THE NATURE OF THE MAN:

At Thursday's hearing, Comey offered more detail and explanation about why he created this paper trail. He said he documented the Jan. 6 conversation based on a "gut feeling" about "the nature of the person" he had just met. "I was honestly concerned he might lie about the nature of our meeting," said the former FBI director. So he wrote it all down.

In his written testimony, Comey described extensive discussions with his FBI leadership team after a Feb. 14 meeting in which Trump, after clearing the room of other officials, asked Comey to lay off Trump's recently ousted national security adviser, Michael Flynn. Comey wrote a memo on the encounter and made sure the memo was unclassified, so it could be more easily shared. At the hearing, Comey said he and his team "decided the best move would be to hold [the memo], keep it in a box." He suggested that he had concealed Trump's improper request from other people in the White House in part because Trump or his aides might become FBI targets. "I wouldn't want to alert the White House it had happened," Comey said of Trump's request about Flynn, "until we figured out what we were going to do with it investigatively."

Comey didn't just stow memos at the FBI. He gave at least one copy to Daniel Richman, a friend who teaches at Columbia Law School. On May 12, when Trump tweeted a warning that "James Comey better hope that there are no 'tapes' of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press," Comey was ready. He asked Richman, by his own admission, "to share the content of the memo with a reporter." Comey explicitly testified that he did this to trigger an escalation: "I asked him to because I thought that might prompt the appointment of a special counsel."

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