UNBIASED - Israel/Gaza Resolution, Hush Money Trial Date Set, Trump's Bond Reduced, Boeing CEO Resigns, RFK Jr. Possibly Libertarian, and More.

Episode Date: March 25, 2024

1. Appeals Court Delays Trump's Deadline for Bond Posting and Reduces Amount to $175M (1:03)2. Judge Denies Trump's Motion for Delay in Hush Money Case, Says Trial Will Begin April 15th (3:20)3. Boeing CEO to Step Down at End of Year (8:00)4. Supreme Court Declines to Hear Murphy v. Biden Admin, Sandmann v. NY Times (8:58)5. RFK Jr. Allegedly in Talks to Possibly Appear on Libertarian Party Ticket (12:13)6. UN Security Council Passes Resolution Calling Immediate Ceasefire and Release of Hostages (13:38)7. Florida's Gov. DeSantis Signs New Law Banning Social Media for Children Under 14 (14:53)If you enjoyed this episode, please leave me a review and share it with those you know that also appreciate unbiased news! Watch this episode on YouTube. Follow Jordan on Instagram and TikTok. All sources for this episode can be found here.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Kick off an exciting football season with BetMGM, an official sportsbook partner of the National Football League. Yard after yard, down after down, the sportsbook born in Vegas gives you the chance to take action to the end zone and celebrate every highlight reel play. And as an official sportsbook partner of the NFL, BetMGM is the best place to fuel your football fandom on every game day. With a variety of exciting features,

BetMGM offers you plenty of seamless ways to jump straight onto the gridiron and to embrace peak sports action. Ready for another season of gridiron glory? What are you waiting for? Get off the bench, into the huddle, and head for the end zone all season long. Visit BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. Must be 19 years of age or older. Ontario only. Please gamble responsibly. Gambling problem? For free assistance,

call the Conax Ontario helpline at 1-866-531-2600. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Welcome back to Unbiased, your favorite source of unbiased news and legal analysis. Welcome back to Unbiased. Today is Monday, March 25th, 2024, and this is your rundown of today's news. As a reminder, I will be releasing episodes Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday this week, with Monday through Wednesday featuring daily news in 20 minutes or less, and then Friday will be a deep dive into the top one or two stories of the week. So with that being said, if there are any stories in today's episode, tomorrow's episode, or Wednesday's episode that you want a little bit more detail on,

you want me to dive a bit deeper into, please reach out to me on Instagram or email me jordan at jordanismylawyer.com. And that way I know what you guys want to hear on Friday. So that will be, that new format will be trialed this week and if all goes well, which I think it will, that'll be the new format moving forward. And finally, if you love the unbiased approach this episode provides, you feel more informed after listening, please go ahead and leave my show a review on whatever platform you listen and be sure to share this show with your friends. Without further ado, let's get into today's stories. Donald Trump's deadline to post a bond or cover the full judgment amount in his $464 million New York civil fraud judgment was today at 5 p.m. However, this morning around 11

a.m., a New York appeals court allowed for 10 more days and the reduction of the required bond amount. So here's the situation. Trump had previously filed a motion with the court asking the appeals court to put Judge Ngaran's ruling on hold completely while this case is up on appeal. Essentially, if that motion would have been granted in full as Trump had requested, Trump wouldn't have had to post the judgment amount at all while appealing this case. He wouldn't have been bar post the judgment amount at all while appealing this case. He wouldn't have been barred from serving as an officer or director in the state of New York for the next three years. His sons and his co-defendants wouldn't have been barred from serving as officers

or directors. He wouldn't have been barred from applying for loans from New York financial institutions for the next few years. So all of those sort of restrictions that Judge Engeron put in place would have been revoked or reversed. Now, what the judge did here, or what the appellate court did here, is it granted Trump's motion in part and then denied Trump's motion in part. So specifically what the court said is, look, we're not going to pause enforcement of the judgment completely, but we will give you another 10 days to post the bond amount and we'll reduce that bond amount to $175 million since you're having a hard time securing a bond for the full amount. Now, the ruling from the appeals court also allowed Trump and his co-defendants to continue conducting

business in the state of New York. There was no restriction on that, gave Trump the ability to apply for loans from New York financial institutions again. But all of those sort of permissions are conditional on Trump paying the new bond amount within 10 days. Now, as I said, the court also denied Trump's motion in part, and the portions of the motion that it denied dealt with the independent director of compliance and the monitor. So the appeals court upheld the lower court's installation of an independent director of compliance within the Trump organization hush money case regarding a second possible delay of the upcoming trial, which the judge ultimately denied. But here's what you should know about it. First and foremost, this case is dealing with Trump's payments to Stormy Daniels in 2016 for or I guess the payments were made allegedly to keep an affair between the two of them

