7

Tuesday Night Massacre

Spring–Summer 2017

Washington, D.C.

A nut job.

—DONALD TRUMP on James Comey, speaking to Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov and Sergey Kislyak

The scandal that engulfed Washington in the spring of 2017 took place in a remarkably compact area. It had begun at the Democratic National Headquarters at 430 South Capitol Street. When I walked by, the signs on the DNC’s perimeter fence looked—given everything that had happened—mordantly superfluous. They said: “Beware, you are under video surveillance.”

The intruders who had busted into the building were incorporeal. They hadn’t jumped the wall or broken a window. Instead, the Russian hackers had entered electronically, an unstoppable army of ghosts. They had grabbed what they wanted and exited—not that they were in. The Times ran a memorable photo from inside the building. It showed a computer server next to an old filing cabinet, broken into in 1972 as part of the Watergate burglary.

I found the DNC office locked up and deserted. It was a Sunday. I sat outside in the spring sunshine and scrawled a few notes. The building looked modernist, with a curvilinear design. There was a Stars and Stripes in one window; on the sidewalk daffodils. Cars droned over a flyover; in the middle distance a factory belched gray smoke—all was urban normality.

Two blocks away, along a shaded road of handsome brick houses and front gardens decked out with pansies, was another building. The road climbed upward. This was the Republican National Committee at 310 First Street SE. Outside pink cherry trees blossomed. If you believed U.S. intelligence, the ghosts had got in here, too. The RNC’s emails hadn’t been released but sat on a server somewhere in Moscow.

A few hundred yards north was Capitol Hill. Here was the U.S. Congress. By this point Congress was home to an inquisitorial process—or, to be more accurate, processes. They involved the House and Senate intelligence committees, the Senate’s judiciary committee, and the House’s oversight and government reform committee. Four committees in all.

Their broad subject was what Twitter had taken to calling #Russiagate or #Kremlingate. These names hadn’t quite stuck, but the political scandal was real, and getting bigger.

Another investigation was going on nearby. A diagonal walk from Capitol Hill led to Pennsylvania Avenue and the J. Edgar Hoover building, the headquarters of the FBI. From the outside the building looked impermeable, its secrets safe. Trump, however, had changed that. The concrete 1970s complex—unlovely, lumpish, and softened only by a line of trees—was now one of the most porous places in Washington, a palace of leaks.

Almost next door was D.C.’s former post office and clock tower. In autumn 2016 Trump reopened it as a luxury hotel, just before he became the forty-fifth president. It was raining when I got there. I went inside to dry off. A giant U.S. flag hung in a cavernous atrium. There were security guards with earpieces; above the bar TV sets were tuned to Fox and CNN. Families were having lunch. The women and their daughters had Alice bands; the men wore golfing sweaters.

Trump had had dinner there a few weeks earlier, in late February. One of his guests—added at the last minute—was Nigel Farage. Farage was the grinning architect of Britain’s Brexit and the public face of the anti-immigration UK Independence Party. And a Trump cheerleader. Other guests included Ivanka, Jared, and Florida governor Rick Scott. (Back in London ten days later, Farage dropped in to see Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy.)

Trump’s actual office, the White House, was close by. In the surrounding streets—Mother Jones on F Street, The Guardian in Farragut Square—investigative journalists were hard at work. Some research happened here, some out of office. Later that evening I met someone in the Tabard Inn, an idiosyncratic English country house–style bar and hotel on N Street. Here reporters and bureaucrats got together over pale ale. Information—Washington’s currency of choice—flowed in all directions.

In the lead-up to the U.S. election, the intelligence community hadn’t taken Trump terribly seriously. They had—according to one source I spoke to—viewed him as quirky and entertaining. There was a widespread assumption that he wouldn’t win. Now, with Trump in the Oval Office, there was a new and unsettled mood. “There is a very high level of anxiety inside the tent. It stretches across all agencies. It concerns who Trump is and what he’s up to,” the source said. “And his entourage.”

Previously, the FBI’s 35,000-odd employees tended to avoid politics. They packed their sandwiches each day and went to work—field agents, intelligence analysts, support staff. A large majority were Republicans. (Indeed, the FBI’s New York field office hated Clinton with a “white-hot passion,” I was told.) Trump’s apparent connections with Moscow meant that politics was now unavoidable.

The situation in which the agents found themselves was confounding and unprecedented.

The question being asked inside the FBI was a troubling one: Was the president of the United States a patriot? Increasingly, the answer was no. “Trump’s priority is to take care of his personal interests. These may not align with the interests of the country,” the source said, adding: “Russia is a point of great sensitivity.”

The source continued: “Most [intelligence community] people haven’t seen a president like that. They frequently have ones they disagree with on policy. They don’t fundamentally question whether they are patriots.”

The man who had to steer the agency through this period of turmoil was James B. Comey, FBI chief since September 2013. Comey was, by inclination, a Republican. He had donated to the presidential campaigns of John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012. Comey was also an accomplished lawyer, a former terrorism prosecutor, and a former deputy attorney general.

It was in this last role that Comey had faced down George W. Bush, in one of the most extraordinary moments of Bush’s presidency. Bush and his deputy, Dick Cheney, had sought the Department of Justice’s approval for their top-secret program of domestic surveillance: spying on Americans. They had asked Attorney General John Ashcroft to renew it. He had refused. Ashcroft was in the hospital and dangerously ill.

A delegation from the White House went to Ashcroft’s hospital bedside to persuade him to change his mind. Comey got there first. Ashcroft held firm. The White House was furious. When Bush reauthorized the program anyway, Comey wrote a letter of resignation. He quoted what he’d said at his confirmation hearing, when asked what he would do if faced with an “apocalyptic situation.” (That meant a course of action Comey believed to be “fundamentally wrong.”)

Comey told Bush: “I don’t care about politics. I don’t care about expediency. I don’t care about friendship. I care about doing the right thing.”

Next Comey met Bush in the Oval Office and informed him that then FBI director Bob Mueller was quitting, too. Bush was taken aback. He called in Mueller. Comey and Mueller left the White House together, sitting for a while and chatting in the backseat of their bulletproof vehicle. Bush climbed down. He amended some aspects of the surveillance program.

This 2004 drama made Comey’s reputation. It established him as someone willing to stand up to the executive branch—ready to defy even the president, if necessary. It showed that Comey could play the Washington game at the highest level. And that his loyalty was to the Justice Department and what he called “this great group behind me,” rather than to any individual politician. The episode turned him into a household name.

Comey’s method was interesting, too. His daily routines, as The New Yorker noted, were those of a clerk. Immediately after his meeting with Bush, Comey switched on his BlackBerry and sent an email of what had happened to six Justice Department colleagues. He left a contemporaneous trail. He understood the importance of creating a record. This made it harder for others to lie in future about contentious past events. It was done, too, one suspects, with an eye to history.

