As advertised, former FBI Director James Comey's testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence was riveting political theater, and it also managed to cast some new light on the man with whom we are burdened as president and on his coterie of defenders.

Here are seven takeaways from the hearing:

Donald Trump is a lying liar whose pants are very clearly on fire. Comey testified that he had never felt compelled to create contemporaneous memos of conversation after his infrequent interactions with Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. With Trump, however, he felt a need to do so from the very first time they had a private interaction. Why? "A combination of things," Comey said. "I think the circumstances, the subject matter and the person I was interacting with." What specifically about Trump's nature? "I was honestly concerned he might lie about the nature of our meeting so I thought it important to document," he said.

He went on (emphasis mine):

I knew there might come a day when I would need a record of what had happened, not just to defend myself, but to defend the FBI and our integrity as an institution and the Independence of our investigative function.

So even before Trump took office – Comey started creating the memos after a Jan. 6 meeting – he saw the incoming president as not only a liar but a potential threat to the FBI's "integrity as an institution" and to its "independence of our investigative function."

By now, most of us know that Trump is simply not a credible person, but step back for a moment and consider what a damning indictment of a new president's character this was from an FBI director.

And of course as Comey recounted, his perception of Trump was on target. The administration's first, risible, explanation for Comey's firing was that the bureau was in disarray. "Those were lies, plain and simple," Comey noted. On whether Trump's May 18 assertion that he'd never pressured Comey to drop the investigation of former national security adviser Mike Flynn was true: "I don't believe it is."

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That's why he wrote – and leaked – the memos. With one exception, he said, Comey very deliberately wrote his memos-to-file as unclassified documents so it would be easier for them to surface publicly. "Well, I remember thinking, this is a very disturbing development, really important to our work. I need to document it and preserve it in a way, and this committee gets this but sometimes when things are classified, it tangled them up," he said. "If I write it such a way that doesn't include anything of a classification, that would make it easier for to us discuss within the FBI and the government, and to hold onto it in a way that makes it accessible to us." He went on to acknowledge – no great surprise here – that he was responsible for one of the (unclassified) memos getting leaked to The New York Times. Why? "I asked him to because I thought that might prompt the appointment of a special counsel," he said. This again seems to indicate a fear that the Russia investigation had to be kept as far clear of Trump's reach as possible.

Trump's still got problems. GOP talking points and Trump's personal lawyer's bonkers statement may assert that Comey exonerated the president, but reality is different. It's true that Comey testified to telling Trump that he wasn't under investigation for colluding with Russia but, thanks to Trump, his direct knowledge of the investigation ended several weeks ago. And when Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton asked directly whether Trump had colluded with Russia, Comey demurred: "That's a question I don't think I should answer in an open setting," he replied. "When I left, we did not have an investigation focused on President Trump. But that's a question that will be answered by the investigation, I think." That's far from an indictment or accusation, but it's hardly a ringing defense either.

And that's collusion, which is a separate question from whether the president attempted to obstruct justice when, for example, he asked Comey to just let go of the investigation into Flynn. When committee chairman and North Carolina Sen. Richard Burr asked Comey about it directly, here was his reply, in part:

I don't think it's for me to say whether the conversation I had with the president was an effort to obstruct. I took it as a very disturbing thing, very concerning, but that's a conclusion I'm sure the special counsel will work towards to try and understand what the intention was there, and whether that's an offense.

Even as he refused to say it was a crime, he went on to editorialize that Trump was acting in a "very disturbing, very concerning" manner. (Somewhere Hillary Clinton is laughing.) But it's important to note that he expects Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating the Russia scandal, will look into whether Trump obstructed justice.

And as much as some Republicans tried to parse the difference between a stated presidential desire and a hope, Comey had none of it. When Idaho Sen. James Risch tried to argue that Trump was just, basically, shooting the breeze without any expectation that a president's subordinate would feel pressure to act on his words, Comey had none of it: "This is a president of the United States with me alone saying I hope this," he said. "I took it as, this is what he wants me to do." And he later told Florida Sen. Marco Rubio that he perceived it as an order.

