As America tuned in to former FBI Director James Comey’s blockbuster testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee this morning, California’s two senators got a turn in the spotlight.

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Kamala Harris chewed out by Republican colleague and America goes wild Dianne Feinstein, who has led dozens of hearings as the former chair and ranking member of the intelligence committee, and Kamala Harris, a former prosecutor and state attorney general, drilled into the Trump administration’s actions with the investigation — and Feinstein provoked one of Comey’s most memorable quotes of the day.

“Lordy, I hope there are tapes,” Comey told Feinstein, referring to President Donald Trump’s tweeted threat that Comey “better hope that there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations.”

The hearing was a dramatic climax in the Russia saga that’s consumed the White House since almost the first days Trump took office. Several times, Comey, who was fired by Trump last month, told senators that he believed statements from the Trump administration were “lies” or not true. But he declined to say whether he believed Trump’s actions amounted to obstruction of justice.

In written testimony released Wednesday, Comey detailed several meetings he had with Trump in which, he said, the president asked Comey to pledge his loyalty and told him he hoped he could let the investigation into former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn go. Thursday, in a hearing that spawned TV coverage, watch parties, and even bingo cards, Comey filled in more details of what took place.

With most major cable and broadcast news channels playing the hearing in full, both senators had a huge audience — probably the largest Harris has drawn in her career, said Jack Pitney, a politics professor at Claremont McKenna University.

The senators “let Comey be Comey,” Pitney said. “They both did a good, professional job.”

Feinstein, the fourth senator to question Comey, started by asking him why he believed he was fired. Comey said he wasn’t sure, but believed reports that he was fired because of the Russia investigation. “I take [Trump] at his word there,” he said.

She quoted from Comey’s written testimony and asked Comey to go into more detail about Trump’s request that he pledge loyalty. “He was asking for something and I was refusing to give it,” Comey said.

Feinstein — wearing a seersucker suit to mark National Seersucker Day — also asked Comey about his own actions. “You’re big, you’re strong,” she said. “I know the Oval Office and I know what happens to people when they walk in. There is a certain amount of intimidation. But why didn’t you stop and say, ‘Mr. President this is wrong, I cannot discuss this with you?’”

“That’s a great question,” Comey responded. “I was so stunned by the conversation that I just took it in… I was playing in my mind what should my response be.”

He said he had agreed with Trump that Flynn was a “good guy” as “a way of saying I’m not agreeing with what you had asked me to do.”

“I’ve seen the tweet about tapes. Lordy, I hope there are tapes,” Comey added.

That answer was “one of the YouTube moments from today,” Pitney said. “This isn’t his first rodeo, and the way he phrased it, he knew darn well that would be one of the soundbites.”

Harris — whose questions came near the end of the hearing, as the body’s most junior member of the minority party — started with a friendly aside, pointing out Comey was appearing before the committee as a private citizen for the first time. “I’m between opportunities now,” he joked. “I’m sure you’ll have future opportunities,” Harris responded with a laugh.

She framed her seven minutes in the spotlight with her experience as a prosecutor and attorney general. “In my experience of prosecuting cases, when a robber held a gun to somebody’s head and said ‘I hope you will give me your wallet,’ the word hope is not the most operative word at that moment,” Harris said.

Harris, whose questioning style seems like a cross-examination, focused on whether Attorney General Jeff Sessions had appropriately distanced himself from the Russia investigation.

“I don’t know of any information that would lead me to believe he did something to touch the Russia investigation after the recusal,” Comey said.

She also asked a series of questions she asked about the progress of the Russia investigation, which Comey declined to answer in public. The committee is holding a classified session behind closed doors this afternoon. “Harris appeared to be laying track for questions that will come up in the closed session,” Pitney said.

At a separate intelligence committee hearing Wednesday, Harris was admonished by Republican senators for interrupting a witness — a response some of her Democratic colleagues and many on social media saw as sexist. But in Thursday’s hearing, her questions made fewer waves.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration pushed back against Comey’s testimony. “I can definitively say the president is not a liar,” White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters after the hearing.

In the Bay Area, many caught the hearing — which started at 7 a.m. local time — on their way to work. “I don’t trust Comey. I trust President Trump even less. That makes it hard to know who to root for,” said Eric Garland, a political independent and a law professor at Santa Clara University.

John Hansen, a lawyer in Castro Valley, caught up on the hearing by watching parts of it over his lunch break. “I got the sense there is much more that [Comey] withheld in order not to interfere with the ongoing investigation,” said Hansen, a Democrat. “I suspect there are some more shoes to drop before this is over.”

Lori Drake, a real estate agent in Manteca and a former chair of the Alameda County Republican Party, opted to read the transcript of the hearing, which she considered “very damaging” for Trump.

“I think it was a mistake to fire Comey in the first place, and this is the result,” she said. Democrats like Feinstein and Harris, she said, are “trying to create soundbites to make the president look bad.”

Others flocked to local bars to watch the spectacle with company. “It was packed, packed,” said Steve Sullivan, a bartender at Clooney’s Pub in San Francisco’s Mission District. Clooney’s opens at 6 a.m. every day of the year, usually attracting firefighters, police officers and nurses getting off graveyard shifts. On Thursday morning, the crowd was about 10 times larger than usual, Sullivan estimated.

“People loved Comey, and there was a lot of yelling about impeachment and things like that,” Sullivan said. And it wasn’t drunken shouting, either — “the majority of them were just drinking a cup of coffee.”