Now Comey was facing another apocalyptic situation. This was, if anything, trickier than the bedside dash of 2004. As a candidate, Trump had praised Comey’s decision to reopen the Clinton email investigation. In October 2016 Trump told supporters at a campaign stop in Michigan it had taken “a lot of guts.” “I really disagreed with him [Comey]. I was not his fan. I tell you what, what he did, he brought back his reputation,” Trump said.

Two days after he took office, Trump saw Comey at a White House law enforcement reception. “Oh, there’s James! He’s become even more famous than me,” Trump said, as Comey advanced sheepishly across the Blue Room toward the president. Trump then attempted a man-hug. And whispered in Comey’s ear: “I really look forward to working with you.”

It was an awkward encounter: at six-foot-eight, the FBI director towered over his executive boss. (Comey later revealed that he’d tried to avoid Trump by blending into the curtains.)

In the meantime, the House Intelligence Committee summoned Comey and NSA chief Mike Rogers to give evidence. It was March 20, 2017. The two were star witnesses. Their testimony was keenly awaited. The committee was investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election. Inevitably, though, the hearing would want to examine this: had Trump or his entourage colluded with the Russians?

In his opening remarks, Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat, summarized what was known and what wasn’t. Moscow, he said, had “blatantly interfered in our affairs.” It had done so “upon the direct instructions of its autocratic ruler Vladimir Putin.” Putin’s goal was to help Trump. Schiff said: “We will never know whether the Russian intervention was determinative in such a close election.”

He continued:

We do not yet know whether the Russians had the help of U.S. citizens, including people associated with the Trump campaign. Many of Trump’s campaign personnel, including the president himself, have ties to Russia and Russian interests. This is of course no crime. On the other hand, if the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it aided and abetted the Russians, it would not only be a serious crime, it would also represent one of the most shocking betrayals of our democracy in history.

Schiff cited the Steele dossier. He said that Steele “is reportedly held in high regard by U.S. intelligence.” There was an awful lot of circumstantial evidence, he said—Page and his trips to Moscow; Manafort and the junking of armed support for Ukraine; Flynn’s multiple conversations with Ambassador Kislyak. It was possible, Schiff said, that all these events were unconnected.

It was equally possible that they were “not coincidental.” And: “that the Russians used the same techniques to corrupt U.S. persons that they have employed in Europe and elsewhere.” “We owe it to the country to find out,” Schiff said.

Up to this point, there had been no official confirmation of an FBI collusion investigation. Typically, the FBI would say nothing about an ongoing operation, especially if it involved classified and sensitive intelligence.

Now, though, Comey took the unusual step of making a public statement:

I have been authorized by the Department of Justice to confirm that the FBI, as part of our counterintelligence mission, is investigating the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election and that includes investigating the nature of any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government and whether there was any coordination between the campaign and Russia’s efforts.

As with any counterintelligence investigation, it would include “an assessment of whether any crimes were committed,” Comey said.

It had been assumed that this was the case. And yet confirmation made the FBI’s counterespionage probe an empirical fact, an un-fake event. The news—now flashing on TV screens, and punched out via text alerts—was a stunning rebuke of Trump, who had previously dismissed collusion claims as a ludicrous plot-cum-excuse by bad loser Democrats.

There were fresh details. The investigation, Comey said, began back in late July 2016, after the first DNC leak. It had been going for eight months. This was “a fairly short period of time.” The FBI’s work was “very complex.” There was no timetable for when it might conclude, Comey said.

The FBI director then delivered further unwelcome news to the White House. Trump had asserted that he was the victim of wiretapping—ordered by President Obama at Trump Tower in Manhattan and conducted by Britain’s GCHQ.

This claim had originated in…Moscow. A discredited former CIA analyst, Larry Johnson, floated the conspiracy theory on RT. Johnson was a source for Andrew Napolitano, Fox News’s legal analyst. Napolitano went on the Fox & Friends show, saying that Obama had used the British to circumvent U.S. intelligence. From here, the zombie claim reached Trump. Sean Spicer, the president’s press secretary, cited the Fox report to back up the president’s claim.

The story, of course, was rubbish. It was an example of how a propaganda trope dreamed up by state TV in Moscow entered the global media echo chamber, where pro-Trump media and the alt-right seized on it. The lie then reached its ultimate destination: the president’s brain. It had become, by a process of RT-Fox alchemy, an alternative “fact.”

GCHQ was appalled. The eavesdropping agency was known for its silence. It normally refused to comment on intelligence matters. On this occasion GCHQ responded with a rare fuck-off. It called Napolitano’s claims “nonsense.” A spokesperson said of them: “They are utterly ridiculous and should be ignored.”

In the hearing, Schiff read aloud one of Trump’s tweets on the matter:

Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my “wires tapped” in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!

Schiff asked Comey if this was true. The FBI director gave a deadpan reply: the bureau had no information that supported those tweets. The Justice Department shared this assessment, he said.

Then:

SCHIFF: Were you engaged in McCarthyism, Director Comey?

COMEY: I try very hard not to engage in any isms of any kind, including—including McCarthyism.

It was a smart reply, and one that brought laughter to the committee room. Trump, however, watching the proceedings on TV, may have seen this as a semi-humiliation. And an act of disloyalty. Sensing the exchange was going well, Schiff read out another Trump tweet:

How low has president Obama gone to tapp [sic] my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon-Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!

Comey admitted he was a kid during Watergate and had studied it quite a bit at school. Asked if Trump’s wild and inaccurate claims damaged relations with British intelligence, the United States’ closest partner, Rogers admitted: “I think it clearly frustrates a key ally of ours.”

What was at stake here was enormously serious—a break-in not by domestic burglars but by a foreign power using cyber means. The committee was bipartisan. Its leading Republicans, however, seemed less interested in examining collusion. Their focus, at this and other hearings, was on leaks. Who was leaking? How were reporters getting their information? What was the FBI doing about identifying the leakers and chucking them in jail?

This strategy—led here by Republicans Devin Nunes and Trey Gowdy—was diversionary. The aim was to deflect attention from the president’s links with Russia and focus on the process instead. Gowdy was incensed by the sheer number of current and former U.S. officials talking to journalists—nine in one Washington Post article!

Back in the 1970s, Nixon and his allies were similarly incensed by leaks emerging in the first stages of the Watergate investigation. The leaker—the FBI’s Mark Felt—had disclosed information because he feared that attempts were being made to shut down the FBI’s inquiries and to maintain a cover-up. Was this happening again?

Comey and Rogers agreed that leaking was a “serious crime.” Both said under oath that they had never leaked restricted material. Leaks weren’t exactly new, though, Comey pointed out: “I read over the weekend something from George Washington and Abraham Lincoln complaining about them. But I do think in the last six weeks, couple of months, there’s been at least—apparently a lot of conversation about classified matters that’s ending up in the media.”

