OLD AND IN THE WAY: The special counsel who brought no charges against President Biden for mishandling classified documents wrote a report that is devastating for the man who’s been accused of being too old to run for re-election.

  The report that found no criminal wrongdoing went out if its way to describe Biden as old and feeble. It says Biden was unable in interviews to remember key dates of his vice presidency, and even when his son Beau had died. “Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview with him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” Special Counsel Robert Hur wrote.

  Biden was so angry about it that he called a press conference last night. “I’m well meaning, and I’m an elderly man, and I know what the hell I’m doing,” Biden said to a Fox News reporter who asked him about the report. “My memory is so bad I let you speak.”

  Biden held on to classified documents after leaving the vice presidency in 2017 and was even found to have shared material “implicating sensitive intelligence sources and methods” with the ghost writer of his memoir. But no criminal wrongdoing.

  Hur wrote that if Biden were to be tried after leaving office it would be difficult to convince a jury that “a former president well into his 80s” was guilty of a felony that “requires a mental state of willfulness.” 

  Biden said he is the most qualified person to be president and that he should “finish the job that I started.”

SUPREME ISSUES: Supreme Court justices, even the more liberal members, seemed skeptical yesterday about upholding the California court decision to bar Donald Trump from presidential ballots in that state.

  Much of it came down to the question of whether states have the power to exclude candidates from elections. Justice Elena Kagan, one of the court’s three liberals, expressed concern that allowing the removal of Trump could set the precedent of giving individual states “extraordinary” power to affect national elections.

  The Colorado Supreme Court ruled last year that Trump should be barred from the ballot because he was a participant in the January 6^th insurrection and can be excluded under the terms of the third clause of the 14^th amendment.

  Chief Justice John Roberts several times raised the prospect that other states could retaliate by removing a Democratic candidate from their ballots by also charging insurrection. Jason Murray, a lawyer for the Colorado voter group that brought the original lawsuit, said courts could stop such abuse of process. “This court can write an opinion that emphasizes how extraordinary ‘insurrection against the Constitution’ is and how rare that is because it requires an assault not just on the application of law, but on constitutionally mandated functions themselves like we saw on Jan. 6,” Murray said.

  Justice Brett Kavanaugh questioned whether preventing Trump from being on the ballot would disenfranchise voters. Murray said, “The reason we’re here is that President Trump tried to disenfranchise 80 million Americans who voted against him, and the Constitution doesn’t require that he be given another chance.” 

THE WAR ROOM:  President Biden issued what may have been his sharpest criticism of Israel last night in that same press conference, describing war operations in Gaza as “over the top” and that the suffering of innocents has “got to stop.”

  Most of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million people has been displaced as Israel levels whole neighborhoods. An estimated 27,000 Palestinians have been killed. “There are a lot of innocent people who are starving,” Biden said. “There are a lot of innocent people who are in trouble and dying. And it’s got to stop.”

 In Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky has fired and replaced the chief of the country’s military in a leadership shakeup in the midst of a slogging winter war with the army short on bodies and bullets.

FOX IN THE KREMLIN: In a two-hour interview with fired Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Russian President Vladimir Putin called on the US to “make an agreement” to cede Ukrainian territory to Russia in order to end the war.

  Putin appeared to be using Carlson as a conduit to conservative politicians in the US who are already balking at giving further military aid to Ukraine.

  The Russian president laid out an historical claim for Ukraine dating back to the 9^th Century and charged that Russia’s goal is to “stop this war” that he claims the West is waging against Russia.

  Russia invaded Ukraine two years ago. And despite being stalled, Putin asserted that Russia will not be defeated on the battlefield.  

THE OBIT PAGE: Seiji Ozawa, the Japanese conductor who was music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1973 to 2002, died three days ago in Tokyo at age 88. 

  Ozawa was a leader among Asian musicians who came to the West and in turn helped spread Western classical music to Korea, Japan, and China.

THE SPIN RACK: Michael Mann, a renowned climate scientists, won a $2 million defamation judgement against two conservative writers in a DC Superior Court. Mark Steyn, a right-wing author, had called Mann’s work “fraudulent.” And Rand Simberg had compared Mann’s work to an infamous child molester, saying Mann had “molested and tortured data.” — Medals to be awarded in the 2024 Paris Olympics in Paris will include a little piece of original iron taken from the Eiffel tower during renovations.  

BELOW THE FOLD:  A researcher at Princeton University has found that “mutant” wolves roaming the grounds of the abandoned Chernobyl power plant appear to be immune to radiation poisoning.

  In 1986 Chernobyl had a steam explosion that released radioactive material into the air and for a while the world anticipated nuclear meltdown. The compound has been fenced off ever since. Researcher Shane Campbell-Staton says the wolves are able to tolerate six times the amount of radiation exposure that would be safe for humans.

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