July 17, 2024: RFK Jr./Trump Call Leaked, Biden Planning Supreme Court Reform, Attempted Assassination Investigation Updates, Democrats Seek to Delay DNC Nomination, and More.
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Welcome back to Unbiased, your favorite source of unbiased news and legal analysis.

Welcome back to Unbiased. Today is July 17th and this is your daily news rundown. As always, you know the drill. 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, please go ahead and hit that thumbs up button and subscribe to the channel if you're not already. Without further ado, let's get into today's

Shortly before I recorded yesterday's episode, news came out about an apparent Iranian plot to assassinate former President Trump. We don't know a lot of details, but important to this story is that the Department of Homeland Security and Secret Service were actually made aware of this plot before the assassination attempt on

So the assassination attempt on Saturday is not connected at all to the Iranian plot, but it is raising even more questions as to how Saturday's events occurred, given the increase in Secret Service protection that Trump received in recent weeks.

A national security official said that upon learning of the assassination threat, the National Security Council directly contacted Secret Service at a senior level to be sure that they continued to track the threat. Secret Service then shared the information with the detail lead and informed the Trump campaign. In response, Secret Service increased resources and assets for Trump's protection, but as we know, the events of Saturday took place despite this.

While the official would not give details on the Iranian threat specifically, so we don't know much, the official did note that this was all in advance of this weekend. National Security Spokesperson Adrian Watson said in a statement, quote, As we have said many times, we have been tracking Iranian threats against the former Trump administration officials for years, dating back to the last administration.

These threats arise from Iran's desire to seek revenge for the killing of Qasem Soleimani. Soleimani was Iran's most powerful general back in 2020 when he was killed by a U.S. airstrike under Trump's administration. Iran's

Iran commented on this alleged assassination plot, saying, quote, These accusations are unsubstantiated and malicious. From the perspective of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Trump is a criminal who must be prosecuted and punished in a court of law for ordering the assassination of General Soleimani. Iran has chosen the legal path to bring him to justice, end quote.

And staying on the topic of presidential candidates, RFK Jr. is apologizing after a phone call between him and Donald Trump was leaked on X yesterday. The audio quality of the video isn't great, so I'm actually not going to play it for you, but I will tell you what the conversation consisted of in great detail. And I do, of course, have the link to the video in the sources section of this episode. So if you want to watch it for yourself, feel free to do so.

The clip is about a minute and 40 seconds long, and it's really just Trump talking. I mean, you can see RFK Jr. standing in a room with his phone on speaker, but on the other end, Trump is doing all the talking. So the first thing you hear Trump say is, quote, really something is wrong with that whole system, end quote. And we don't have any pretext to that statement, but we can kind

of imply that he's talking about the FDA because the next thing he says is, quote, when you feed a baby a vaccine that's like 38 different vaccines and it looks like it's meant for a horse, not a 10-pound or 20-pound baby, and then you start to see these babies radically change. I've seen it too many times. And then you hear that it doesn't have an impact, right? But you and I talked about that a long time ago.

End quote. Trump then says, quote, I would love you to do it, sir. I think it would be so good for you and so big for you. And we're going to win. We're way ahead of the guy. You know, it was interesting. It was very nice, actually. He called me and he said, how did you choose to move to the right? I said, I was just showing a chart. I didn't have to tell him it was a chart of all the people pouring into our country, but I just turned my head to show the chart. And then Trump sort of describes what it felt like getting hit with

the bullet, which he says it felt like being bit by the biggest mosquito in the world.

That was the call. Again, it is linked for you in the sources section if you want to listen to it for yourself. But RFK Jr. apologized after the leak. He wrote on X, quote,

Now, we did hear that RFK Jr. and Trump had a pre-RNC meeting. And while it hasn't been officially confirmed that this leaked phone call is what that meeting was...

I actually don't want to make any assumptions, but there was only so much time between when the attempted assassination took place on Saturday and when the RNC started. So this leaked phone call may have very well been that meeting that we heard about that the two of them had before the RNC began. And...

After that meeting that we heard about, RFK wrote on X, quote,

So again, we don't know officially when that call took place in the grand scheme of things, but it did sound as if Trump and RFK Jr. are planning to work together should Trump get elected. But again, nothing is confirmed.

