Washington is a lawyer’s town, built on protocols and rules. If this tends to make happy-hour conversation in the city a little more pedantic than the American norm, then it also has its advantages, among them a fanaticism for records. James Comey, the fired F.B.I. director, began his career as an associate at the powerhouse law firm of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. Later, during his years of government service, he routinely documented conversations with his superiors as a method of self-preservation. During the Bush Administration, he documented his resistance to the use of torture, which helped extend his career from a conservative epoch to a liberal one. “A showboat,” President Trump called Comey, last week, in defending his decision to fire the man. Perhaps, but one with the daily routines of a clerk.

The conversation between Trump and Comey in the Oval Office in February—whose details the F.B.I. director circulated in a memo at the time, and which became public this week after a source close to Comey read it to Michael S. Schmidt, of the Times—was an extraordinary one. The two men were discussing Michael Flynn, who had briefly been Trump’s national-security adviser before being forced to resign over his failure to disclose pre-Inauguration contact with the Russian government, and was now a focus of F.B.I. investigators. “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go,” Trump told Comey. This declaration, in which the President seemed to lean on the F.B.I. director to cut short an investigation into an associate, was the part that, by Tuesday night, had Senator John McCain comparing the current situation to Watergate “in size and scale.” But the rest of the exchange was interesting, too, in the clues it offered about how the President saw his own relationship to Comey. Trump said of Flynn, “He’s a good guy.”

Consider the scene. The President has already asked his own Attorney General and chief of staff to leave the room, so that, instead of a formal meeting, Comey and Trump were now in the kind of informal, one-on-one negotiation in which Trump’s supporters believe he thrives. Perhaps he sensed in Comey—towering, earnest, self-regarding—a familiar type, and so the President sounded a bit like the son of a Queens developer talking to the grandson of a Yonkers cop, which both was and wasn’t the situation. Surely the President misunderstood Comey, who took the opportunity to agree that Flynn was “a good guy” and then rushed off to write a memorandum about the episode. But Trump may also have misunderstood the kind of city he was in.

One way to understand the events of the past ten days is to see them as the revenge of the capital’s professional classes. Last Monday, the career prosecutor Sally Yates sparred with Ted Cruz at a Senate hearing, taking obvious relish in her mastery of the legal context for the President’s travel ban, deploying the word “promulgated” like a whip. Last Thursday, after the President fired Comey, the word was that rank-and-file F.B.I. agents were horrified, that Comey was popular and his dismissal was received as a transgression. On Monday, anonymous intelligence officers disclosed that Trump had given classified intelligence, which had been passed to American agents by their Israeli counterparts in exchange for the promise of secrecy, to the Russian foreign minister. (The conservative writer Erick Erickson wrote that he knew one of the sources of the leak, whom he described as politically pro-Trump but horrified by Trump’s exposure of an ally.) Tuesday turned on the disclosure of that Comey had taken notes of his meetings with Trump. The critical stories were written by newspaper beat reporters: the national-security reporters Greg P. Miller and Greg Jaffe, of the Washington Post, and the Times’ man at Justice, Schmidt. Professionals know where to find each other.

What will happen next? On Tuesday, Politico reported that some Republican congressmen, privately, were wondering about impeachment. Publicly, most were much more reticent. But the Comey memo has likely already altered the trajectory of the various investigations swirling around the White House. In addition to the question of whether Trump’s Presidential campaign colluded with the Russian government, there is now the question of whether he interfered to stop an investigation—whether he, as President, obstructed justice. This is the realm of lawyers—timelines, documents, protocols. The early word is that Comey could testify next month. Already, Congress is seeking documents. “I have my subpoena pen ready,” the House Oversight Chairman, Jason Chaffetz, wrote yesterday.