(CNN) Attorney General Jeff Sessions spent just under two and a half hours answering questions from the Senate intelligence committee on his ties -- or lack thereof -- to Russia as well as his conversations with former FBI Director James Comey.

We live-blogged. I tweeted . And I jotted down some of the best and worst of the hearing that was. My thoughts are below.

WINNERS

* Angus King: The Maine independent senator, again, stole the show. Despite going in the middle of the pack of questioners, King zeroed in on why, exactly, Sessions was invoking executive privilege and how there was absolutely zero legal reason for it. He also got Sessions tied up around a past comment in which he seemed to be just fine in sharing conversations with Trump that seemed to favor the administration. To King's credit: He also accomplished all of this without coming across as overly partisan or angry.

* Tom Cotton: Democrats will call him a show-boater. They will hate everything he did in terms of firming up Sessions and asking a question that the attorney general thanked him for. But remember Cotton, the Arkansas GOP senator, could care less about what Democrats -- or even reporters who cover Congress and might have viewed that as short of "senatorial" -- think of him. He's got his eye firmly on the national horizon. And that performance -- and, yes, it was a performance -- will get played and replayed at conservative confabs all over the country over the next months. Which is exactly what Cotton wants.

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