UNBIASED - June 25, 2024: Biden's Loan Forgiveness Plan Partially Blocked, WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange to Accept Plea Deal, Hunter Biden Requests New Trial, and More.

Episode Date: June 25, 2024

1. Federal Judges in Missouri and Kansas Partially Block Portions of Biden's Loan Forgiveness Program (1:46)2. Hunter Biden Seeks New Trial Over Alleged Lack of Jurisdiction (6:46)3.  WikiLeaks Founder, Julian Assange, To Be Set Free After Years of Extradition Battles; Here's What You Need To Know About Him and How He Got Here (10:10)4. Quick Hitters: Louisiana Sued Over New 'Ten Commandments Law'; Trump's Hush Money Gag Order Partially Lifted (14:45)LIMITED EDITION 'UNBIASED' HATS DROP TOMORROW - JUNE 26TH @ 5PM ET. SHOP HERE.Support ‘UNBIASED’ on Patreon.Join Jordan's Email List.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 25th, and this is your daily news rundown. Today being Tuesday means that tomorrow is Wednesday, and that means that not only is the Supreme Court releasing new opinions, which I'm so excited about. But it also means that my unbiased Just the Facts hat will be live tomorrow, Wednesday, June 26th at 5 p.m. Eastern. If you are already subscribed to my email list or you are a paid Patreon member, you'll get an early access code tomorrow morning at 10 a.m. There is still time to sign up for early access. You just have to head to my website, sign up for either my email list or head to Patreon and sign up there. So long as you're subscribed to one or

the other by 10 a.m. tomorrow morning, you'll receive that early access code in your inbox. If you've never received an email from me and you don't see one at 10 o'clock tomorrow morning, Eastern Time, maybe just check your junk folder too. I doubt it'll end up there, but I just want to make sure we cover all the bases ahead of time. And most importantly, I do want to be very clear that this is essentially a pre-order. So the orders are going to ship in about two weeks, which means that depending on where you live, you will receive your hat between two and three weeks from when you order. You'll receive a tracking number once the order ships, but just know that the processing time that, you know, is going to be about two weeks. So don't start to

worry if you haven't received a tracking number within the next week or so. You will get it. There's just a bit of a, you know, a bit of an in-between there before it ships. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to reach out to me. And thank you so, so, so much for all of your support thus far. Without further ado, we can now get into today's stories, starting with Biden's student loan forgiveness plan. Last night, federal judges in Kansas and Missouri blocked parts of a student loan repayment plan called the SAVE plan. First, let's provide a little bit of context. We know in 2022, the Supreme Court struck down Biden's loan forgiveness plan, which relied on authority from the HEROES Act. This was a piece of legislation enacted after 9-11. After that,

the administration went back to the drawing board and came up with a few different ways to offer loan forgiveness based on already existing authority through a piece of legislation called the Higher Education Act. First, what he did is he essentially reformed a program called the, it's public service loan forgiveness, making it easier for those borrowers to qualify for forgiveness. Then he made it easier for those enrolled in income-driven repayment plans to qualify for forgiveness. And he did this by essentially saying that certain conditions should have counted towards forgiveness all along. And now those conditions count. So for example, previously, if a borrower was supposed to be repaying their loan,

but maybe they were making late payments or partial payments, those late or partial payments didn't count towards that forgiveness threshold. Because with income-driven repayment plans, once you make a certain number of payments, you can qualify for forgiveness. So what Biden did is he said these types of payments that should have counted towards that forgiveness threshold all along, we're going to retroactively apply them. And this brought certain people either closer to the forgiveness threshold or in some cases past the forgiveness threshold or in some cases past the forgiveness threshold. But the third thing that President Biden did, and this is the part that's at issue in both lawsuits we're about to talk about, was create the SAVE plan.

The SAVE plan is a new income-driven repayment plan. Just to give you a little bit of background, in the past, administrations have created their own versions of repayment plans. In 1994, the first income contingent repayment plan was created. Then in 2012, the Obama administration created the pay plan. In 2015, Obama updated that plan to the repay plan. And essentially what all of these changes did is update the criteria for when a borrower is eligible for forgiveness based on criteria like financial hardship, length of time in repayment status, number of payments made, etc. So last year, Biden created his own repayment plan called the SAVE plan. And what it does in a nutshell is it raises the floor for discretionary income, it decreases borrowers' monthly payments.

