Ugliness takes the lead role in political theater

Just to be clear, this hasn’t happened before: The former FBI director publicly called the president a liar, and he returned the favor.

Ousted FBI director James Comey’s blockbuster testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee didn’t settle whether Trump associates colluded with Moscow’s alleged meddling in last year’s presidential campaign, or resolve whether President Trump is guilty of obstruction of justice.

But in two days of allegations that the president’s private lawyer flatly denied, Comey painted a devastating portrait of a president who he said lied in public and bulldozed in private through the governmental norms designed to protect the rule of law.

His accounts, which Comey said are backed up by contemporaneous memos, are guaranteed to fuel the multiple investigations that cast a cloud over the White House, carrying consequences impossible to predict. Whatever happens next, the back-and-forth accusations of suspicion, dishonesty and wrongdoing between the president of the United States and the man who served as one of his most senior

“This is the president of the United States to me alone saying I hope this,” Comey said. “I took it as, this is what he wants me to do. I didn’t obey that, but that’s the way I took it.”

Whether that would amount to obstruction of justice is harder to establish. Federal law broadly prohibits people from “corruptly” trying to influence or interfere with law enforcement proceedings. Prosecutions for violating those laws are both comparatively rare — Justice Department records list 56 cases in which someone was found guilty of violating the laws since 2013 — and difficult. The government must prove someone sought to influence the case and that his reasons for doing so were improper.

Former prosecutors said Comey’s testimony laid out sufficiently clear evidence to justify a deeper investigation of whether Trump broke the law.

“We now have a series of events that, at least based on what we know now, strongly suggests a desire to influence the investigation of Flynn,” said Dan Petalas, a prosecutor in the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section.

The president’s lawyer, Marc Kasowitz, said Thursday that Trump “never sought to impede” the FBI’s investigation of suspected Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Comey gave a markedly different account. He began Thursday by accusing the president of lying about the basis for his firing, then spent more than two hours detailing their private interactions. Former prosecutors said his testimony shed light on some of the harder-to-prove facets of an obstruction case, in particular whether Trump would have any reason to think that asking the FBI to drop its investigation of Flynn was improper.

Of greatest significance, former prosecutors said, was the testimony that Trump requested that his aides and Sessions leave the Oval Office before he spoke to Comey about Flynn.

“The inference one would draw is that Trump knew what he was about to say was inappropriate,” said Julie O’Sullivan, a Georgetown University law professor and former federal prosecutor under Comey.

O’Sullivan and other lawyers said it doesn’t matter whether Trump, as the government’s chief executive, had the legal authority to instruct Comey to drop an investigation or to fire him. Otherwise legal conduct can form the basis of an obstruction charge if it’s done for an improper purpose.

“Obstruction is what gets them every time,” O’Sullivan said. “That’s one lesson that everybody in Washington pretty much knows.”