President Donald Trump’s dealings with James Comey, the former director of the FBI, make a story which demands the talents of one of the great American crime novelists. It would open with a scene beyond most fiction writers’ imagination: a conversation between the director of the FBI and the director of national intelligence as to which of them would have to break to the president-elect the existence of an intelligence dossier setting out with unforgettable details all the blackmail material which the Russian government might have on him. Mr Comey drew the short straw. The conversation that followed – in which Mr Trump angrily denied everything, as he has done ever since – so shocked the very experienced FBI director that he emerged from it determined to record every detail he could remember. This was unprecedented. On Thursday he told the Senate why. “I knew there might come a day when I might need a record to defend not just myself but the FBI and our integrity and … independence.”
“I was honestly concerned that he might lie about the nature of our meeting,” Mr Comey told the Senate intelligence committee. It was what he came to know personally of the president’s character which led him to write his notes of every meeting. Of all the shocking things to emerge, this willingness to use the verb “lie” is one of the most surprising. Mr Comey is not some startled fawn who has wandered into the tiger enclosure where real politicians work. He is himself a formidable bureaucratic politician. Such people have many more subtle ways to say an enemy is lying, most of which Mr Comey also deployed in his testimony. His repeated use of phrases like “I don’t think I can answer that in an open session” is razor work worthy of Francis Urquhart.
But about Mr Trump, he was quite clear that he had lied. “The administration chose to defame me, and more importantly the FBI … Those were lies, plain and simple.” Mr Comey appears to believe that the president lied about taping their conversations in the Oval Office, but is absolutely certain that if the tapes exist they will corroborate his story.
His revenge on Mr Trump for sacking him was expertly calculated: to give to a friend his unclassified memories of the conversation where – he thought – the president was asking him to drop an open criminal investigation. Their publication, he hoped, would compel the appointment of a special counsel, which seems a flag that a crime has been committed. That – as he helpfully explained – is why he opposed the appointment of one to look into the matter of Hillary Clinton’s emails; but he admitted that he had been put under political pressure through the then attorney general, Loretta Lynch, to minimise that inquiry too.
The Republicans on the committee, along with whoever was tweeting from the account of Donald Trump Jr, made every effort to refocus Mr Comey’s testimony on what Ms Clinton might have done as secretary of state. But the story is now ineluctably about what President Trump has done in 2017 rather than about Russian attempts to subvert the election in 2016. It repeats a classic theme of American crime fiction, the conflict between the mafia and the bureaucracy, between raw power and imperfect order. The sense of Mr Trump’s private personality which comes through from the testimony is entirely consistent with the domineering bully that he appears to be in public. Mr Comey was clear that the president had intended to intimidate him. He asked the attorney general to ensure that the two of them were never in a room together. The brutal chumminess of Mr Trump’s demand for “loyalty” and his “hope” that the investigation into the disgraced Michael Flynn be dropped are of a piece with a racketeer explaining what a shame it would be if anything happened to your nice little business.
Behind all this lies the shadow of a real mafia, the Russian state whose links into the Trump family and the Trump campaign still have to be fully brought into the light. Mr Comey spoke of a prolonged, large-scale and determined assault on American democracy with more passion than he spoke of anything else. The emotion was needed. Underneath all the grotesquery, this is a drama that concerns the whole world. The dysfunction at the heart of the White House threatens to overthrow the checks and balances of the political system that are intended to contain executive power. Mr Comey’s testimony may prove to be the beginning of the end, but whether it does so is another question which can’t be answered in an open session.