More, when asked about Trump's credibility he added: "Why would you kick the attorney general, the president, the chief of staff out to talk to me if it was about something else? So that, to me, as an investigator, is a significant fact."

And finally, not for nothing, he explicitly linked his own firing to Trump's dissatisfaction with the Russia investigation (mostly because Trump has said as much publicly): "It's my judgment that I was fired because of the Russia investigation," he said. "The endeavor was to change the way the Russia investigation was being conducted. That is a very big deal." Big-league.

The water the GOP is carrying for Trump is weak sauce. The depth of Trump's troubles (political and perhaps legal) can be measured by the weakness of the Republican defense of him. There's the line argument, lamely proffered by the aforementioned Risch among others, that Trump wasn't merely telling Comey to drop the investigation but simply expressing an abstract desire. Alone in the Oval Office. To someone perfectly positioned to fulfill that desire. With no expectation that anything would come of it. Seriously.

"There's no ambiguity," MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace, a former aide in the George W. Bush administration, said on air Thursday afternoon. "When a president has you alone and asks you to do something, you go do it." As Comey put it to Maine Sen. Angus King, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats, "It rings in my ear as, well, 'Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?'" – a reference to the quote famously credited to King Henry II in reference to Thomas Becket the Archbishop of Canterbury; the king's followers quickly did his bidding.

Republicans also argued, weakly, that the fact that Comey didn't quit somehow undermines his credibility or that the fact that he didn't report his concerns up the chain of command does so. "In fact, I think no action was the most important thing I could do," Comey said.

Some Republicans wondered at the fact that Trump only asked him to let Flynn go once, and that he didn't direct any other pressure at Comey on the manner. "The key aspect here is if this seems to be something the president is trying to get you to drop it, it seems like a light touch to drop it," said Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford – as if ineptitude was a defense against interfering with a criminal investigation. In other words, he did it badly so it doesn't count.

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That echoed an even more absurd defense offered not at the hearing but across the Hill by House Speaker Paul Ryan. "The president is new at this," Ryan told reporters. "He is new to government so he probably wasn't steeped into the long-running protocols." But this isn't some esoteric point of philosophy, and neither is the presidency a learn-on-the-job sort of venture where the president gets training wheels while he learns how to count. And in any case, ignorance is no excuse – waving Comey off was wrong whether Trump knew it (and if he didn't, why did he clear the room before making the ask?) or not.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions has a problem, too. As I noted regarding Comey's pre-testimony Wednesday, he and his FBI colleagues expected Sessions to recuse himself from the Russia investigation weeks before the attorney general actually did. He expounded on that Thursday: "Our judgment, as I recall, is that he was very close to and inevitably going to recuse himself for a variety of reasons. We also were aware of facts that I can't discuss in an opening setting that would make his continued engagement in a Russia-related investigation problematic." Whoa – other, secret facts which made Sessions' engagement in a Russia-related investigation untenable? Inquiring minds want to know.

Tapes? Comey doesn't know if Trump has a taping system in the Oval Office (neither does Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House deputy press secretary). But, he said, "Lordy, I hope there are tapes." Who knows? Trump does have a history of secretly recording things. And in this day and age, he has a recording system in the Oval Office any time he brings his mobile phone to work. One can only hope that White House Counsel Don McGahn, in addition to giving Trump lessons in not tampering with ongoing criminal investigations, has time to teach him about U.S. v. Nixon.

Russia is the Russia cloud. Interspersed among the thrusts and parries over Trump, and occasionally over Hillary Clinton, the underlying and very serious issue came into occasional focus: that Russia conducted an assault upon our political system. Said ranking committee Democrat Virginia Sen. Mark Warner:

We are here because a foreign adversary attacked us right here at home, plain and simple. Not by guns or missiles, but by foreign operatives seeking to hijack our most important democratic process, our presidential election. Russian spies engaged in a series of online cyber raids, and a broad campaign of disinformation, all ultimately aimed at sowing chaos to undermine public faith in our process, in our leadership, and ultimately in ourselves.

And as Comey put it: "It is not a Republican thing or a Democratic thing. It really is an American thing. They're going to come for whatever party they choose to try and work on behalf of, and they're not devoted to either, in my experience. They're just about their own advantage. They will be back."