The two agency chiefs gave an accomplished performance. Comey was fluent, good-natured, likable. Nothing floored him. His answers amounted to: I am a man of integrity. Comey and Rogers, it seemed, enjoyed a healthy rapport. The FBI director was equally at ease in two worlds—the one of his own hermetic institution and the high-stakes public interrogation taking place before Congress.

It was left to Democrat Joe Heck to offer the big picture. He described the evidence as “terribly disturbing”—“that this was, in part, an inside job from U.S. persons.” There were “willing American accomplices or terribly naïve ones, or probably both—who helped the Russians attack our country and our democracy.”

Heck asked Comey why we should care if Russia used U.S. persons to destabilize “our democracy.”

Comey replied: “Well, like Admiral Rogers, I truly believe we are a shining city on a hill, to quote a great American. And one of the things we radiate to the world is the importance of our wonderful, often messy, but free and fair democratic system and the elections that undergird it.”

—

Trump continued to brood on the FBI’s probe. That the matter continued to vex him was evident from his bitter public commentary. In April he told the Washington Examiner that the Russia story was a “faux story,” a hoax. Trump told Fox the same thing. The story was “phony,” he said, put about by his “embarrassed” political foes.

According to Politico, quoting two advisers, Trump was deeply frustrated about his inability to shut down the Russia story. He repeatedly demanded of aides why the investigation wouldn’t go away. He told them to speak out for him. Trump would even sometimes scream at television clips about the probe, an adviser said.

Phony wasn’t how Hillary Clinton saw it. In one of her first post-defeat appearances, speaking in New York, Clinton said she took “absolute personal responsibility” for her failure. Even so there were several factors that had made a difference, she said, including misogyny and “false equivalency” in the news media.

Two things above all had cost her the presidency, she said—the release of John Podesta’s hacked correspondence “an hour or two after the Access Hollywood tape was made public” and Comey’s October 28 letter saying he’d reopened the investigation into her private email server. Putin is not “a member of my fan club,” she said, calling Russian interference “unprecedented.” “There was a lot of funny business going on,” she added. This was undoubtedly true.

Meanwhile, Comey was preparing to testify again, this time before the Senate Judiciary Committee. It was May 3 and an annual oversight hearing—and one that would inevitably be dominated by further questions about Russia.

Comey’s replies were those of a person enjoying his work. And of someone keen to continue. He began by quoting what John Adams, the country’s second president and a founding father, had written to Thomas Jefferson: power always thinks it has a great soul. The way to guard against abuse was accountability—“having people ask hard questions,” he told the committee.

“I know you look at me like I’m crazy for saying this about this job. I love this work. I love this job. And I love it because of the mission and the people I get to work with,” he said.

The hearing moved along now-familiar lines—with Republicans keen to chase down who was leaking. Comey was relaxed and authoritative. He batted away some questions by saying he couldn’t give an answer in an unclassified setting; he affirmed others with “sure.” A memorable exchange came when Comey was asked, by Senator Dianne Feinstein and others, why he had publicized his Clinton investigation.

Comey was forthcoming—if not entirely convincing. He claimed he’d faced an invidious choice between keeping silent (and facing accusations of cover-up) or telling Congress. “It makes me mildly nauseous to think that we might have had some impact on the election. But honestly, it wouldn’t change the decision,” he said. He insisted he’d treated the Clinton and Trump investigations the same way. He had revealed both only months after they’d begun.

On Trump-Russia, “we follow the evidence wherever it takes us,” Comey promised. But what if it led to the president? Comey said he had briefed the chair and ranking members of the committee as to which individuals were currently in the spotlight. “That’s as far as we’re going to go,” he told Democrat Richard Blumenthal.

BLUMENTHAL: So, potentially, the president of the United States could be a target of your ongoing investigation into the Trump campaign’s involvement with Russian interference in our election, correct?

COMEY: I just worry—I don’t want to answer that—that—that seems to be unfair speculation. We will follow the evidence. We’ll try to find as much as we can and we’ll follow the evidence wherever it leads.

The Republican chair, Chuck Grassley, tossed in a couple of hostile questions on Steele: Did the FBI interact with him or pay him? Comey said he couldn’t answer “in this forum.”

Steele watched the hearing on TV from his home in Surrey. He had been back at work for some weeks. By arrangement, the Press Association had photographed and videoed Steele, now minus the beard, on the front steps of Orbis. Steele had given a quote of Politburo-like blandness: “I’d like to say a warm thank-you to everyone who sent me kind messages and support over the last few weeks.” He was now focusing on the “broader interests” of his company, he said.

Comey’s newest Senate hearing was a moment of worry for Steele: What might the director say? “The best-case scenario would have been for Comey to confirm the dossier. The worst for him to say something disobliging,” one friend told me. In the end, the outcome was “acceptably neutral,” the friend added.

The week beginning Monday, May 8, was the end of spring. Summer was coming. The days were getting lighter, brighter, and warmer. The mood in Washington was febrile. The city was spinning—the pace and sheer destructive tempo of the Trump presidency was exhausting for everyone. It was as if a thundercloud was about to burst.

The FBI’s investigation was gathering pace. In Alexandria, Virginia, the U.S. Attorney’s Office was busy. The first subpoenas were sent out to associates of Michael Flynn, according to CNN. A grand jury had been convened. A second federal grand jury, I was told, had been secretly assembled in the Southern District of New York in connection with Paul Manafort.

For Comey, it was another busy week. That Thursday he was due to return to Capitol Hill. Another public session was scheduled before the Senate Intelligence Committee. In the meantime, he took a plane to Florida—a secure one, fitted out with communications equipment that gave him instant access to the president. His next stop was California and a diversity forum for FBI agents.

Soon after arriving in Los Angeles, and before he had made his speech to FBI employees, Comey caught sight of a TV screen. There was urgent breaking news. It reported that President Trump had fired the director of the FBI. That was him. Comey assumed this was some kind of prank—an in-house joke arranged by his security detail or others on his personal staff.

It wasn’t. The news was real. Comey was out—fired and terminated in brutal fashion. The president might have broken the news in person. Instead he had chosen to strike while Comey was away from station. The director was unable to clear his desk, say farewell to his staff, or take away personal documents.

Comey stepped into a side office at the bureau’s LA office. There he confirmed he had indeed been fired. At this point the White House hadn’t informed him of anything directly. Soon afterward, Trump’s longtime personal bodyguard, Keith Schiller—an ex-cop and now part of White House security—hand-delivered a letter from the president to FBI headquarters. It came in a manila envelope.

The date was Tuesday, May 9. The letter—on White House paper—began, “Dear Director Comey.” It said Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had recommended his dismissal. Trump had accepted their recommendation, and “you are hereby terminated and removed from office, effective immediately.”

The next paragraph was strikingly odd. It began with a subclause. It said: “While I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation, I nevertheless concur with the judgment of the Department of Justice that you are not able to effectively lead the Bureau.”