Let's switch gears now a little bit to the only presidential candidate that we actually have not covered yet today, which is President Biden. President Biden is said to be working on reforms for the Supreme Court and possibly backing a constitutional amendment that would speak to the issue of presidential immunity.

So over the weekend, Biden held a call with Democrats in the Congressional Progressive Caucus. And according to a source on that call, Biden said that he has been working with experts on court reform and would announce the reform proposal soon. However, it is worth noting before we dive a little deeper into this conversation, given the divided Congress we currently have, the chances of any reforms actually happening are slim. But it's

The alleged reform proposals would include term limits as well as an ethics code coupled with an enforcement mechanism. Just last week when I covered AOC introducing articles of impeachment against Justices Thomas and Alito, I spoke a little bit about the Supreme Court and how the or how Supreme Court reform has been a topic of conversation lately due to recent decisions from the court, a lack of financial transparency from the justices, etc.,

Currently, justices have lifetime appointments and no governing body, meaning if there's any wrongdoing of any sort, there's no judicial oversight aside from the chief justice himself. And that lack of governing body is.

coupled with the lifetime terms have been the source of controversy for years. In fact, Congress's fight over the Supreme Court dates back to the founding of our nation. So it's really nothing new. Biden himself has been a voice against Supreme Court reform in the past. Dating back to 1983, Biden called President Roosevelt's plan for reform, quote unquote, boneheaded.

Roosevelt was wanting to place term limits on the older justices and expand the size of the court. And while it seems that Biden's opinion on term limits may have changed since then, Biden has been consistent in not wanting to adjust the size of the court. In fact, in 2020, during the Democratic presidential

primary, he stood by his position that adding or subtracting justices would ruin the court's credibility. And more recently in 2021, because of this talk about court reform, he actually formed the presidential commission on the Supreme Court when he was elected, which did set forth some proposed reforms to the court, but Biden did not act on any of those proposed changes.

Some of the commission's proposed changes included increasing the size of the court, cases being decided by panels rather than the entire court, rotating justices, term limits, limiting the court's power to declare legislative acts as unconstitutional, modifying the court's jurisdiction, allowing Congress to override constitutional decisions of the court, as well as reforming the judicial ethics and

and transparency with respect to recusals and conflicts. So a lot of suggestions, but again, as I said, despite all of those suggestions, Biden did not act on them. However, now that we are in an election year, the stakes have obviously changed a little bit. So just to be clear, the particular reforms that Biden is talking about potentially proposing now

include term limits, an ethics code, and an enforcement body. But any reforms would likely have to go through Congress first, and as I said, with a divided Congress, who knows.

As for the presidential immunity constitutional amendment, this actually would not be proposed by Biden himself. Rather, it would be proposed by a lawmaker in Congress and then simply backed by Biden. Democratic Representative Joe Morrell announced his plans for proposing this constitutional amendment earlier this month. He said in a press release, quote, I am introducing a constitutional amendment to reverse the Supreme Court's

This amendment will do what they failed to do, prioritize our democracy. The Supreme Court decision will cause a seismic shift in the powers of the presidency unless we take immediate action to ensure accountability, integrity, and justice preserved.

prevail, end quote. Now, for a constitutional amendment to even be proposed by Congress, it has to receive a two-thirds vote of approval in both houses of Congress. Two-thirds vote of approval in both houses.

Then for the amendment to actually be ratified, it has to be ratified by three-fourths of all states. So it's incredibly difficult, and that is why only 27 of the 11,000 proposed constitutional amendments in this country's history have actually been ratified. Just to wrap this up, we don't know exactly when Biden is planning on making these announcements, but that is what we know about his plans according to sources on that call as of today.

And the last story before we get into quick hitters, it's a less political one. Last night, the Supreme Court halted an execution just 20 minutes before it was set to take place. And this was the second time the Supreme Court has halted this man's execution. Ruben Gutierrez was sentenced to death in 1998 for the murder of an 85-year-old woman, which happened during the course of a robbery. Here's the issue.

It was three men that were accused of planning to rob this woman's mobile home. And when she was murdered, each of the three accused the other two of committing the murder.

One of the other two, so not including Gutierrez, pled guilty. He's serving a life sentence. The other of the other two was released from jail on a $75,000 bond and has completely disappeared, has not been caught since. He is still wanted by authorities. So Gutierrez, the man on death row, he never pled guilty and he actually still maintains his innocence in the murder. But ultimately, he was tried, he was convicted, and he was sentenced to death.

