Hello, dear Amicus listener. Thank you so much for joining us. And because I like you, here's a little tip. If you join our membership program, Slate Plus, you can enjoy this and all of Slate's podcasts ad-free. And you will be supporting our journalism work at the magazine at the same time. So win-win. There is a free trial to be found at slateplus.com slash amicus. Now time for the show.

Everybody's focused on the question of whether the president removes Bob Mueller, but they should also be focused on the protection of the deputy attorney general, who is the acting attorney general for purposes of these investigations.

And the president really seems to hate it.

Hi, and welcome back to Amicus Slate's podcast about the courts, the Supreme Court, and the rule of law or whatever is left of that rule of law thing in these very, very strange times.

I'm Dahlia Lithwick. I cover the courts and the law for Slate. And in the next two weeks, the Supreme Court is going to hear the final oral arguments of this term, including the big, big travel ban argument, which we will discuss in great depth on our next show.

But if you've been listening to the past couple of shows, you've probably noticed that we've been talking more and more

volubly and probably ever more grimly and despondently about the rule of law and the Trump presidency.

These have not been, I know, very confidence-inspiring conversations, but they have tended to

surface a lot of questions, especially from readers about the law and the Constitution and checks and balances and executive powers.

So this week with federal agents raiding the home and offices of Donald Trump's personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, on Monday, and this ever-increasing drumbeat of threats to fire Robert

Mueller or Rod Rosenstein or Jeff Sessions or some combo platter of the three of them coming

out of the White House, it doesn't feel like it's an exaggeration to say that we may be

quickly getting involved in a slow motion

constitutional crisis. Next week, with the release of James Comey's much-awaited, already

best-selling memoir, a higher loyalty, which comes out on Tuesday. Things are going to get

crazier. Early excerpts from the book reveal

unbelievable bombshells, including the revelation that John Kelly told Comey, he himself was prepared

to step down as head of Department of Homeland Security when Comey was fired and Kelly calling

Trump's firing of his FBI director dishonorable. And I guess

Comey has also compared Trump to a mob boss in this book. So White House allies are marshalling

this huge response to discredit Comey's version of how things went down.

And also simmering underneath all of this is the possibility that an already furious and very, very reckless president could use the whole Comey book as a pretext for just terminating the Mueller probe. This is not an

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