It went on: “It is essential that we find new leadership for the FBI that restores public trust and confidence in its vital law enforcement mission. I wish you the best of luck in your future endeavors.” Then Trump’s hedgehog-like signature.

The letter revealed what was foremost in Trump’s mind: Russia. The investigation it referred to was Comey’s expanding probe into Kremlin collusion. According to Trump, Comey had exonerated him three times. Or at least that was what the president claimed.

The attached letters from Sessions and Rosenstein, however, said something completely different: that Trump had fired Comey because of his mishandling of the Clinton email affair. Sessions’s letter was vague. It said that the FBI chief had strayed from the Justice Department’s “rules and principles.” Sessions said that as attorney general he was committed to a “high level of…integrity.”

This last claim was somewhat hilarious. At his January confirmation hearing Sessions was asked if he’d been in contact with anyone from the Russian government during the 2016 campaign. Sessions’s answer under oath: no. It later emerged that he had met Kislyak at least twice, in the summer and early fall of 2016; like Flynn and Page he had been afflicted with sudden memory loss over his dealings with the ambassador. Sessions survived Democratic calls to resign for lying but was forced to recuse himself from all things Russia.

It was left to Rosenstein to explain. His letter said Comey had been wrong to announce in July 2016 that he was closing down the Clinton investigation—in effect, usurping the role of the attorney general. Comey was also wrong to tell the media he was reopening the probe—a “textbook example of what federal prosecutors and agents are taught not to do.” Since Comey wouldn’t admit his mistakes, he couldn’t be expected to fix them, Rosenstein wrote.

Officially, then, Trump fired Comey because he disapproved of the way Clinton had been treated. This explanation was so lacking in credibility as to be entirely, woefully ridiculous. Why had the president waited until May 9 to act? Where had his sudden compassion for Clinton come from? Wasn’t it more likely that the president had already decided to fire Comey and had merely asked Sessions to come up with a legal excuse?

According to The New York Times and The Washington Post, Trump had spent the previous weekend stewing at his New Jersey golf resort. He had watched the Sunday talk shows and concluded that there was “something wrong” with Comey. Trump had believed for a while he had to get rid of the FBI director and was “strongly inclined” to do so after Comey’s latest appearance before Congress.

What had especially irked Trump was Comey’s statement that he felt “mildly nauseous” at the possibility that his late intervention in the email affair might have cost Clinton the election. Trump seemed tortured by the idea that he wasn’t the legitimate president. This insecurity had clearly gnawed at him. Here, as he saw it, was Comey questioning his role in history, diminishing his victory, pandering to his enemies.

Trump reportedly shared his thoughts with a small group of advisers—Pence, McGahn, Kushner, Schiller. They agreed that Comey should be made to walk. Bannon, the chief strategist, argued it might be better to delay and was concerned about backlash. Overall, the White House seemed sincerely to hold the view that Democrats would welcome Comey’s humiliation, having complained about him previously.

Trump’s decision was reckless and impulsive. The president could, of course, do this: the move was constitutional. It would turn out to be spectacularly self-defeating.

It flowed from a profound suspicion within the administration toward Washington and its federal agencies. As Mike Hayden put it to me, the Trump team had “this incredible distrust, almost contempt,” for the outgoing government they were replacing. They believed that the intelligence community served Obama. This was wrong; it didn’t. But the perception stuck. The intelligence family was “fairly indifferent to who the president is,” Hayden said, adding: “We got off on a very bad foot.” And “Trump the human being” made everything worse.

For the president, the optics of Comey’s firing would prove disastrous. Those who had been skeptical about claims of collusion were now beginning to wonder if there was perhaps something there after all. The public articulation of why he’d been fired didn’t pass the smell test.

Meanwhile, FBI employees were an unhappy and bewildered lot. Former agent Bobby Chacon called it “a punch in the stomach to agents.” It was, he told The Guardian, a disrespectful and outrageous act that had besmirched the FBI’s reputation. Others predicted it would have a “chilling effect” on the ongoing Russia investigation. One said: “The rule of law has to prevail, not the rule of whim.”

The night of May 9, Press Secretary Sean Spicer emerged from the West Wing. Spicer gave an interview to Fox in one of the tents erected along the White House driveway. About a dozen reporters lurked nearby, including The Guardian’s David Smith. They were puzzled when Spicer disappeared for a few minutes. Eventually he emerged from a pathway lined with bushes. He agreed to take some questions but asked for TV cameras to be turned off.

The Post reported this strange event, which ended with Spicer giving an informal press conference in deep gloom. The White House objected to the Post’s characterization of Spicer’s location. The paper—whose “Democracy Dies in Darkness” motto had never seemed more appropriate—agreed to make a correction. It said that Spicer hadn’t hidden in the bushes but among them. Normally corrections are a matter of mild embarrassment. This one had been done with glee.

According to Spicer’s official version, Rosenstein had reached his decision independently, with Trump acting swiftly upon it. There was no cover-up. Kellyanne Conway, White House counselor, told reporters: “This has nothing to do with Russia” and said Comey had simply lost the confidence of everybody—his subordinates, Congress, and of course the president. Spicer’s deputy, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, said of the Russia story: “Frankly, it’s kind of getting absurd. There’s nothing there.”

Even by the dysfunctional standards of the White House, these events were surreal. As the comedian John Oliver pointed out, what was happening at dazzling speed resembled not so much Watergate 2 as Stupid Watergate. It was a pastiche version of the original 1970s scandal, replayed by clownish dimwits and brainless plotters. Stupid Watergate was happening more quickly than the original version, even if the ending—impeachment?—seemed uncertain.

Those who lived through the Nixon era likened Comey’s firing to the Saturday Night Massacre. This was when Nixon called on his senior Justice Department officials to fire Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor investigating the Watergate burglary. Two officials—Attorney General Elliot Richardson and his deputy, William Ruckelshaus—refused. They resigned. The next one down, Solicitor General Robert Bork, agreed to the president’s wishes.

This time around there was no pushback. Sessions and Rosenstein caved to Trump’s demands. Since Comey was fired on a Tuesday, the episode became known as the Tuesday Night Massacre. Rosenstein’s behavior, in particular, disappointed many. Philip Allen Lacovara, the senior surviving member of the Watergate special prosecutor’s office, asked Rosenstein to explain why he’d been so malleable. The deputy attorney general had put his “generally applauded credibility into a blind trust,” Lacovara wrote.

—

Trump had been in power for a little over one hundred days. During that period his less attractive qualities had been on painful display. One of these was Trump’s astonishing lack of loyalty to his own subordinates and team. He was quite prepared to throw his own White House staff under the bus, to trash their reputations and burn their political capital if it suited his temporary need or impulse. Meanwhile, he demanded absolute fealty from them.

With Washington reeling from the Comey affair, Trump gave an interview to NBC News’s Lester Holt. This was the moment, surely, for the president to say that he had nothing to do with Comey’s dismissal. And that he had merely heeded the advice of the Department of Justice, a slave to protocol.

