UNBIASED - U.S. Credit Placed on Review, Lawsuit Over Spam Calls, E. Jean Carroll Asks for $50M More, SCOTUS Rules on Tyler v. Hennepin County

Episode Date: May 26, 2023

1. Two Credit Agencies Place U.S. on Negative Review for Downgrade Due to Ongoing Debt Negotiations and Looming Default Date (1:40)2. Nearly All 50 States Plus Washington D.C. Sue Avid Telecom After Abundance of Telemarketer and Spam Calls (10:05)3. E. Jean Carroll Asks for $50M More in Trump Defamation Case After Trump Town Hall (16:56)4. Supreme Court Releases Unanimous Ruling in Tyler v. Hennepin County (19:06)If you enjoyed this episode, please leave me a review and share it with those you know that also appreciate unbiased news!Follow Jordan on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. All sources for this episode can be found here.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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You are listening to the Jordan Is My Lawyer podcast, your favorite source of unbiased news and legal analysis. Enjoy the show. Welcome back to the Jordan is my lawyer podcast. Happy Friday. I have four stories for you today. The first is that the United States was put on review for downgrade by two credit rating agencies. The second story is a lawsuit brought by all 50 states against a telecom company because of those spam calls that I'm sure we all know all too well. The third story is that E. Jean Carroll has asked for 10 million more dollars after CNN's Trump town hall. And the fourth and final story is a Supreme Court ruling that just

came out on Thursday in a case that we actually already discussed about a month ago on the podcast. So I wanted to give you guys that update and those will be our four stories today. So before we get into today's stories, let me just kindly ask that you review my show on any podcast platform that you listen on, whether that be Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It really does help support my show and helps me get my name out there. And also, if you guys could share my show with any of your friends, family, colleagues, whoever you know that you feel will appreciate an unbiased take on the news. So without further ado, let's get into today's stories. On Wednesday, Fitch put the United States credit rating on negative watch following the debt ceiling negotiations between the president and Speaker McCarthy.

And on Thursday, DBRS Morningstar followed suit. Fitch and DBRS Morningstar are two different credit agencies, credit rating agencies, I should say. There are currently 10 rating agencies that are nationally recognized, and Fitch is in the top three, the other two being Moody's and Standard & Poor's, whereas DBRS is the fourth largest credit rating agency. In a statement about the watch, Fitch said in part, quote, Fitch still expects a resolution to the debt limit before the expiration date, which is referenced as X date. However, we believe risks have risen that the debt limit will not be raised or suspended before X date, and consequently that the government could miss payments on some of its obligations. So this is something I should have mentioned before.

The United States has a AAA rating with all of the agencies except Standard & Poor's. So Standard & Poor's, they actually downgraded the United States back in 2011, which we'll talk about in a second. They downgraded the United States credit rating to a double A plus. So again, we'll get there in a second. But DBRS said something similar. In part, they said the under review with negative implications, that's what they call this review, reflects the risk of Congress failing to increase or suspend the debt ceiling in a timely manner. The review period will focus on whether Congress lifts the debt ceiling in a

timely manner, how the U.S. Treasury responds if Congress is late to increase the debt ceiling, the economic and financial fallout if the government fails to pay its obligations on time, and the likelihood of recurring debt standoffs in the near term. As far as rating drivers go, DBRS said the rating could be confirmed at a AAA rating if Congress lifts the ceiling in a timely manner and the risks stemming from debt ceiling brinksmanship in the near term, are deemed to be relatively low. On the flip side of that, the rating could be downgraded if one, the Treasury fails to pay its obligations on time, two, the government builds up material

non-interest arrears, or three, if there is a high likelihood of repeated debt ceiling standoffs in a climate of heightened political polarization. Importantly, the DBRS also said, so this statement came along with their announcement that the U.S. credit rating was under review. It also said that while the debt ceiling impasse poses a potential threat to the United States AAA rating, the United States has exceptional strengths that support the credit profile. The U.S. economy is very large in scale, accounting for one quarter of global output. The economy is highly resilient to shocks given its diversification across industry and geography, its flexible labor market, and its global leadership position in terms

of research and innovation. U.S. financial markets and the U.S. dollar are at the center of world trade and capital flows, which provides the U.S. with an unusually high degree of financing flexibility. In addition, the country benefits from well-established democratic institutions, a strong legal system, and transparent governance. While a late debt payment could erode the reputation of the dollar as the world's primary reserve currency and United States government bonds as global safe haven assets, the fundamental credit strengths of the United States would likely continue to support the

