We have one very key witness to presidential attempt to interfere in the 2020 presidential election, and that key witness is Donald J. Trump.

Deflecting, delaying, creating a smokescreen, but basically undermining the adversary, accusing the adversary of partisanship.

Hi, and welcome to Amicus. This is Slate's podcast about the Supreme Court and the law and the rule of law. I'm Dahlia Lithwick, and I cover those things for Slate.

Well, I know I promised to bring you this week the curtain raiser briefing the imminent about to begin

unbelievably consequential Supreme Court term. And guess what? A few other legal things have happened. So here's what we're

going to do. We're going to add an extra show next week. And we're going to talk, as promised, to

Dean Irwin Chemerinsky for a full and deep dive accounting of what to expect in the coming

weeks as the U.S. Supreme Court starts to tackle a raft of really big ticket cases, some issues that it's been avoiding for the past few years.

That show, I promise this time, we'll be dropping into your feeds next Saturday morning.

But we didn't feel like we could ignore the constitutional events of this week because guess what? It looks like Chief Justice John Roberts may have to actually start mainlining energy drinks because in addition to the term that he's about to oversee, he may also have an impeachment trial over which he will preside in the Senate this year.

Now, impeachment. We've talked about it quite a lot on this show over the past few years. Back in May 2018, we talked to Professor Larry Tribe about the power of impeachment.

This past summer, we checked in with Frank Bowman about the history of impeachment, the definition of high crimes and misdemeanors.

So it feels as though this word impeachment, it's been on the tip of our tongues for so long that we almost had a sense of, at last, when Speaker Nancy Pelosi stood up this week and spoke the words.

I'm announcing the House of Representatives moving forward with an official impeachment inquiry.

But to be sure, starting an inquiry is just that. It's a launch pad. It's a departure point. It is not a destination.

Impeachment, remember, is a legal process that is carried out in a political form. So it becomes a hybrid of which we don't have that much experience.

And so we wanted to turn in a moment to Walter Dellinger, who is as a former acting solicitor general under Bill Clinton, truly one of the best people to help us understand where we are now and where we may be going in the coming months.

Now, later on in the show, we're going to be talking to a former assistant U.S. attorney from the Southern District of New York, Jim Ziron.

He's got a new book out called Plaintiff in Chief, a portrait of Donald Trump in 3,500 lawsuits.

The conversation with Jim Ziren is going to help us understand how we got here on this impeachment question and how Donald Trump's long history of weaponizing the law

has made him both vulnerable to and weirdly immune from any legal accountability. So, yeah,

it's a really long show. And I'm going to suggest that you just make yourself a grilled cheese

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