Instead, he said this:

“What I did is I was going to fire Comey. My decision. It was not…”

HOLT: You had made the decision before they came into your office.

TRUMP: I—I was going to fire Comey. I—there’s no good time to do it, by the way.

HOLT: Because in your letter, you said…

TRUMP: They—they were…

HOLT:…I—I accepted—accepted their recommendations.

TRUMP: Yeah, well, they also…

HOLT: So, you had already made the decision.

TRUMP: Oh, I was going to fire regardless of recommendation.

Then:

“And in fact, when I decided to just do it, I said to myself—I said, ‘you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story. It’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election they should have won.’”

Trump was confirming he’d decided to fire Comey before he reached out to his legal officials. Oh, and “the Russia thing” was foremost in his mind at the time. Trump said he’d asked Comey if he personally was under FBI investigation. The director’s answer was no, he wasn’t, Trump said.

If the president was now telling the truth about Comey’s dismissal, that meant his press team had spent the previous forty-eight hours misleading the American public. Of Comey, Trump said: “He’s a showboat, he’s a grandstander, the FBI has been in turmoil. You know that, I know that. Everybody knows that.”

It was a stunning admission, made more incredible by Trump’s next set of White House guests. The day after Comey was out, two Russian visitors made their way to the Oval Office. One had leathery features, a rasping voice (a lot of cigarettes here), and a sarcastic manner, deployed over a period of many years in the service of the Russian state. The other was a slightly jollier-looking figure—a rotund person with a pale face, double chin, and white hair. These were Moscow’s two top diplomats: Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

Obama administration officials who had dealt with Kislyak viewed him with grudging respect. Times, however, had changed. Kislyak was the man whose connections with Trump’s team were not just embarrassing but a subject of criminal inquiry. Flynn, Sessions, Page, Kushner—all had met him and all had concealed these meetings afterward. Now the ambassador was talking to the president.

No American press was allowed in to record the meeting. Lavrov, however, had brought a photographer who worked for the state news agency Tass. In Soviet times, journalists for Tass were typically KGB or GRU officers. The photographer took equipment into the Oval Office. What, exactly? The photos show Trump warmly shaking Lavrov’s hand. Another reveals him patting Lavrov on the shoulder. Trump and Kislyak posed together. The president grins.

Trump seemed happy, relaxed, among friends. His manner here was in contrast to the one he had deployed with traditional U.S. allies—a glum, handshakeless encounter in March with Germany’s Angela Merkel, for example.

The conversation with the Russians, leaked to the Times a few days later, was also comradely. And astonishing. “I just fired the head of the FBI. He was crazy, a real nut job,” Trump told Lavrov. “I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off,” Trump said, adding: “I’m not under investigation.” Trump joked that he was the only person who hadn’t met Kislyak. He said the Russia story was fake and added that Americans wanted his government to have a healthy relationship with Moscow.

There were foreign policy discussions. Trump reportedly said that he wasn’t personally concerned by the fighting in Ukraine, but asked if the Russians might help solve the conflict there. There was talk of Syria.

It was at this point that Trump revealed details of a highly classified intelligence briefing he had been given. It concerned an ISIS plot. The intelligence wasn’t actually Trump’s to share. It had come from Israel, the United States’ closest ally in the region. Trump told the Russians the name of the Syrian city from where the information came. Seemingly, the Israelis had a double agent deep inside ISIS. Though there was no confirmation, the agent appeared to have supplied details of an attempt to smuggle explosives onto a plane using laptop computers.

Now the Russians knew about this source. Probably Bashar al-Assad—Syria’s president and Russia’s close ally—would soon learn of it, too. It was an astonishing breach. One former intelligence officer said that it wasn’t sharing the information per se that was significant: it was the relaying of material obtained from a partner. “You don’t even reveal the color of a carpet without consulting the ally first,” the officer told me. Another called it “fucking unbelievable.” Alarmed White House officials notified the CIA.

Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, Flynn’s replacement as national security adviser, defended the president’s blunder. McMaster said no secrets were given away. Trump, meanwhile, tweeted that as president he had “an absolute right” to share classified material on terrorism with anybody he liked. Russia agreed. The story was the latest manifestation of fake news, the foreign ministry said.

Trump had called for Clinton to be jailed for her use of a private email server. Now he had leaked “code word” information to the Russians, a classification beyond top secret. Since he’d done it, that was okay—or so Trump seemed to be suggesting. Even Republicans were dismayed by the president’s lack of discipline.

There were two ways of explaining it. Neither was good. Either the conspiracy sketched out in the Steele dossier was true, or the president was an idiot—or, if not a complete idiot, at least someone unfamiliar with the ways of Washington and therefore unaware of what he was doing. These two explanations were not incompatible, but Paul Ryan, Speaker of the House and a Trump loyalist, chose to go with the second one. In the coming months, Ryan would argue that the president was new to the job, a well-meaning neophyte who couldn’t be held accountable for his errant behavior.

The Lavrov-Kislyak episode had an epilogue. After the meeting, the American media had been expecting to see Trump with his Russian guests. Instead, they found the president sitting next to a well-known ninety-three-year-old man—a shrunken individual, still alert, owlish, with penetrating brown eyes. This was Dr. Henry Kissinger. Kissinger was Nixon’s secretary of state. His surprise presence seemed at first like a cosmic joke: one of the central figures from the Watergate era was literally back.

Kissinger was part of the United States’ political and cultural fabric. John Ehrlichman—Nixon’s counsel and assistant—served a year and a half in prison for his role in the Watergate conspiracy. His novel The Company is a fictional account of the period. In it, Kissinger appears as Carl Tessler. Ehrlichman describes Tessler as a “physical anomaly,” with a large head, a broadening girth, and “small almost dainty” hands and feet. Tessler/Kissinger was a geopolitician. He had a “brilliant mind.” He thought of himself as “a sort of universal Man of the Age in foreign affairs.” Tessler kept himself under “rigid self-control,” rarely revealing the “hidden man” beneath.

Traditionally, U.S. presidents sought out Kissinger’s advice. Obama had notably failed to do so, something that clearly rankled the elder statesman. Kissinger hadn’t endorsed Trump. And yet here he was, back at the center of events, with the world’s most powerful man, and meeting the Russians as in Cold War times. Kissinger had described the Watergate scandal as a “domestic passion play.” Now he sat next to another scandal-engulfed White House incumbent.

Reporters asked the president why he’d fired Director Comey.

“Because he wasn’t doing a good job,” Trump said to the cameras.

Kissinger, it appeared, was back in the Oval Office in the role of intermediary. He wasn’t just a throwback to the 1970s. He was frequently in contact with the Kremlin. Kissinger had long-standing good relations with Russia’s president and was treated as a VIP whenever he dropped in to Moscow. This happened quite frequently, with Kissinger visiting in 2016. Like Trump, Kissinger had said favorable things about Putin. He had compared him to a character from Dostoyevsky and said Putin possessed an “inward connection” to Russian history.