ratings. As I said before, the U.S. did have its credit rating downgraded in 2011. That went from a AAA to a AA+. This was, again, done by Standard & Poor's. At the same time, though, Fitch and Moody's affirmed the United States AAA rating. So even if the U.S. does get downgraded by, let's say, one of these agencies, it wouldn't be the first time. And that also doesn't mean that the other agencies would downgrade the United States credit score. And since 2011 doesn't mean that the other agencies would downgrade the United States credit score. And since 2011, the United States has been put on this negative watch. So Fitch put the United States ratings on negative watch in October of 2013 during a similar debt ceiling standoff. So this is nothing new. I don't want to scare you guys. You know how news outlets

like to fearmonger. And that's not my job here. You guys know my job is just to report on the news and tell you guys in a very calm fashion what's going on. So yes, the United States was put on review by two credit rating agencies, but this is not the first time. And the last time that they were put on review was 2013. And in 2011, the credit rating was downgraded. With all of this said, the president and Speaker McCarthy are supposedly getting closer to a deal. According to reports as of Thursday, they were only $70 billion apart, which sounds like a lot, but the total figure that they're negotiating here, it's possible is well over a trillion dollars. So $70 billion in the grand

scheme of things is not so far apart. Now, according to a source familiar with the talks, aka take this with a grain of salt, everything I'm talking about, about these debt ceiling negotiations, we have to remember, you know, everything's according to a source or according to reports or according to someone familiar with the talks. We're not really going to know what's going on until we hear from Speaker McCarthy or President Biden directly. But according to a source familiar with the talks, the deal will specify the total amount that the government can spend on discretionary programs like housing and education. Though Biden said that the two sides still disagreed where the cuts should fall.

However, he also said that defaulting on the debt was, quote, not an option and that congressional leaders have already agreed that there will be no default. Also on Thursday, 35 Republicans sent a letter to Speaker McCarthy asking him to do a few things in his negotiations with the president. And I did link this letter for you in the sources on my website. So check it out if you so desire. But really, it's three things that they asked. So one, they want McCarthy to add additional provisions to the Limit Save Grow Act, such as the inclusion of the Secure the Border Act and to end the funding for the new FBI's headquarters. The second thing they asked was to deflate the quote-unquote manufactured crisis of the June 1st, 2023 X date, which the treasury secretary has

quote-unquote arbitrarily declared to be the date of a debt ceiling breach. The letter says that McCarthy should deflate this situation by publicly demanding that the Treasury immediately furnish a complete justification of the June 1st projection. In other words, why does the Treasury Secretary think that June 1st is the date? The third thing that the letter requested of McCarthy was to combine two provisions of the Limit Save Grow Act, specifically the provision in which unspent COVID funding would be taken back and also repealing funding for 80,000 new IRS agents. So they want him to take those two provisions and move them through the House as a standalone measure in order to extend

the X date through June. So what they're saying is that that would give the government some revenue, it would give the government some more money if those two provisions were able to alone be passed, you know, and that way the X date could be extended because the United States would get some revenue. According to sources in the negotiation room, again, take it with a grain of salt, Democrats think that Biden isn't being vocal enough in the negotiations. But both Biden and McCarthy have said that this is going to be a deal where no one is happy. Both sides are going to have to give up some of their desires in order to reach a deal. I'll keep you posted on this, but that is our most recent update. So let's move on to the second story, which is that all 50 states have sued a telecom company. So despite seeing a lot of division in this country,

one thing that we can all agree on is how annoying telemarketer calls are, and not even just telemarketer calls, spam calls. And these calls are so annoying that all 50 states plus Washington, D.C. have filed a lawsuit against Avid Telecom, not only the company, but also its CEO and its vice president, alleging violations of the Telemarketing Act, the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, and various state laws that protect against unfair and deceptive telemarketing practices. According to the complaint, Avid Telecom is a VOIP company, and what this stands for is Voice Over Internet Protocol, which is basically just the process of using the internet to make calls rather than your traditional landline.

VOIP companies provide a way to do this, a way to make internet calls, and they make a profit in doing so. So Avid Telecom is one of these companies that makes a profit by transmitting these calls via the internet. And these companies can either serve as an originating provider or an intermediate provider. So what does that mean? Let's break this down very simply. So you make a call using the internet and the originating

VoIP provider initiates this call on behalf of its customer. The call is then routed to another provider who routes the call to another provider. And this keeps going. It's called hopping providers until the call is eventually routed to a provider that actually delivers the call to the intended recipient. The providers in between here, where the calls are being hopped around to, are known as intermediate providers. So what the complaint says is that Avid Telecom is either, in all of these situations that it cites to, is either the originating provider, meaning they're either making the call, or they're one of the companies that it's being routed between, right? So it's not Avid Telecom that's making the call, or they're one of the companies that it's being routed between, right? So it's not

Avid Telecom that's making the spam calls themselves. I just want to clarify that. They're not alleging that Avid Telecom is the one calling all these people, but rather they're providing spammers and telemarketers with a way to connect consumers. In other words, Avid is providing the network to connect the call. What are the states using as proof that Avid knew or should have known its service was repeatedly being used by scammers and telemarketers? So one, every attempted or completed call that uses VoIP automatically generates a record, and it's called a call detail record or a CDR. And when the plaintiffs reviewed these CDRs, it showed that between December 31st, 2018 and January 31st, 2023, Avid Telecom made or attempted 24.5 billion calls.

