In a rare burst of humor from the New York Times, reporter Alex Burns tweeted the other day that this is "C-SPAN sweeps week programming." CNN says this is the Super Bowl for those who play politics because they weren't good enough to play sports.
Today is the day for fired FBI director James Comey to testify to the Senate Intelligence Committee. The spectacle begins at 9 a.m. our time.
Even the old mainline networks--CBS, NBC and ABC--plan to pre-empt regular game shows, gabfests and soap operas to telecast the hearing live, as if this were Watergate.
Per a few requests, I intend to live-tweet the affair at least until my fingers tire or my fascination wanes. There is reason to believe President Donald Trump may also fire off a tweet or a hundred, depending on how consistently Comey gets beneath his thinly fragile skin.
I will now give you an outline of what's going to happen, stipulating that the main reason the nation will watch is in case something not on this outline happens.
Comey will testify, and Democratic senators will use their questioning to prompt him to so testify, that the New York Times and Washington Post were correct in these recent exclusives:
• That, yes, Trump asked him over dinner for personal loyalty that he couldn't promise, and that the president's request reflected a lack of presidential sensitivity to the FBI's vitally independent law-enforcement role.
• That, yes, Trump took him aside and wondered if he could find his way clear to direct that the FBI back off its investigation of resigned national security adviser Michael Flynn's Russian and other foreign ties and alleged lack of forthrightness about them.
• That, yes, he went straightway from Trump's inappropriate overture to write a contemporaneous "note to file" because that's standard procedure when an FBI official is rendered uncomfortable and needs to make a record of the source of that discomfort conceivably for future reference.
• That, yes, Comey told Attorney General Jeff Sessions he never wanted to be alone with Trump again.
Comey is likely to say that no, not exactly, did he, as Trump says, tell the president three times that he was not under investigation in the FBI's probe into Russian meddling in the election. He is likely to say he told Trump only that the investigation was focused more broadly elsewhere.
That's unless he says Trump is whole-cloth lying, which is doubtful--that he would say that, and that Trump is doing that. Self-serving misrepresentation, not full-bore fabrication, seems to be the preposterous second-place president's demonstrated forte.
Comey will say that he did not consider the president's request for an FBI retreat on Flynn to amount to obstruction of justice, at least so clearly as to compel him to report it as a crime. He will say he deemed Trump's overture merely a matter of discomfort for him, particularly since he was intending to proceed apace and the president had not invoked any repercussion against him for that.
(Trump's firing Comey later was the hammer that might have completed the definition of attempted obstruction of justice, but that's a judgment for special counsel Robert Mueller to make, or so Comey will surely say.)
Partisan headlines will compete: "Comey didn't think Trump committed a crime," Republican headlines will say. "Comey confirms Trump inappropriateness," Democratic headlines will say.
Republican senators on the committee will respond to Comey's testimony in two ways.
First, they'll berate Comey for writing a note to his file over something he readily admits was not a crime. They'll ask: Either there was no big deal or you covered up a crime yourself, so which was it?
Second, they'll spend most of their time pounding Comey with counter-partisan questions about where all these illegal leaks came from and why Comey didn't get to the bottom of those, and why the FBI didn't delve more deeply into allegations that the Obama White House was eavesdropping on the Trump campaign and "unmasking" Trump officials.
U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton sits on the committee. He dined with the president Tuesday night at the White House. Thus, we can view his questions as regurgitations of what the president told him to ask.
Comey will patiently explain that the "note to file" was common practice and that the FBI under his leadership probed all relevant Russia-related allegations.
From time to time he will say that he can't answer a question because he believes the query bears on the special counsel's investigation, which he must not compromise or prejudice.
All of that will prove plenty dramatic in its real-time occurrence.
If something even more revelatory comes out, such as an element arising from a previously unknown Comey memo ... well, that's what daytime television dramas are all about.
And Trump will tweet, as will I.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 06/08/2017