Additionally, Kissinger was a foreign policy realist. He believed—as did Putin and, seemingly, Trump as well—that deal-making rather than values should shape international relations. As the Russian opposition leader and former chess champion Garry Kasparov put it to me, Kissinger would like nothing better than to come out of retirement and broker a historic U.S.-Russian concord. It would be his last service to diplomacy. The two states (together with, presumably, China) could divide the world between them into sovereign spheres. There could be a new Grand Bargain.

The “Russia thing,” however, meant that rapprochement with Moscow was politically impossible. At least for now. Meanwhile, for a president keen to dispel rumors of collaboration, the meeting was deeply unfortunate.

The Times put the photo of Trump and Lavrov on its front page. At the bottom of the photo taken inside the White House was a credit. It said: “Russian Foreign Ministry.”

—

The day after his firing James Comey was at his home in Virginia. Photographers caught a glimpse of him in his driveway, wearing a white cap. It had been a bruising twenty-four hours. Comey’s feelings at the time can only be guessed at—shock, righteous anger, a feeling that his collision with Trump was surely inevitable?

The situation, though, wasn’t as grim as it seemed. The former FBI director had two things in his favor. One was his religious faith. The other was more tangible: a series of memos Comey had written setting down all his dealings with the president.

Certainly, his Christian belief was significant. In a profile, The Guardian’s Julian Borger described Comey as “a rare species in American politics, a public intellectual with a complicated personal history.” Comey had been born in Yonkers, New York, to an Irish Catholic, Democratic family. He had studied at the College of William and Mary in Virginia.

There, Comey had turned away from his upbringing and embraced various kinds of evangelism. He wrote his thesis on how the evangelist teacher Jerry Falwell somehow embodied the teachings of Reinhold Niebuhr. Niebuhr was America’s greatest mid-twentieth-century theologian. His work Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics, published in 1932, is a classic of Christian thinking.

Niebuhr’s view of the world was pessimistic. He described himself as a member of a “disillusioned generation” and wrote from an age of war, totalitarianism, racial injustice, and economic depression. Individuals were capable of virtuous acts, he thought, but groups and nations struggled to transcend their collective egoism. This makes social conflict inevitable.

Niebuhr was brutally honest about human failings. American contemporary culture was “still pretty firmly enmeshed in the illusions and sentimentalities of the Age of Reason,” he wrote. He didn’t see much room for goodness in politics. Instead he identified “greed, the will-to-power and other forms of self-assertion” at the level of group politics.

Comey’s interest in Niebuhr remained constant, even as his church affiliation drifted from evangelicalism to Methodism. According to the magazine Gizmodo, Comey set up a personal Twitter account in Niebuhr’s name. In party terms, Comey was of the political right and a movement Republican. Until Trump came along, this socially conservative faction dominated the Republican Party.

One imagines that Niebuhr wouldn’t have been surprised by Trump or his unscrupulous brand of personal politics. (Instead, you can envisage the great religious intellectual saying: “I told you so.”) The spectacle about to grip Washington in summer 2017 was certainly Niebuhrian. Here, after all, was an upright individual—a moral man—speaking truth to selfish power. Or in this case to a dishonest presidency.

Comey wasn’t merely relying on providence or divine destiny to get him through his battle with the White House. He was relying on notes. These were his records typed up in the immediate aftermath of his interactions with Trump. There were nine of them—three face-to-face meetings and six telephone calls. They took place between January, when Trump was not yet president, and April. All these encounters were fraught, it would emerge.

Trump had underestimated Comey—by how much would soon become clear. The fired FBI chief perfectly understood how Washington politics and bureaucracy interacted. The president didn’t. Comey knew that D.C. was, as The New Yorker put it, a lawyer’s town built on protocols and rules. His memos were an attempt to protect his own reputation and that of the FBI from subsequent smears. The goal was to proof his version of events from Trump’s untruths.

“He [Comey] understands the system. He’s played his cards perfectly at every turn,” one seasoned Washington insider told me. The person added: “Trump has not got a clue. He has immense power as president. But he doesn’t understand the operational issues and makes mistake after mistake after mistake.”

Two days after Comey’s firing, The New York Times published an account of a dinner Comey had with Trump on January 27. The venue was the White House. There were no other guests. According to the paper, the conversation began politely, with talk of the election and inauguration crowds. Then Trump turned to Comey and asked him, in effect, to pledge his loyalty. Comey declined, the report said.

The White House dismissed the story, with Trump telling NBC News the question of loyalty had never come up. The president’s strategy must have confirmed what Comey had suspected: that Trump would simply lie about their conversations.

Trump followed this up with a threat and tweeted:

James Comey better hope there are no “tapes” of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!

The tweet had the opposite effect to what Trump might have wished. As Comey would explain, a couple of days later he woke up in the middle of the night. There was now a distinct possibility that the White House had secretly bugged his conversation with the president. This was good rather than bad: any tape would confirm his version. In the meantime, Comey needed to get out what had actually been said to the “public square,” as he put it.

Comey turned to an old friend, Daniel Richman. Richman was a former federal prosecutor and a professor at Columbia University’s law school. Richman had defended Comey when he’d come under fire in previous months—calling Comey’s role at the FBI “apolitical and independent.”

Comey instructed Richman: “Make sure this gets out.” The professor contacted a reporter at the Times, Michael Schmidt. Richman offered details from another explosive Comey memo. It chronicled a meeting at the Oval Office on February 14, 2017. That was a day after Flynn had resigned for lying to Vice President Pence.

According to the memo, Trump had singled out Comey after the meeting. Trump then told him: “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go.”

Trump added: “He [Flynn] is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.”

There would be much future discussion of hope. Was this, as some Republican leaders suggested, an aspiration? Or was it a direct order from the commander in chief? Comey’s reported reply to Trump was noncommittal. Comey said: “I agree he [Flynn] is a good guy.”

The FBI was investigating Flynn for various misdemeanors. None of them were trivial. They included alleged perjury committed by Flynn during his FBI interview. Comey was deeply concerned by Trump’s comments. As Comey saw it, the president was asking him to shut down a criminal investigation. That amounted to obstruction of justice. It undermined the FBI’s role as an independent investigative body.

What happened next was up to the Justice Department. With Sessions recused, it fell to the number two, Rosenstein, to respond to the Times revelations. Democrats had been demanding that Rosenstein appoint a special counsel to oversee the Trump-Russia investigation. They argued that he—or she—would be independent of the White House and the Justice Department.

The answer from Republicans had been: there’s no need. Now there was a shift, with some expressing misgivings at Comey’s firing. Rosenstein’s dilemma was clear. If he agreed to a special counsel, this might redeem his reputation. But it would also attract the president’s ire—and perhaps ultimately lead to Rosenstein’s firing, too.