And among the 21 billion calls that were made to actual valid United States numbers, 93% of those had a call duration of less than 15 seconds. This is what they call short duration calls. And as we know, these are the calls typically used by scammers. So the complaint details the different scam transcripts that Avid helped transmit to its consumers. And a lot of us are probably actually pretty familiar with them, but they include calls about Medicare rewards, auto warranty extensions, employment requests, Amazon account debits, tv discounts social security so i mean the list goes on but of the billions of calls that were made using avid telecoms service

millions of those calls were actually made to people who were on the do not call registry who obviously you were not supposed to call so that that's one. Two, what they say is there's these things called traceback requests, and they're exactly what they sound like. They come from a government entity, and they're meant to trace calls back to the origin or source of these illegal calls. And what they say is since January 2020, Avid Telecom has been notified 329 times by ITG, which is the government entity that does these traceback requests, about identified or suspected illegal calls that used Avid's network. So they were put on notice at least 329 times, and they never really mitigated anything. They never made any changes. Three is that one of Avid's customers,

John Spiller and his telecom company, received a $225 million fine in March of 2021 for these deceptive practices. So they say that was a notice in a sense to Avid. Number four is at least seven of Avid's customers had received cease and desist letters from the FCC. So again, they say more notice. And number five, and the last one I'll go through, this list goes on and on, pages and pages, and it's all to say the same thing. But obviously, they're just laying out all the proof that they have. But the last and fifth one is that Avid received notices from bigger companies like Verizon, Call48, bigger networks that put them on notice that, hey, we're getting a lot of spam and illegal calls from you guys.

So again, this list goes on and on, pages and pages of notices, all of this to say that the plaintiffs are arguing that Avid knew or should have known that robocallers were using its service, and they should have taken measures to mitigate their usage. And because they didn't, they violated various federal and state laws. In total, there are 23 counts, but the states are asking really just, you know, I'm going to boil this down and make it easy. They're really just asking for a permanent injunction and monetary damages, and they are demanding a jury trial. This seems obvious to me. You know, people know how annoying these calls are, so I'm sure they feel if they can get it in front of a jury who has received calls like this,

then they're more likely to get more monetary damages. So in response to the lawsuit, AVID's outside counsel made a short comment to the Associated Press, and what they said was this. They said, contrary to the allegations in the complaint, Avid Telecom operated in a manner that is compliant with all applicable state and federal laws and regulations. The company has never ever been found by any court or regulatory authority to have transmitted unlawful traffic, and it is prepared to meet with the attorney generals, as it has done on many occasions in the past to further demonstrate its good faith and lawful conduct. On Monday, E. Jean Carroll amended some court filings to ask for $10 million more in her defamation lawsuit against Donald Trump following

CNN's Trump town hall. You might be asking, how can one amend their damages request once a verdict has been rendered? Well, this is how. So she actually had filed two lawsuits. The first one was in 2019. That was just a defamation lawsuit for some statements he made about her sexual abuse claims. The second lawsuit was brought in 2021, and that was when the New York Adult Survivors Act was enacted, which gave sexual assault or sexual abuse victims an opportunity to sue their abusers civilly for past assaults and abuse where the statute of limitations had run. So she filed that second suit in 2021 based off of that New York statute. That's the lawsuit that just found Donald Trump liable. The first lawsuit that was just for defamation that was filed in 2019 is still tied

up in appeals. This is the lawsuit where she added the new request for damages. So it's still unresolved, which means she can amend and ask for more damages. In the amended filing that was filed with the court on Monday, Carroll's attorneys wrote that Trump was undeterred by the jury's verdict and persisted in maliciously defaming Carroll yet again. The filing says, quote, he doubled down on his prior defamatory statements, asserting to an audience all too ready to cheer him on that, quote, I never met this woman, I never saw this woman, and that he did not sexually assault Carol and that her account, which had just been validated by a jury of Trump's peers one day before, was a fake, made-up story invented by a whack job. The filing also says, quote, this conduct

supports a very substantial punitive damages award in Carroll's favor, both to punish Trump, to deter him from engaging in further defamation, and to deter others from doing the same, end quote. So that lawsuit where this amended filing was filed has obviously been in the court system for years. Who knows when it will be resolved. So let's move on to the fourth and final story, which is an update on a Supreme Court case called Tyler v. Hennepin County. And we talked about this in an episode about a month ago, both on the podcast and on my social media accounts. Specifically, if you want to go listen to it, it's the April 28th podcast episode, but the Supreme Court has released its decision.

