UNBIASED - June 18, 2024: Biden Announces New Immigration Action, NY Court Denies Trump's Gag Order Appeal, Ethics Committee Re-Opens Rep. Gaetz Investigation, and More.

Episode Date: June 18, 2024

1. Biden Administration Announces New Immigration Action on DACA's 12th Anniversary (0:43)2. NY Court of Appeals Denies Trump's Appeal of Gag Order; Request for Lift Still Pending (4:30)3. House Ethics Committee Announces Re-Opening of Investigation Into Rep. Matt Gaetz Plus New Allegations (7:09)4. Quick Hitters: CBO Releases New Federal Deficit Estimate, USDA Pauses Some Food Exports From Mexico Due to Security Concerns, Biden's Secret Service Agent Robbed at Gunpoint, Boeing CEO Testifies Before Senate, Massachusetts State-Wide 911 Outage (10:05)Support ‘UNBIASED’ on Patreon.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

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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 Tuesday, June 18th, and this is your daily news rundown. Just as a reminder, my news cycle ends at 3 p.m. Eastern time, just to give myself time to get this episode out before the end of the workday. So any big stories that break after 3 p.m. Eastern will usually be covered on the following day's episode. If you love the unbiased approach that this episode provides and you feel more informed after listening, please go ahead and leave my show a review on whatever platform you

listen, share the show with your friends. And if you're watching on YouTube, just hit that thumbs up button, subscribe to the channel if you haven't already. All of those things really help me out. So thank you very much in advance. And without further ado, let's get into today's stories, starting with two announcements from President Biden, the first of which will actually both were to mark the 12th anniversary of DACA, which stands for the Deferred Action

for Childhood Arrivals that was enacted under the Obama administration. But today was the 12th anniversary. So President Biden made two announcements. The first announcement was this executive action called Parole in Place, which allows certain undocumented spouses and children of United States citizens to apply for lawful permanent residency without having to leave the country. So here's what this means, and here's how it changes things. Under current federal law, an immigrant can marry a United States citizen and get a green card. But if an immigrant enters the United States unlawfully and marries a United States citizen and tries to get a green card, that person has to actually leave the country, file what's called a waiver for unlawful presence, wait for their final interview outside the country,

and then re-enter legally to be eligible for a green card. And this process can take anywhere from five to seven years on average. And in certain circumstances, if an immigrant is living here for a certain period of time unlawfully and goes ahead and applies for a green card, it can actually sometimes trigger this automatic 10-year ban, which deters a lot of people from even going down that road. But anyway, once a person leaves the country and goes through the final interview, gets a green card and is living lawfully here in the United States for a period of five years, that's when they can apply for citizenship.

So that's how the process currently works. But under Biden's new parole in place program, which he announced today, assuming it's finalized and assuming it's, you know, upheld in court, you know, passes all of these challenges that I'm sure are going to be filed, those same individuals that would have had to have left the country to wait for their final interview would be able to do their interview here in the United States, meaning they wouldn't have to leave the United States at all during that process of obtaining their green card. As far as who's eligible for this program, it's only those that have lived in the United States for at least 10 years as of Monday, so as of yesterday, and are legally married to a United

States citizen, again, as of Monday, as of yesterday. Those are the only people that would be eligible to apply for this program. The administration is expecting the program will provide legal status and protections for roughly 500,000 families and 50,000 non-citizen children of immigrants under the age of 21 whose parents are married to a United States citizen. And then just as a final note, this parole in place program, albeit a more narrow version, has actually been in place for undocumented spouses and children of United States service members and veterans since 2007. And it was more recently affirmed by Congress in 2020.

So in essence, Biden's plan extends a broader version of that parole in place program to undocumented spouses and children of all United States citizens rather than just United States service members and veterans. Biden's second announcement today was in regard to work visas for DACA recipients and college educated undocumented migrants. So under that plan, those who have earned a degree at an accredited United States institution of higher education here in the United States and who have received a degree at an accredited United States institution of higher education here in the United States and who have received an offer of employment from a United States employer in a field related to their degree will be able to receive work visas faster than they were able

to before. So it'll streamline that work visa process for those individuals. So that's the gist of Biden's two announcements today. And now we can move on to some news about his election opponent. Earlier today, New York's highest court published a decision list, and on it was the court's denial of Trump's appeal related to his hush money gag order. Now, the timeline of this denial is a little bit confusing, so stick with me here. But first, this was the gag order issued by Judge Mershon in Trump's hush money case. It prevented him from making public statements about any of the witnesses, jurors, prosecutors, court staff,

members of the court staff's family. However, it did not prevent Trump from commenting on the judge himself or Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg. Now, as I said, the timeline of this is a little confusing. When the gag order was originally issued, Trump appealed it. And that's the appeal that the New York court denied today. But after Trump was found guilty last month, Trump's attorneys asked Merchan to lift that gag order, and that still has yet to be ruled on. We're expecting a ruling on that soon. So it could very well get lifted, but this denial from the highest court in New York is from that original appeal months ago. And when Trump's attorneys asked Merchan to lift that gag order, they basically said, look, now that the trial's

over, there's no need for the gag order to still be in place. You know, all of the concerns from the court are irrelevant at this point. But DA Bragg objected and said, no, no, no, we still have things happening. Sentencing is still a month away. We still need to protect the integrity of the court and court proceedings, at least until sentencing. So Mershon still needs to rule on that, whether to lift the gag order. Again, the ruling today from the New York Court of Appeals was a ruling on the original appeal months ago. And the court's denial was very brief. It just read, quote, appeal dismissed upon the ground that no substantial constitutional question is directly involved, end quote. And before we move on, I do just want to mention that when you read about this story in the news,

