Here’s the latest sign of how far we’ve passed through the looking glass since Donald Trump moved into the White House:

James Comey, the former director of the F.B.I., told the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday that he actually would be happy if the president had been covertly recording their conversations on the phone, in the Oval Office, at dinner and in Trump Tower.

When he told his top aides that the president had asked him to drop the investigation into National Security Adviser Michael Flynn’s lying about his contacts with Russian officials, the other F.B.I. officials were “as shocked and troubled by it as I was,” Comey testified on Thursday.

At that moment, Comey said, he was glad that he’d continued writing memos after every conversation he had with Trump, a practice he started after their first meeting in Trump Tower before the inauguration. “I was honestly concerned that he might lie about the nature of our meeting,” he told the Senate.

But Comey said he and his aides knew that there was no way to corroborate his account of Trump’s request to drop the Flynn case because he and the president were alone together: It would be Comey’s word against Trump’s.