Ex-FBI Director James Comey will testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday, and his opening remarks, which were released a day early, are already causing a firestorm. Slate’s own Katy Waldman has already evaluated these statements for their literary merit, but Late Night’s Seth Meyers sees one parallel in particular, comparing the passage in which Comey describes a private conversation about the FBI’s Russia probe to a John Grisham novel. Trump reportedly accosted Comey after a meeting to tell him that he was never “involved with hookers in Russia” and asked how he could “lift the cloud” hanging over the White House as a result. Meyers has a pretty good solution: “The first thing you could do is not call people out of nowhere and say, ‘I was not involved with hookers in Russia.’ ”
But that’s nothing next to Trump’s uncomfortable courtship of Comey, which supposedly included nine phone calls and a surprise one-on-one dinner, which sound “less like All the President’s Men and more like a Lifetime Original Movie,” noted Meyers. The craziest part though, he says, is Comey’s account of Trump demanding that he pledge his loyalty to the president, which was followed by an awkward silence and then a word game in which Trump tried to negotiate the very meaning of the word loyalty. “Sounds like a terrible Tinder date.”
You can follow Slate’s live blog of Comey’s Senate testimony here.