And then for loans with an original balance of $12,000 or less, it limits a borrower's repayment window to 10 years of payments down from 20 or 25 years, depending on the plan. So after Biden sets forth these changes and reforms, he's again sued. And what usually happens when a lawsuit is filed, the party suing tries to get an injunction, which will stop the actions of the opposing party while the lawsuit is pending. So in both cases, one out of Missouri, one out of Kansas, the plaintiffs sought an injunction. And in both cases, just yesterday, those injunctions were partially granted, meaning the various components of the

plan were blocked, but others were allowed to proceed. In Kansas, what the judge said essentially is that the administration could continue their plan to forgive the loans of those that borrow $12,000 or less and make 10 years worth of payments, but blocked phase two of the plan, which was set to take effect next week, in which in part, at least, the administration would start to recalculate and lower the monthly payments of save plan borrowers to just 5% of their discretionary income down from 10%. In Missouri, the judge also blocked a portion of Biden's save plan, but actually kind of issued an opposite ruling from the Kansas-based judge, in a sense. The Missouri judge said that the administration

can still implement some of the benefits of the save plan, like lowering monthly payments for borrowers, but couldn't actually forgive loans for the time being. So the two rulings are, they're a bit in conflict with one another. Now, Kansas and Missouri, they're in their own jurisdiction, and they also each belong to different appellate jurisdictions. So when the Missouri case gets appealed, it'll go to the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals. When the Kansas case gets appealed, it'll go to the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals. We don't typically see the Supreme Court get involved in an issue until at least one appellate court has made a decision on the issue, but oftentimes the Supreme Court get involved in an issue until at least one appellate court has made a decision

on the issue. But oftentimes the Supreme Court will actually wait until there's a circuit split, meaning two different appellate courts rule differently on the same issue. So it'll likely be a while until Biden's save plan goes before the court, if it even makes it there. But now at least you know what the district court rulings out of Kansas and Missouri entail. In some other Biden news, this time a different Biden, Hunter Biden's attorneys have refiled their motion for a new trial. You might remember I talked about his attorney filing a motion for a new trial about a week ago, maybe a week and a half ago, but that motion was quickly taken down. So I had said at the time, they're probably fixing something or adding something and we'll likely see it back up on the docket soon. Well, it's back up and this is what

we know. Obviously, this motion stems from Hunter's recent conviction on the three felony counts related to his purchase of a firearm back in 2018. And what it says is that Hunter should get a new trial because the court that conducted the trial lacked jurisdiction. Let's break that down a little bit. Hunter's attorneys argue that the court lacked jurisdiction, lacked the power to even oversee or conduct the trial because at the time the trial went forward and to this day, the appellate court, which Hunter filed a notice of appeal with, has not issued a final mandate, which Hunter's attorneys say would have returned jurisdiction to the district court after Hunter had appealed, but because the mandate was never

issued, the district court never regained jurisdiction. So let's back up. Hunter had filed two notices of appeal in this case for lack of jurisdiction. He was arguing that the district court did not have jurisdiction over this case. His first appeal was filed on April 17th, which was then dismissed by the appellate court on May 9th, but Hunter filed a motion for rehearing, which automatically delays the issuance of a final mandate from the appellate court. Then Hunter files a second appeal on May 20th. And the appellate court denied Hunter's May 20th appeal a week later, and then subsequently denied his rehearing petition on May 31st, which stemmed from his first appeal. The issue, though, according to Hunter's attorneys,

is that the appellate court, yes, they dismissed his appeal, but they never issued what's called a final mandate as to the dismissals, and therefore jurisdiction was never formally returned to the district court, and the district court therefore never had the proper jurisdiction to conduct the trial. So this is purely a procedural issue. Now it's true that an appellate mandate is what formally returns jurisdiction to the district court, but this is a bit of a peculiar situation because the reason the appellate court dismissed Hunter's appeal is because it determined that there was no merit to Hunter's argument that the district court lacked jurisdiction in the first place.

So the dismissal of the appeal presumably means that the district court does have proper jurisdiction and therefore proceedings can go forward. However, a mere presumption here doesn't always overcome a formality, so we'll have to see what the judge does with this, even though it's worth noting that Judge Noriega, who is the judge that oversaw Hunter's trial, she had already previously said that Hunter appealing her pretrial rulings does not divest her court of jurisdiction. So we kind of know which direction she's headed here, meaning she's probably going to reject this argument from Hunter. But even if she rejects the argument, he can then appeal it, which is the whole point of raising the issue in the first place. The point of him filing this motion for a new trial isn't necessarily to get

a ruling in his favor at the district court level, but instead to be able to bring the issue up on appeal. So we'll likely see this get appealed on that grounds, but only time will tell. The third story today is about the WikiLeaks founder. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is expected to plead guilty to a felony charge related to his alleged role in one of the biggest leaks of classified information in recent United States history. But first, we have to talk about who is Julian Assange. Julian Assange is an Australian journalist who launched a site called Wikileaks back in 2006. Now, Wikileaks was all about making leaked documents available to the public. As a journalist, he's very passionate about truth and transparency. That was the whole purpose of WikLeaks. So in 2010,

