Jodi Kantor

and scrutiny of the justices, essentially establishing an independent lens that lets us see them more clearly.

So for four years, that's what I've been doing.

And I'm very happy to tell you, Debbie, that story is not an impossible story.

Over and over again, we have taken information about the Supreme Court that is supposed to be secret, and we have put it in the newspaper as a team.

When you're reporting on an institution that is designed to resist exposure, what allows you to establish something on the record?

Oh, because there are a lot of varieties of on-the-record evidence.

Like, for example, okay, so Adam Liptak and I reported the backstory of the immunity decision, like truly one of the most controversial decisions the court has made in our lifetime.

The court awards President Trump broad immunity.

This is after he was going to be prosecuted for what he did on January 6th.

And the court awards him even more immunity than his own lawyers had asked for.

And also, the opinion was...

widely regarded by scholars on the left and the right to be very messy, like disjointed, like left too many holes, didn't hold together well as an argument.

So how could they have given him this much immunity?

And also, like, the Chief Justice John Roberts is known as a pretty good judicial craftsman.

So how could it have come out in this kind of messy way?

In that story,

We were able to quote from some of the justices' private memos to one another.

That is very unusual.

That information was very hard to get.

And so it's on-the-record information, but it's not an on-the-record interview.