BIDEN AGE PROBLEM RATTLES CAMPAIGN. There was some buzz Thursday morning about the then-unseen report by special counsel Robert Hur, the man the Biden Justice Department appointed to investigate President Joe Biden’s alleged mishandling of classified documents. By the end of the day, the report was public, the political world was agog at the quantity of damaging evidence it presented, and the president was in front of the press in an impromptu, rare nighttime news conference, angrily denouncing the special counsel’s findings. And then the Biden White House went to war, but not war over classified documents. The White House went to war over the 81-year-old president’s age.

Hur had decided not to charge Biden with any crime related to classified documents. Some of Biden’s defenders cited that as instant exoneration, but the fact is Hur couldn’t charge Biden given that it is long-standing Justice Department policy that a sitting president cannot be indicted. Instead, Hur began with the statement that “our investigation uncovered evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen,” including “marked classified documents about military and foreign policy in Afghanistan.” Remember that Biden’s predecessor and main challenger, former President Donald Trump, has been charged with more than 30 counts of “willful retention of national defense information,” and Hur’s description of what Biden did looks pretty damning.