WikiLeaks published footage of a 2007 U.S. airstrike in Baghdad, which killed almost a dozen civilians. Months later, WikiLeaks began publishing hundreds of thousands of United States government documents that contained secret, top secret, and classified information about the war in Iraq. Later that year, the site then published thousands of United States diplomatic cables, which included not only raw views of foreign leaders, but also assessments of security threats, things of that nature. Meanwhile, he's living in Australia, Assange, not the United States. Soon after, a Swedish court then orders Assange to be arrested over rape allegations. But Assange has long denied these allegations. He says this is part of a

conspiracy with the United States government to get WikiLeaks shut down and get him arrested. He ends up turning himself in to British authorities. But while he's out on bail in 2012, as he's appealing his extradition to Sweden, he takes refuge in Ecuador's embassy in London, where he was granted political asylum. In 2016, Assange makes the news again for publishing roughly 20,000 emails from Hillary Clinton's campaign, believed to have been hacked by Russian operatives. In 2019, Swedish prosecutors drop their rape investigation, but the United States Department of Justice then formally asks Britain to extradite Assange to the United States to face 18 charges that he conspired to hack United States government computers, violated an espionage law, and

endangered the lives of confidential sources. Prosecutors here in the United States accused him of conspiring with U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to hack into a Pentagon computer to release those diplomatic cables and military files years prior. He was facing a maximum penalty of 175 years in prison here in the United States. Assange ends up losing asylum in 2019 due to the extradition warrant from the United States and subsequently spends 1,900 days in a maximum security prison in England. Since then, since he went to prison in England, there has been this ongoing fight over his extradition to the United States. But in May, London's high court ruled that he had the right to appeal his extradition. And around that same time, President Biden alluded to the fact that he was considering a request from Australia

to drop the prosecution against Assange. And in court documents today, we know that the United States government reached a deal with Assange in which Assange would plead guilty to one count of conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defense information in exchange for a 62-month sentence, which means he gets to go free because he gets credit for time served. He's already served 62 months. He'll be free to go once this deal is signed off on. Now, this proceeding, the plea deal and the judge signing off on it and everything is happening in a place called the Mariana Islands, which are in the middle of, right in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, right near Japan and the Philippines. The Mariana Islands were taken by the United States from Japan in 1944 during World War II and now make up a commonwealth of the United States. The reason

the proceeding is happening there is because Assange demanded that be the case. Obviously, the Mariana Islands are closer to his home country of Australia than the United States, but that is not why he's not coming to the United States. The reality is you never know what can happen in these situations. He was not about to risk stepping foot on United States soil, another jurisdiction swooping in and bringing charges against him for the same thing that he's here to plead guilty to. And so he opted just to stay out of the United States for the plea deal proceeding altogether. He was not going to risk it.

The plea deal does still have to be signed off by the judge, but all signs are pointing to the fact that he'll be heading home to Australia to be with his family for the first time in years. That's what's going on with Julian Assange. And now we can finish with just a couple of quick hitters, the first of which is that the first lawsuit has officially been filed against Louisiana in response to that Ten Commandments law. So I had reported on this when I originally reported on the law that the ACLU had said it was preparing a lawsuit to challenge the constitutionality of the law, and that has now been filed. The plaintiffs are nine families, which include rabbis, pastors, and reverends,

who are also parents of students in public schools, and the complaint cites to Stone v. Graham, which you are all familiar with if you've been listening to the podcast, and it says that not only does Louisiana's new law violate Supreme Court precedent, but it also violates the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment. That lawsuit is available in the sources section of this episode. If you're interested in reading it, the sources link can always be found in each episode description. And finally, Donald Trump's gag order in his hush money case was partially rolled back today by Judge Mershon.

Following the guilty verdict at the end of May, Trump had asked that the gag order against him be lifted, arguing that there was no need for it at that point in time. DA Bragg, on the other hand, argued that the gag order should remain in place at least until Trump's sentencing. And today, in ruling that, quote, circumstances have now changed, Judge Mershon gave Trump the green light to publicly speak about the trial's witnesses and jurors, but ruled that Trump still cannot discuss any prosecutor, court staffer, or member of their family, at least until he's sentenced on July 11th. That is what I have for you today. Stay tuned for tomorrow. We have a big day. We're bound to get at

least one controversial decision from the Supreme Court. And my hats go live, so we got a lot going on. Have a great night, and I will talk to you tomorrow.