quiet. And I say allegedly because Donald Trump has said that there keep an affair between the two of them quiet. And I say allegedly because Donald Trump has said that there was no affair. He has denied any affair. Now, something a lot of people don't know is that hush money payments in and of themselves are not illegal. They're fine. This type of payment would only be illegal if it's proven that the reason Stormy Daniels was paid was to not only keep her quiet, but also by keeping her quiet, she would benefit Trump's or it would benefit Trump's campaign. So in that case, Trump could be guilty of making an illegal payment to benefit his campaign. But again, a hush money payment in and of itself, not illegal. With that said,

what Trump is facing charges for in this case is allegedly falsifying the business records surrounding those payments. So the financial accounting of it all. Because what happened is Michael Cohen, Trump's former lawyer, is the one that paid Stormy Daniels. And the payment was classified as a legal retainer. So according to Michael Cohen, him and Trump had agreed to this alleged scheme, which would keep Stormy Daniels quiet during the campaign by paying her off through an LLC of Cohen's and classifying the payment as a retainer fee. So that is what this case is all about. Now, jury selection in this case was supposed to start today. But then a few

weeks ago, the DOJ, who is actually not the entity prosecuting the case, the Manhattan DA is, but the DOJ released more than 100,000 documents that were subpoenaed by Trump's team. And these documents are said to be related to the case. Prosecutors say that only a few hundred of the documents are actually related to the case, but when these documents were released by the DOJ, Trump's team asked for a delay in the trial in order to give them more time to review all of these newly released documents. In the alternative, Trump's team asked for an outright dismissal of the entire indictment. So at the time that these documents were released, what the judge did is he delayed the trial by 30 days, which the prosecutor's office actually didn't object to.

They were fine with that. They just didn't want to delay longer than 30 days. But also at that time, the judge set a hearing to determine whether there would be a further delay in the trial or a dismissal of the indictment in accordance with Trump's request. And that was the hearing that was had today. What we know from the hearing is the arguments from Trump's side as to why there should be an additional delay or why the indictment should be dismissed is that the prosecutors had purposely taken this lackadaisical approach to obtaining the documents from the DOJ. And because of it,

Trump's team had to go after it themselves. And despite the DOJ supposedly declining to turn over the documents to the prosecutors, the DOJ ultimately turned them over to Trump's team once they subpoenaed them. So what Trump's team says is had it not been for the prosecutor's lack of effort here or misconduct, neither party would be in the position that they're in right now. But the judge did not like this argument. At one point, the judge said, quote, you are literally accusing the Manhattan DA's office and the people assigned to this case of prosecutorial misconduct and are trying to make me complicit in it. And you don't have a single site to support that position, end quote. The judge also did not like that Trump's team hadn't brought up this

issue earlier when they had previously asked for a delay in the case just a couple, maybe, actually, it was probably more like a month ago, and the subpoena had already been issued at that point. So the judge wanted to know why Trump's team waited so long to subpoena the documents in the first place, and then why Trump's team didn't bring this issue up to the judge when Trump's team asked for a different delay. So ultimately, as I said, the judge denied Trump's motion as he didn't find that there was any bad faith from the prosecutor's side, said the trial will start April 15th. And the judge did leave the door open for Trump's team to file a motion for delay based on pretrial publicity concerns, which this was a concern that Trump's team had raised at the hearing. So he said, you guys can go ahead and file your motion for delay,

you know, on account of that. But the motion for delay that was heard before the court today was denied. Boeing's CEO, Dave Calhoun, announced his intention to step down from his position at the end of this year. Calhoun said in a letter to the company in part, quote, as you all know, Alaska Airlines flight 1282 was a watershed moment for Boeing. We must continue to respond to this accident with humility and complete transparency. It is the future of our company that is the subject of my letter to you today. I have been considering for some time in discussion with our board of directors the right time for a CEO transition at Boeing. I want to share with you that I have decided this will be my last year the upcoming annual meeting of shareholders, and that Boeing's commercial the Biden administration, the other Sandman versus New York Times. The first case Murphy deals with the reservation of land and

presidential power. So at issue in that case was this portion of land in Oregon, which Congress had previously reserved for permanent forest production through a piece of legislation. And we're talking all the way back in 1937. Then about 90 years later, in 2017, President Obama invokes a presidential power or an executive power through the Antiquities Act to add a particular portion of that federally reserved land to an existing Oregon National Monument. The problem was that the land, that lands that are a part of that particular monument can't also be used to produce timber. So it created sort of this conflict of federal protection, so to speak. Congress had reserved it for timber protection, but then Obama assigned it to, or assigned a portion of it to a protected monument.