This was the last oral argument of this term, by the way. So this decision came out rather quickly because it was a unanimous decision. But let's jog your memory really quick what this case was about. So this was the case where the 94-year-old woman, her name was Geraldine Tyler, I will refer to her in this episode as Tyler, hadn't paid property taxes on a condo that she owned in five years. Well, the county takes the property, they sell it at auction, and it's sold for $40,000. But the issue was that she only owed $15,000 in unpaid taxes and fees. So Tyler said that the county keeping the extra $25,000, that surplus over the $15,000, was an unjust taking, and it violated both the takings clause and the Eighth Amendment. Now, the takings clause prohibits the government from taking property without just compensation.

The Eighth Amendment prohibits excessive fines. So she was arguing both, you know, one, this was a taking under the takings clause and I didn't get my just compensation. And two, the $25,000 is really considered a fine in this situation. And it's an excessive fine, which violates the Eighth Amendment. The county argued a few things. So the county argued, one, that Tyler not only had $25,000 in unpaid taxes and fees, but she also had a $50,000 mortgage and a $12,000 homeowners association lien. So they say she didn't actually have any equity in the property, and considering she owed more than it was worth, she doesn't really have any standing to sue here. Two, they said her failure to pay property taxes constituted a forfeiture of her entire

interest in the property. And they cited to a case that said in part that a failure to abide by reasonable ownership conditions can constitute a forfeiture of an interest in a property. And they said that paying your taxes is a reasonable ownership condition that she did not abide by. And the county said not only did she know she had unpaid taxes, but she didn't pay them for five years. And the last thing that the county argued was they're selling the condo at auction and

keeping the money was a remedial measure. It wasn't a fine under the Eighth Amendment because in some cases like this one, it actually helps the homeowner because it alleviates them of all of their debt on the property, not just the unpaid taxes. So this case goes before the district court who dismissed the lawsuit because they said that Tyler had failed to state a claim that could be litigated. The appellate court affirmed this ruling and they brought it up to the Supreme Court. Now, when I originally posted about this case to my Instagram story and I asked my followers who they sided with, 71% of the poll respondents sided with Tyler, the property owner, 29% sided with the county.

Well, yesterday, on Thursday, in a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Tyler. And here's what they said. They said, one, Tyler's claim that the county illegally appropriated the $25,000 surplus from the sale constitutes a classic pocketbook injury sufficient to give her standing to bring the lawsuit. Even if there are debts on the home, as the county claims, Tyler still plausibly alleges a financial harm by way of the fact that the county has kept $25,000 that she could have used to reduce her personal liability for those debts. Two, they say, Tyler has in fact stated a claim under the takings clause. The district court and the appellate court both said she failed to state a claim. That's not true, the Supreme Court says. They say history and precedent dictate that while

the county had the power to sell Tyler's home to recover unpaid taxes, it could not use the tax debt to confiscate more money than was due. Doing so resulted in a classic taking in which the government directly appropriates private property for its own use. And lastly, the Supreme Court rejected the county's argument that Tyler had no property interest simply because she failed to pay taxes. The court said, quote, abandonment requires the surrender or relinquishments or disclaimer of all rights in the property. Failure to pay property taxes is not an abandonment that avoids the requirements of the takings clause. And the decision concluded by

saying, quote, the takings clause was designed to bar the government from forcing some people alone to bear public burdens, which in all fairness and justice should be borne by the public as a whole. A taxpayer who loses her $40,000 house to the state to fulfill a $15,000 tax debt has made a far greater contribution to the public fisc than she owed. The taxpayer must render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, but no more. Because we find that Tyler has plausibly alleged a taking under the Fifth Amendment, and she agrees that relief under the takings clause would fully remedy her harm, we need not decide whether she has also alleged an excessive fine under the Eighth Amendment. And they say that the judgment of the appellate court is reversed. But that concludes this

episode. Don't forget to check out this week's Spotify poll. If you're a Spotify listener, please don't forget to leave me a review and please share my show with your friends and family that you feel will appreciate unbiased news just as much as you do have a great holiday weekend and i will talk to you next week