you'll see the court that denied Trump's appeal is called the New York Court of Appeals. I've mentioned this before, but New York, specifically the state of New York, structures their court system a little bit differently. The New York Court of Appeals is actually the highest court in the state of New York. Typically, when it comes to state courts, we see trial courts are the low-level state courts, court of appeals are the mid-level state courts, and then the state Supreme Court is the highest court in a state. But in New York, the lowest court is actually the Supreme Court, the mid-level court is called the Appellate Division, and then the highest court in

the state of New York is called the New York Court of Appeals. So just keep that in mind because it can be a bit confusing and it can be a bit misleading. In some news out of Congress, the House Ethics Committee announced today in a rare update that it has resumed its investigation into Representative Matt Gaetz and is investigating additional allegations. So to catch you up to speed very quickly, the investigation into Matt Gaetz was launched back in 2021 following allegations of, quote, sexual misconduct and or illicit drug use, shared inappropriate images or videos on the House floor, misused state identification records, converted campaign funds to personal use and or accepted a bribe, improper gratuity or impermissible gift in violation of

House rules, end quote. After the investigation was announced, the DOJ then requested that the ethics committee actually defer its consideration of the matter to the DOJ. And the DOJ subsequently opened a sex trafficking investigation, and that investigation specifically stemmed from an allegation that Gates had had sex with and paid for sex with a 17-year-old girl. But then in 2023, the DOJ withdrew its deferral request and said it would not be prosecuting Gates, but that meant that it was back on the table for the House Ethics Committee to reopen its investigation. At the time, it was speculated but not confirmed that the committee was picking up the investigation where it left off.

And today, the committee confirmed that it had and confirmed the investigation into additional allegations. So the committee's update today comes one day after Gates claimed the committee is opening new, quote unquote, frivolous investigations into him. Now, what we know about the ethics committee is typically it works very much behind the scenes, very much in confidence, but today's update seems to tell us that they are rebutting Gates's remarks yesterday. So the committee wrote in its update in part, quote, Representative Gates has categorically denied all of the allegations before the committee. Notwithstanding the difficulty in obtaining relevant information from Representative Gates and others, the committee has spoken with more than a dozen witnesses, issued 25 subpoenas, and reviewed thousands of pages of documents in the matter. Based on its review to date, the committee has determined that certain

of the allegations merit continued review. During the course of its investigation, the committee has also identified additional allegations that merit review, end quote. And the committee then goes on to say that it will continue reviewing the allegations that Gates may have engaged in sexual misconduct and illicit drug use, accepted improper gifts, dispensed special privileges and favors to individuals whom he had a personal relationship, and sought to obstruct government investigations had a personal relationship and sought to obstruct government investigations of his conduct. However, the committee said it will not take further action at this time on the allegations that he may have shared inappropriate images or videos on the House floor, misused state identification records, converted campaign

funds to personal use, and or accepted a bribe or improper gratuity. So that is what we know from the committee's update. And now we can finish this episode with some quick hitters. The Congressional Budget Office released an updated projection for the federal budget deficit today, which expects the deficit will hit $1.9 trillion this fiscal year, which is $408 billion or 25% larger than the agency estimated in February. The CBO attributes 80% of the increase to four main factors, the largest being the changes made to the estimated cost of student loans and the administration's proposed rule to reduce balances on student loans. This accounts for $145 billion of the increase.

The second factor is the FDIC's failure to recover payments it made when resolving bank failures in 2023 and 2024. As quickly as expected, this accounts for $70 billion. The third factor is newly enacted legislation, including aid to Ukraine, which accounts for $60 billion of the increase. And the fourth factor is Medicaid outlays being higher than expected, which amounts to a $50 billion increase. The USDA has temporarily paused new exports of mangoes and avocados out of a particular region in Mexico due to security concerns. A spokesperson for the agency said the inspection program will remain paused until it can ensure its inspectors working in Mexico are safe. The USDA didn't elaborate on

the nature of the security threats, but other reports say the suspension stemmed from a protest in support of local police in a local municipality. Over the weekend, one of President Biden's secret service agents was robbed at gunpoint while Biden was campaigning near LA. Police say officers responded to a call about a potential robbery around 9.36 p.m. and found the victim's bag was stolen at gunpoint. Some of the agent's belongings were later found in the area, though no suspects have been identified at this time. The shooter, who killed five people at a gay nightclub in Colorado Springs in 2022, entered into a plea deal to seemingly avoid a federal death sentence. Anderson Aldrich pled guilty to 74 crimes of hate crimes and gun crimes, and in exchange received a

life without parole sentence plus 190 years. On top of this federal sentence, Aldrich has also been sentenced to more than 2,000 years in state prison. CEO of Boeing, Dave Calhoun, is testifying before the Senate today over safety concerns. The testimony follows the publication from a Senate subcommittee, which details new whistleblower allegations against the company, including that Boeing tried to hide broken or out of specification 737 MAX plane parts from regulators and lost track of them. The whistleblower said some of these parts probably ended up getting installed in some planes while the company was trying to hide them. And finally, the state of Massachusetts dealt with a statewide 911 outage today. At the

time I clicked record on this episode, the outage was still ongoing and the cause for the outage is under investigation. That is what I have for you today. Thank you so much for being here. Have a great night and I will talk to you tomorrow.