In an open letter to Rosenstein, the Times said that the deputy attorney general could safeguard democracy. He was uniquely placed to restore “Americans’ confidence in their government.” “We sympathize; that’s a lot of pressure,” the editorial board said. It said that Trump had “exploited the integrity” Rosenstein had earned during three decades of public service in the same careless way Trump liked to spend other people’s money.

Rosenstein went for the “noble” and “heroic” Times option. He announced that it was “in the public interest” to appoint a special prosecutor. That didn’t mean, he said, that he had determined a crime had taken place. Rosenstein signed his order without consulting Trump; it was left to White House counsel Don McGahn to carry the bad news to the Oval Office.

The president said he was innocent. According to several accounts, Trump was unusually noncombative. In a statement he again insisted there’d been no collusion between his campaign and “any foreign entity.”

The episode illustrated Trump’s capacity for self-sabotage. By firing Comey to “take the pressure off,” he had made the crisis worse and hastened the appointment of a determined outside investigator. The special counsel was Robert Mueller. Mueller had spent twelve years as FBI director under the Bush and Obama administrations, 2001 to 2013—the longest tenure of anyone in the job since J. Edgar Hoover. Comey had succeeded him. The two were allies.

Mueller had a reputation for tenacity. Hayden—Mueller’s former opposite at the NSA and CIA—described him to me as “a straight arrow.” “I’m trying to think of a good word for Bob. Formal, straitlaced, friendly, but governed by principle,” Hayden said. Democrats and Republicans agreed. As did Comey, who would hail Mueller as “one of this country’s great great pros” and a “dogged, tough person.”

Hayden predicted that Mueller would be scrupulously fair in performing his duties. He was skeptical that Mueller would find Trump guilty of obstruction, the first article of impeachment drawn up against Nixon. “Which doesn’t mean we don’t have a really serious problem. I actually think the congressional investigations might be more important,” Hayden suggested.

Thus far, Comey had got the better of Trump. He had out-intrigued and out-leaked the president, skillfully releasing information into the public domain that triggered Mueller’s appointment. Comey had not yet given a complete version of events. That was coming: the Senate Intelligence Committee invited Comey to testify, this time in his capacity as a private citizen.

Would this actually happen? There was speculation that Trump might argue executive privilege, saying his conversations with Comey were classified. In theory, Justice might seek an injunction. But the White House had a problem here. During Watergate the courts established that privilege couldn’t be used to cover up unlawful conduct by the executive branch.

Additionally, Trump’s nonstop tweets about Comey meant that executive privilege on the grounds of confidentiality was pretty meaningless. Or as one Washington lawyer put it to me: “He [Trump] does these things that are unbelievably fucking stupid all the time.”

By June, Washington was in a frenzy. There was a low but distinct rumble in the air: the sound of impeachment. This din was growing louder. There was discussion—in bars, cafés, and public squares—of whether Trump would complete his first term. And talk of the Twenty-fifth Amendment. This statute allows for the removal of a president on the grounds of incapacity. Impeachment is slow and uncertain; might the vague Twenty-fifth Amendment be swifter?

Comey’s upcoming testimony would be key. If his account of the Flynn conversation held up, then Trump was—or could be—in the frame for obstruction of justice. Republicans on the Hill were in no mood to dethrone their president: he was, after all, still the best hope of getting their tax-cutting legislative agenda through. But as Senator McCain observed, the situation was beginning to look like Watergate “in size and scale.”

Comey had prepared well. On the eve of his appearance before the Senate Intelligence Committee, he released a statement, on the record, and drawn up for a nonclassified hearing. It set out in calm tones his four-month-long interactions “with President-Elect and President Trump.”

The document was a masterpiece of storytelling. It was lucid and spare. There were flashes of reportorial color. Best of all, it was authentic—a real-time account of what had transpired behind closed doors. Overall, one gets the impression of a master bureaucrat attempting to do the right thing—and of a wayward individual who happens to be president of the United States.

Comey’s encounters with Trump, we learned, had been awkward from the start. The first was on January 6, 2017. The venue was a conference room in Trump Tower. U.S. intelligence chiefs, including Comey, gave a briefing to the president-elect and his national security team on Russian interference.

The other agency chiefs exited and Comey stayed behind. He briefed the new president “on some personally sensitive aspects” of the information assembled during the assessment. That was the Steele dossier. The U.S. intelligence community had decided to inform Trump for two reasons, Comey wrote, even though the Steele material was thus far “salacious and unverified.”

One, it believed the media were about to leak the dossier, and publication was imminent. Two, it felt that by forewarning Trump it could “blunt” any effort to compromise him. The task fell to Comey by pre-agreement: Clapper, the outgoing director of national intelligence, asked him to do the briefing alone because “the material implicated the FBI’s counterintelligence responsibilities.” And to “minimize” any embarrassment to Trump.

Trump, it seems, didn’t take the news well. His “reaction” isn’t recorded. But it was such that Comey felt he had to assure Trump that he wasn’t under suspicion.

Comey writes:

I felt compelled to document my first conversation with the President-Elect in a memo. To ensure accuracy, I began to type it on a laptop in an FBI vehicle outside Trump Tower the moment I walked out of the meeting. Creating written records immediately after one-to-one conversations with Mr. Trump was my practice from that point forward.

Comey didn’t “memorialize” his earlier discussions with President Obama. But this was a very different kind of president. That much became obvious during their second encounter on January 27, a week after Trump’s inauguration. Comey said Trump called him at lunchtime and invited him to dinner at 6:30 p.m. that evening. As Comey later explained, he had to cancel a date with his wife.

Comey assumed that there would be other guests. But, he wrote, when he arrived at the White House “it turned out to be just the two of us, seated at a small oval table in the center of the Green Room.” Two navy stewards waited on Comey and Trump, only entering the room to serve food and drinks.

Trump began by asking Comey if he wanted to stay on as FBI director. Comey wrote that he found the question “strange” since Trump had twice previously told him that he hoped Comey would remain in the post. Comey said he’d already told Trump he intended to serve out his ten-year term. The president then said that “lots of people” wanted his job and he would understand if Comey decided to “walk away.”

Comey’s language here is neutral. But it’s clear that the FBI director was horrified and appalled by Trump’s blatant methods. Comey writes:

My instincts told me that the one-on-one setting, and the pretense that this was our first discussion about my position, meant that the dinner was, at least in part, an effort to have me ask for my job and create some sort of patronage relationship. That concerned me greatly, given the FBI’s traditionally independent status in the executive branch.

Comey’s forebodings turned out to be correct. He told the president that he wasn’t “reliable” in the political sense but could always be counted on to tell the truth. This, he added, was in Trump’s best interests as president. To which Trump replied: “I need loyalty, I expect loyalty.”

It was a paralyzing moment. “I didn’t move, speak, or change my facial expression in any way during the awkward silence that followed. We simply looked at each other in silence,” Comey reports.