So a couple of timber companies out of Oregon filed suit challenging this sort of presidential authority under the Antiquities Act. And the question that they presented to the court was whether the Antiquities Act allows the president to declare federal land to be a part of a national monument where a separate federal statue reserves that same land for a specific purpose that's incompatible for national monument status. Now, as I said, the court denied this petition. Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh dissented, meaning those two justices would have liked to hear this case, but ultimately the majority declined to hear it. And what that means is that the appellate

court ruling will stand. And the appellate court ruling in this case was that the president's declaration of the National Monument can coexist with that earlier piece of legislation because the earlier piece of legislation deals with a much larger chunk of land than the particular piece of land that's at issue in this case. The second case, Sandman, was an appeal from a 19-year-old who sued a bunch of media outlets a few years ago after they posted a video of him nose-to-nose with an older Native American man. Sandman at the time was 16 years old, and he was attending a March for Life rally while Nathan Phillips, the Native American, he's a Native American rights activist,

he was attending a nearby indigenous people's march. And this video of the two of them nose-to-nose went viral. A bunch of outlets picked it up, of course, and quoted Phillips saying that Sandman had blocked him and New York Times, USA Today's parent company, ABC, CBS, and some others for including that quote from Phillips, a quote which Sandman says was defamatory and led to his cancellation in society. This case ended up getting dismissed because the judge said that the quote at issue was an opinion and opinions are protected by the First Amendment. Sandman then appeals this case, but the Supreme Court justices declined to intervene. So again, that appellate ruling will stand, which means that case is dismissed. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is allegedly in talks to run on the Libertarian Party presidential ticket, according to Libertarian Party Chair Angela McArdle, who says she's been speaking with Kennedy about a potential switch in recent weeks. So RFK Jr. is currently running as an independent,

but in the past he has said that he aligns with Libertarians on a lot of issues. Now, as far as the differences between independents and Libertarians, the most notable difference is that the Libertarian Party is actually a party, whereas independent candidates, they're not affiliated with any party. So independent candidates and voters are part of a movement rather than a party. Independents tend to not align with either of the major two parties, whereas Libertarians' views tend to fall into one bucket, which can generally be described as small government and individual rights. Currently, RFK Jr. is only officially on the ballot in Utah. However, his campaign has said that it's claimed enough signatures in seven more states, but the Libertarian Party is

already on the ballots in 36 states. So it may be a smart choice for him depending on how many ballots he can secure as an independent. But this, of course, all depends too on how the delegates vote at the national convention, because it's a party, the Libertarian Party, they have to vote for him as their candidate. Otherwise, he wouldn't be on the ballot anyway, even if he wanted to switch. The UN Security Council passed a resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire between Gaza and Israel for the month of Ramadan, which ends April 9th, the immediate and unconditional release of hostages, and emphasis on the, quote, urgent need for aid in Gaza. The United States was the only member of the council to abstain from the vote. All other 14 members voted yes, and as a result, Israel's Prime Minister

Netanyahu, he wasn't too happy with the United States abstaining rather than vetoing. So he actually canceled a trip that two of his top advisors were supposed to take to the United States. So the difference between this resolution and resolutions the United States had vetoed in the past was that this resolution contained a provision for the release of the hostages, whereas the ones the United States had vetoed in the past did not. So here's the thing. These resolutions are legally binding on members of the UN. What's interesting here is that Israel is a member of the UN, but Gaza slash Hamas is not. So what that means technically is Israel is legally bound by the resolution, and if it fails to comply, it could face sanctions. But Hamas doesn't have that same legal obligation because Gaza isn't a member to the UN. So we'll see what happens with that. Florida's Governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill into law today that,

in part, bans children under the age of 14 from making social media profiles. This law also requires social media platforms to delete the accounts of those that it finds to belong to users under the age of 14. It requires parental permission for 14 and 15-year-olds trying to make social media accounts. It requires sexually explicit websites to use age verification, and it protects the ability of Floridians to remain anonymous online. This law, though it's likely to face legal challenges from social media platforms, is currently set to take effect January 1st of 2025.

Tomorrow, the Supreme Court is hearing oral arguments in alliance for Hippocratic Medicine versus FDA, which is the case dealing with the legality and accessibility of mifepristone and over-the-counter abortion medication. So stay tuned for tomorrow's episode because I will be covering oral arguments as well as the questions and concerns that the justices express. That is what I have for you today. Thank you so much for being here and I will talk to you tomorrow.