It was May 2007, and the newly empowered Democrats were conducting sweeping oversight investigations of the Alberto Gonzales-led Justice Department, particularly the unusual firings of a handful of U.S. attorneys a few years earlier.

The investigations, however, seemed to be losing steam.

Enter James Comey — and a then-little-known staffer, Preet Bharara. Bharara was senior counsel to Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), the political pit bull who had led much of the DOJ probe in the Senate, and more importantly, Bharara had previously worked as a junior federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York when Comey was the U.S. attorney there. (Previous U.S. attorneys in this plum post include Louis Freeh and Rudolph Giuliani — and the current occupant is none other than Bharara.)

What Bharara knew that the House Democrats didn't know was that Comey wanted to tell this amazing story about a constitutional crisis in the hospital room of then-Attorney General John Ashcroft in 2004. So Bharara arranged for Comey to testify before a Senate subcommittee.

The usually loquacious Schumer stopped asking Comey questions and just let him give a long statement telling the tale of something that seemed like a movie plot. You could hear a pin drop in the Dirksen hearing room, and in fact we did, when one reporter — stunned at what he was hearing — literally just dropped his pen onto the press table.