Someone has probably written about this already, but there was one “aha” moment during Comey’s testimony that was bigger for me than any others.
Fairly late in the hearing, there was this exchange between Senator Cornyn and Comey, when Cornyn was grilling Comey on the Clinton email investigation:
CORNYN: And under Department of Justice and FBI norms, wouldn't it have been appropriate for the attorney general, or if she had recused herself which she did not do for the deputy attorney general to appoint a special counsel. That's essentially what's happened with director Mueller. Would that have been an appropriate step?
COMEY: Certainly, yes, sir.
CORNYN: And were you aware Ms. Lynch had been requested numerous times to appoint a special counsel and had refused.
COMEY: Yes. From, I think, Congress had -- members of congress had repeatedly asked, yes, sir.
CORNYN: Yours truly did on multiple occasions. And that heightened your concerns about the appearance of a conflict of interest with the Department of Justice which caused you to make what you have described as an incorrectly painful decision to basically take the matter up yourself and led to that July press conference?
COMEY: Yes, sir. I ask -- after President Clinton, former President Clinton met on the plane with the attorney general, I considered whether I should call for the appointment of a special counsel. And decided that would be an unfair thing to do because I knew there was no case there. We investigated it very, very thoroughly. I know this is a subject of passionate disagreement but I knew there was no case there. And calling for the appointment of special counsel would be brutally unfair because it would send the message, uh-huh, there's something here. That's my judgment. Lots of people have different views about it but that's what I thought about it.
Contrast that exchange to this one earlier between Senator Collins and Comey:
COLLINS: And to whom did you show copies?
COMEY: I asked -- the president tweeted on Friday after I got fired that I better hope there's not tapes. I woke up in the middle of the night on Monday night because it didn't dawn on me originally, that there might be corroboration for our conversation. There might a tape. My judgement was, I need to get that out into the public square. I asked a friend of mine to share the content of the memo with a reporter. Didn't do it myself for a variety of reasons. I asked him to because I thought that might prompt the appointment of a special counsel. I asked a close friend to do it.
These two exchanges were by far the most revealing to me. Comey was waking up in the middle of the night, motivated to find a way to get a special counsel appointed in Trump’s case. In contrast, he thought seriously about pushing for the appointment of a special counselor in the Clinton case, but ruled it out because he knew there was no case there.
If that isn't a tell that Comey is sure there is a criminal case against Trump, I don’t know what is. And the irony of the Republican senators bringing this out in the hearing by promoting all the Clinton email crap is delicious.