This is Amicus Slate's podcast about the courts, the law, and the Supreme Court.

I'm Dahlia Lithway.

And I'm Mark Joseph Stern.

This last week has been bookmarked by two events that have left many of us feeling

nothing short of breathless, a military invasion of Venezuela, ostensibly to arrest its head

of state and his wife on charges that live someplace in the Venn diagram between the war on

drugs, the war on terror, and a thirst for oil. And then there was a horrific

killing by a masked ice agent of a woman called Renee Nicole Good, an unarmed mother who lived in

Minnesota. Both of these two things reflect a new and bold in Trump administration that declares you guilty, destroys your life, and then tells people that what they saw with their own eyes never happened.

Donald Trump told the New York Times this week that the sole limit on the scope of his own executive authority was his conscience.

Later on in the show, we're going to turn our attention to the law of President Trump's

increasingly predatory foreign policy and military actions. And the ways in which the boat

strikes in the Caribbean and the U.S. attack on Venezuela were really precursors for what

happened in Minneapolis this week.

I'll be speaking with Brian Funukin, who served for a decade as an attorney advisor in the

Office of Legal Advisor at the U.S. Department of State under both Obama and Trump.

And our Slate Plus members will also have access to our bonus episode following right after this one,

discussing a surprise gift from conservatives to reproductive freedom in the state of Wyoming

and Lindsay Halligan's latest humiliation in court.

If you're not a Slate Plus member, hang on until the end of this episode for details on how to join us.

But first, it's hard to know where to start with the news from Minneapolis this past week.

The stuffed animals in the glove compartment next to the bloodied airbag,

...