But he says that there's plenty of DNA evidence that was never tested. And if it were tested, it would prove his innocence. Among that evidence is nail scrapings from the victim, a loose hair wrapped around one of the victim's fingers, and various blood samples from inside the home. These pieces of evidence were just never tested.

Prosecutors say that this request for DNA testing is just a delay tactic and that Gutierrez was convicted on other evidence, such as a confession in which he admitted to planning the robbery and admitted to being in the home when the woman was killed.

Now, you might be wondering, well, if there's no actual DNA evidence or physical evidence and he didn't confess to the actual murder, how was he convicted? Well, in Texas, there's a law that says that a person can be held liable for the actions of others if they assist or encourage the commission of a crime. And that is what he was convicted of. So it's not that he was convicted of actually committing the murder himself, but rather that he assisted or encouraged others

another person one of the other men that he was with to commit that murder and so he was charged with or convicted of murder

The first day of execution that he was granted was in 2020. And it was because Texas was not allowing spiritual advisors into the death chamber. The Supreme Court has since ruled on that issue, holding that spiritual advisors have to be let in. That's done with. The stay of execution last night, though, was related to that DNA evidence issue. This time, the justices put his execution on hold.

while they decide whether they are going to review a lower court ruling, which said that the district court didn't have jurisdiction to review the constitutionality of a DNA testing law. So if the justices decide to review that lower court ruling, the stay will remain in place pending a final decision from the justices. But if the justices don't review the lower court ruling, that stay will be automatically lifted and he will have his execution rescheduled.

Okay, so now let's finish with some quick hitters, starting with Peter Navarro. Peter Navarro, Trump's former advisor who was sentenced to four months in jail for contempt of Congress, was released today and is headed straight to the RNC to speak.

Navarro was convicted in September on two counts of contempt of Congress for refusing to provide testimony and documents to the House committee that was investigating January 6th. He served four months in a low security facility in Miami and worked as a library clerk while he was there, but he is now scheduled to speak tonight at the RNC.

On the other side of the aisle, Representative Adam Schiff called for President Biden to drop out of the presidential race today. Schiff is said to be one of the most, if not the most, prominent elected Democrat to call for Biden to end his campaign thus far. And relatedly, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries have reportedly pushed the Democratic Party to delay its nominating process.

This comes after Schumer met privately with President Biden on Saturday. The DNC is currently scheduled for August 19th through the 22nd in Chicago.

And lastly, a few updates to the assassination investigation. First one being that Crooks' parents say that when Crooks left the house Friday late morning with a rifle, they thought he was going to the shooting range and would be back home around 1 p.m. When 11 p.m. rolled around and Crooks wasn't home, they called the police to report him missing and express concern about his welfare. Police have not said what actions they took after being contacted by Crooks' parents.

Additionally, we have since found out that Crooks asked for Saturday off work because he, quote, had something to do, but that he planned to return to work on Sunday.

We also now know that Crooks was at the security screening area of the rally at 3 p.m. on Saturday, roughly three hours before the shooting. He first aroused suspicion when he passed through the magnetometers, hopefully I said that right, carrying a rangefinder, which looks like a small pair of binoculars but is used to measure distances when setting up for a long-range shot.

While the range finder itself would not have prevented Crooks from getting through the security screening point, it attracted the attention of security who kept an eye on him until he left that secure area. At this point, investigators say that they are unsure of where Crooks went after leaving the screening area, but the working theory is that that is when he went to his car to get the rifle.

And finally, I had reported earlier this week that some of Crooks' classmates had described him as a loner, quiet, but very smart. However, another classmate has come forward, given us a little more insight, and says Crooks was quiet unless he was passionate about something, and politics was one of those things that he was passionate about. The classmate said Crooks didn't necessarily have a disdain for any one politician in general, but that he seemed to hate all politicians and he really didn't like everyone.

any of the candidates at all, ever. The classmate also said Crooks did have a group of friends and that his friends were quote-unquote concerning. At one point, a student had made a threat to shoot up their high school, and although the student's identity was never publicized, there were allegedly some suspicions that it was Crooks who made that threat. 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.