In doing so, he made himself extremely hard to impugn. It was a masterful performance.Ĭomey presented himself as a career government man who knew enough not to trust a strange new president already surrounded by scandal, but who nonetheless deferred to him, as president, up to the point where doing so would violate the law - and whose primary concern, even then, was to protect the investigation rather than to cause trouble he saw as unnecessary with the president.
That image - an unruffled professional, speaking on behalf of no one but himself and prompted by nothing but his own sense of right and wrong - is the one Comey projected throughout the hearing. It’s from the moments before the hearing, as a low-grade hurricane of Senate business swirled around an implacable Comey at its eye.
The clip that sums up Thursday’s hearing isn’t actually from the hearing at all. Here’s who came out of Thursday’s hearing in a stronger position - and who saw themselves undermined. The political fight over Comey’s firing, and the broader Russia scandal, is ongoing. And the dogged questioning from Democrats - and, often, Republicans - made for high drama that drew its power not from partisan confrontation, but from the excitement of finding out the truth. Comey’s testimony Thursday presented a reliable narrator for that story. Journalists outside the White House (and the public) have struggled to put together scraps from anonymous sources, often only revealing a little information at a time.Ĭomey’s prepared testimony, released Wednesday afternoon, gave the public a narrative: that President Donald Trump consistently either failed to understand or intentionally violated the norms of independence that set the FBI out of political reach. Most of what we knew before Thursday has come in bits and pieces. Starting with Comey’s sudden firing on May 9, events have been unfolding since then, with near-daily scoops about the interactions between Trump and Comey and the campaigns connections to Russia - it has been a wild ride up until this point. Comey’s testimony of his version of events was even more so. The nature of the events that led ex-FBI Director James Comey to testify before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Thursday are extraordinary. It was political theater of the best kind.
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