The opening statement former FBI Director James Comey will read at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Thursday morning is on its face a dramatic retelling of the events that precipitated his firing in May. But it is perhaps more critically a depiction of a multi-pronged national crisis.

One prong of that crisis concerns the character of the president: Comey, in so many words, has confirmed that Donald Trump is loyalty-obsessed, corrupt in his dealings, and lacking in any sense of what constitutes appropriate checks on the power of the president.

A second prong concerns the president’s actions: Trump administration loyalists are taking solace in and spinning the narrow factual point that Comey did in fact assure Trump three times that he was not under FBI investigation. They ignore the largest thematic point that Comey’s story is one of a president slowly, steadily, incriminating himself. If he was not under investigation before he fired Comey, it is imperative that he be so now.

The final prong concerns the fact that the broader government is in control of people intent on enabling Trump, complicit in his wrongdoing. This final prong is the one Comey depicts most indirectly, but it is perhaps the most important. The president and his confidants are engaging in grave wrongdoing, and Republicans are denying the public the political means to stop it.

The story, according to Comey’s opening statement, begins famously and in earnest with a one-on-one dinner Trump hosted for Comey at the White House on January 27. We now know, thanks to Comey’s testimony, that Trump placed the invitation just hours before the two men dined—one day after Acting Attorney General Sally Yates first warned White House counsel Don McGahn that National Security Adviser Michael Flynn was compromised with Russian intelligence.