On June 8, almost 20 million people watched former FBI Director James Comey testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee, at a hearing some called “Washington’s Super Bowl.” Comey’s testimony made news for several reasons, including the details it provided about the ex-director’s private interactions with President Trump.

But the part many people remember came near the end, when it was John McCain’s turn to ask questions. The senior senator from Arizona set out on a bewildering line of inquiry that appeared to have something to do with why the FBI was still pursuing an investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 race even though the bureau had terminated its inquiry into Hillary Clinton’s private email server. Never mind that the two probes had nothing to do with each other.

This content is imported from YouTube. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

“I’m a little confused, Senator,” Comey said. He wasn’t alone. McCain’s floundering—at one point he referred to “President Comey”—along with the fact that he looked befuddled, triggered a storm of speculation. Was it jet lag from his grueling tour of Asia that had ended the day before? Was it exhaustion, as McCain suggested shortly after the hearing? (“Maybe going forward I shouldn’t stay up late watching the Diamondbacks' night games,” he joked in a statement at the time.) Or was it, as many came to believe, an early symptom of glioblastoma, which McCain was diagnosed with six weeks later?

In an interview earlier this week, McCain suggested another reason for his confusion during the hearing. Just as he was about to launch into the questions that he and his staff had painstakingly prepared, he said, he was inadvertently knocked off course by Senator Lindsey Graham, whom he counts as his best friend and ally.

According to accounts given by both senators to Esquire and sources close to them, the events at the hearing happened as follows. Just moments before McCain was due to take the microphone, Graham realized he had a question he wanted McCain to ask Comey. Graham, who was in meetings during the hearing, had a staffer to deliver a message to McCain in the hearing room.*

Shutterstock

“I had these questions laid out that I had discussed and, honest to God, two minutes before it was my turn, [the aide] hands me this app from Lindsey,” McCain said.

But while McCain was reading the message from Graham—aides said that it was an email, not an app—the screen on the phone the staffer had handed him went black. Without a passcode, McCain couldn’t reopen it to keep reading. “I was looking at it and, naturally, the message fades,” McCain recalled. “I think, ‘What the fuck am I going to do here?’” McCain then heard the chairman of the committee, Senator Richard Burr, call his name.

Though McCain might have reverted to the questions he’d prepared, he said he pressed on out of a sense of loyalty and respect to Graham. “I can’t tell you how important our relationship is, and I knew that this must be important. So I started out trying to remember what was on the app, and, anyway, to make a long story short, I fucked it up.”

"I fucked it up."

Graham, for his part, clearly doesn’t enjoy contemplating the notion that he somehow derailed his friend while the whole country was watching. Though he can’t precisely recall what he wanted to hear from Comey, he said it had something to do with what the ex-director was willing to divulge during the hearing. In the summer of 2016, Graham noted, Comey had cleared Clinton of criminal wrongdoing for the handling of her emails. He said that he was trying to get McCain to ask Comey, “Well, if you’re willing to clear Clinton, why won't you comment on something else?” But this week Graham said, “I can’t remember what that ‘something else’ was.”

The statement McCain made after the hearing suggests one possibility. “What I was trying to get at was whether Mr. Comey believes that any of his interactions with the President rise to the level of obstruction of justice,” McCain said at the time. “In the case of Secretary Clinton’s emails, Mr. Comey was willing to step beyond his role as an investigator and state his belief about what ‘no reasonable prosecutor’ would conclude about the evidence. I wanted Mr. Comey to apply the same approach to the key question surrounding his interactions with President Trump.”

Whatever the case, McCain’s chagrin about the episode is evident. “It was a colossal screw-up. That was such an important hearing. That wasn’t just an ordinary Senate hearing.”

David Usborne is reporting a longer feature on John McCain and Lindsey Graham that will appear in the December 2017 issue of Esquire.

*Updated information based on additional reporting.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io