said in a statement, “I intend to follow the facts swiftly and thoroughly, without fear or favor, and will honor the trust placed in me to perform this service.”

 The first set of about a dozen secret documents was found before the November election at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in Washington, where Biden had an office after he was Vice President. 

  In a slow drip, it has also been revealed that more documents were found in the library of the President’s Delaware home, and the garage where he keeps his treasured Corvette. The White House has not revealed the content or the importance of the documents.

  As Special Counsel, Hur has a lot of power and leeway to investigate, but the decision whether to prosecute is ultimately up to Garland.

 A White House lawyer said, “We are confident that a thorough review will show that these documents were inadvertently misplaced, and the president and his lawyers acted promptly upon discovery of this mistake.” 

 But to give you an idea of where the extreme right will take this, Arizona’s failed Republican candidate for governor tweeted, “The ‘Penn Biden Center’ is a $54 Billion money laundering operation bankrolled by the Chinese Communist Party. Stolen, classified documents were illegally stored there by @JoeBiden.”

Econ 101: The rate of inflation dropped to 6.5 percent in December, down from 7.1 percent in November, according to the Consumer Price Index. This creates some hope that the worst of last year’s burst of inflation is tapering down.

  Lower prices were driven in part by dropping fuel prices and cheaper airline tickets. The news is likely to cause the Federal Reserve to ease up a bit on interest rate hikes that are so painful for car and home buyers.

  One of the shocking increases over the past 18 months has been in the price of eggs. In 2020 a dozen eggs were in the mid-dollar range and now they average $3.59. In California, they’ve gone as high as an average of $7.37 for a dozen Grade A large eggs. 

  What’s behind this, in part, is that bird flu has spread among the egg-laying hen population, eliminating about 5 percent of production. Forty-three million egg-laying chickens were slaughtered last year to control spread of the flu.

The War Room: Russia says it has taken the heavily embattled town of Soledar but the Ukrainians say it’s not so. 

  The Russian Defense Ministry said that Soledar was “of great importance for continuing successful offensive operations” in the Donbas region. A spokesman for Ukrainian troops said that Russia was “dispersing information noise.”

  Russia has been in desperate need of a win, although taking Soledar has limited strategic value. The Institute for the Study of War said that Russian forces “likely control most if not all of Soledar” but called it “at best a Russian Pyrrhic tactical victory.”

  As Ukraine tries to stiffen its air defenses, about 100 of its military personnel are on the way to the US to learn how to use the Patriot missile anti-aircraft system. It usually takes as much as a year, but it’s going to have to be done faster than that.

The Long Count: A faction of Republicans in Arizona, joined by some Democrats, is making a move to eliminate the extremists, Kari Lake among them, by having more open primaries. They want to put a question on the ballot about allowing voters to vote for any candidate they want, regardless of party affiliation.

  That would allow independents to vote, presumably bringing more moderates to the polls. It won’t be easy. Just getting the question on the ballot would require half a million signatures.

The Obit Page: Lisa Marie Presley, the daughter of Elvis Presley and Priscilla Presley, has died at age 54, only two days after attending the Golden Globe Awards in support of the movie “Elvis.” She was reported to have died in a hospital after receiving emergency treatment.

  She looked frail at the Globes.

  Presley had the pleasure and burden of being the only child of one of American culture’s most famous stars. She was a singer who had been married four times and was the mother of four children. Among her spouses were Nicolas Cage and Michael Jackson. 

  Her son, Benjamin Keough ,died by suicide in 2020 at the age of 27. 

  In September, Presley wrote an essay for National Grief Awareness Day in which she said, “Grief is something you will have to carry with you for the rest of your life, in spite of what certain people or our culture wants us to believe. You do not ‘get over it,’ you do not ‘move on,’ period.”

The Spin Rack: A powerful storm system knocked out power in Georgia and Alabama, killing six people in its path. Six of the dead were in in Autauga County, Alabama, where 40-50 homes were damaged or destroyed. — Ryan Kohberger, the man accused of murdering four University of Idaho students, appeared in court yesterday with cuts and bruises on his face and neck that were not there when he was first arrested. — CNN’s smart, and incisive correspondent Clarissa Ward has returned to cover the war in Ukraine while visibly pregnant with her third child. She said she does not intend to go to the front lines. 

Below the Fold: Long Island Rep. George Santos, who lied his way to office, said he’ll resign if 142,000 people ask him to, roughly the number who voted for him. For his campaign, Santos invented a life history, but he said on a podcast with Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, “I’ve lived an honest life.” 

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