Trump returned to this theme toward the end of the dinner. The bargain, as set out by Trump, was a classically transactional one: if Comey wanted to keep his job he had to serve Trump personally rather than his own institution. Trump repeated his demand: “I need loyalty.” Comey replied: “You will always get honesty from me.” Trump then said: “That’s what I want, honest loyalty.”

Comey agreed to this but said he had done so to terminate a “very awkward conversation.” “My explanations had made clear what he should expect,” Comey wrote.

There were further excruciating details. Trump delivered his “I hope you can let this go” speech after deliberately cornering Comey in the Oval Office and sending everyone else out, including Kushner and Sessions. There were whining phone calls. During one, on March 30, the president likened the Russia thing to “the cloud.” He denied being involved with Russia, or Russian hookers, and told Comey he’d always assumed he “was being recorded in Russia.”

Twelve days later Trump called again. He urged Comey to “get out” the fact that he, the president, wasn’t personally under investigation. Comey refused. To do so, the FBI chief said, “would create a duty to correct” the record, should the situation change.

Comey’s seven-page document was a stunning piece of contemporary history. It had everything—a time line, detail, facts—except, perhaps, tone. Trump’s final remarks to Comey on April 11 seem almost sorrowful, though it’s hard to be sure. The president said: “I have been very loyal to you, very loyal; we had that thing, you know.”

Comey writes:

I did not reply or ask him what he meant by “that thing.” I said only that the way to handle it was to have the White House Counsel call the Acting Deputy Attorney General. He said that was what he would do and the call ended.

That was the last time I spoke to President Trump.

—

The line for public seats went on and on. The first person arrived at 4:15 a.m. By 7:30 a.m., three hundred people were lined up inside the Senate Hart Building. The human chain snaked along a corridor overlooking an airy atrium. The focus of its attention was room 216. It was here that Comey was due to give evidence.

Washington was used to big set-piece political events. But this occasion was special—a moment destined to feature in future accounts of Trump’s doom-laden presidency. It had an elemental plot line: a wronged man, a renegade chief, a possibly illegal hint, cunningly delivered off-camera.

Twelve national networks were relaying Comey’s testimony live. Sports bars and cafés, from Bond Street in Brooklyn to Sutter Street in San Francisco—were showing the event to customers. A Washington tavern offered FBI-themed sandwiches. There was even an early-morning Comey yoga party in LA.

America had experienced scandals before—Watergate, the Teapot Dome affair that shook Warren Harding’s administration in the 1920s. But, as The Guardian’s Borger noted as he scrambled for a hearing room seat, these were domestic squabbles. They featured one group of American politicians trying to smear another.

This scandal involved a foreign adversary. If Comey’s statement was to be believed, it revolved around a president who was willing to abuse his power. In this case, that meant seeking to browbeat an investigator. The investigator—it appeared—was getting uncomfortably close to the truth. And so he was fired.

At 10:02 a.m. Comey entered. The buzz subsided to be replaced by what sounded like a waterfall: the multi-click of cameras. The former FBI director looked grim, waxen, baggy-eyed. He sat behind a desk. Photographers were arrayed around him in a semicircle. There were senators and staffers and rows of reporters. Seen from above, the tableau had the solemn sweep of a Renaissance picture.

It seemed likely Comey would criticize Trump. The extent of the former director’s fury became evident immediately after he was sworn in. In his opening statement Comey said he accepted that Trump might fire him for any reason or none. But the official explanation “didn’t make any sense to me,” he said, especially after he learned from TV that Trump had actually done so because of Moscow.

“I was fired, in some way, to change—or the endeavor was to change the way the Russian investigation was being conducted. That is a very big deal, and not just because it involves me,” he said.

The White House, he complained bitterly, chose “to defame me.” It said the FBI was in disarray, poorly led, and with a workforce that had lost confidence in its boss. “Those were lies, plain and simple,” Comey declared, “and I am so sorry that the FBI workforce had to hear them and I’m so sorry that the American people were told them.”

Contrary to Trump’s gloomy claims, the FBI was not in meltdown. Rather, Comey said, it was “honest” and “strong.” “The FBI is, and always will be, independent,” he stressed.

Trump had been expected to live-tweet the hearing to his 31.7 million followers. As the nation watched, gripped, the president was unusually silent. Comey said he had mistrusted Trump from the get-go. He told the committee he started making a record of their conversations because of the “nature of the person.”

Fundamentally, he believed the president to be unethical. Mendacious even. “I was honestly concerned that he might lie about the nature of our [January] meeting, and so I thought it really important to document,” he said.

There were other interesting details. The chairman of the committee, Richard Burr, asked if the FBI had been able to corroborate any of the “criminal allegations” contained in the Steele dossier. Comey passed on this, and remarked that he couldn’t answer the question in an “open setting.” The inference was clear. The FBI had managed to verify some of Steele’s material. How much was secret information.

Comey said he passed on his Trump memos to Bob Mueller. It was Mueller, he said, who would now have to decide whether the president’s comments on Michael Flynn amounted to obstruction of justice. Comey said he took them as “direction.” The episode had left him “stunned,” he said. He hadn’t told his agents, fearing a “chilling effect on their work.”

Throughout Comey remained calm—which, if anything, made what he said more lethal. As the Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson observed, there was a “welcome air of sobriety” about the session. The senators interrogating Comey had done so in a grown-up way. True, Democrats had gone after Trump and Republicans had sought to exonerate him, but all recognized what was at stake.

Comey’s resolute appearance also earned him some unlikely plaudits. The Daily Beast’s Lizzie Crocker praised his “seductive integrity” and wondered whether the fifty-six-year-old, fired FBI director was “hot”:

Sure, he has a somewhat peaked complexion and under-eye bags that look like half-inflated tubular balloons. But he’s handsome, and as with all sex symbols—both the unlikely ones and the obvious ones—he embodies certain qualities in society that we all lust after: integrity, emotional complexity, and quiet but certain confidence.

Hot or not, Comey’s best speech came when he tried to put what had befallen America in context:

We have this big, messy, wonderful country where we fight with each other all the time, but nobody tells us what to think, what to fight about, what to vote for, except other Americans, and that’s wonderful and often painful. But we’re talking about a foreign government that, using technical intrusion, lots of other methods, tried to shape the way we think, we vote, we act. That is a big deal. And people need to recognize it.

What struck me—watching on TV, like much of America—was the question that had prompted Comey’s passionate words. The Democratic senator Joe Manchin wanted to know, did Trump “ever show any concern or interest or curiosity about what the Russians were doing?”

The answer: no. Comey said Trump had asked a few questions during the January 6 briefing. Then nothing.

Trump, then, seemed profoundly unconcerned about Russia’s attack on American democracy. As candidate, and even as president, he had stubbornly denied that Putin was involved. At the same time Trump insisted—to Comey, and to anybody who would listen—that he had nothing to do with Moscow.

This, too, was untrue. Trump’s relationship with Russia went back a long way—to a trip almost certainly arranged by the KGB.