He presented himself as anything but a fearsome G-man. He wondered what he might have done differently “if I were stronger.” He confessed that he had hustled his adversary off the phone in “kind of a slightly cowardly way” to avoid refusing his demands. He was “worried very much” about being in the mold of his most infamous predecessor, J. Edgar Hoover, by seeming to hold his superior hostage over salacious allegations about his sex life.
But in more than two hours of steady, soft-spoken Senate testimony, former FBI Director James Comey nevertheless delivered a quietly devastating indictment of President Donald Trump, confiding that he had kept contemporaneous notes of their every conversation for one overriding and unflinching reason: “I was honestly concerned that he might lie.”