It's easy when we're getting the play-by-play day by day to look at each individual thing in isolation.

And one of the basic rules of putting together a case, a prosecution,

is to look at everything together and how they intertwined.

Every piece of paper, record book, dollar bill, or coin, or property, their buildings,

their furniture, their desk, everything

was taken away from the tribes.

Hi, and welcome back to Amicus Slate's podcast about the Supreme Court and the courts and the law

and the rule of law.

I'm Dahlia Lithwick. I cover many of those things for Slate.

And this week's show is actually going to take us back into the courtroom at One First Street.

And I wanted to do that because this is an intriguing and important case that didn't get enough airtime.

It's a complicated and historic and fascinating case about Native American tribal sovereignty,

and it was argued last week at the court.

And that will be coming up later in the show.

But we thought we'd start this show with the swirling legal story of the

endlessly complicated Robert Mueller probe. It now seems to be accelerating. It's heating up

in what I think we could probably just call the special counsel December Advent calendar,

where every single day we get some new revelation. The force of these

revelations can be sometimes lost to us because there's just so very much to keep track of,

so many players, so many actions, so many pleadings. We don't even know what is good or bad or

important anymore. And today we thought we'd try to do a meta read of all that,

of what's happened, what's to come, what matters and what doesn't. And there is nobody better to

...