Former FBI director James Comey testified before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence today, after releasing an opening statement yesterday that summarized five of his most substantive interactions with President Trump before he was fired.

Comey says he was sure to create a written record of his conversations because of “the nature of the person” he was dealing with, an experience he said was unlike those he had with any other President.

When pressed further on why he felt the need to record these memos when he had not with the last two Presidents, Comey repeated his previous answer and added that he had “a gut feel laying on top of all of that, that this is going to be important to protect this organization that I make records of this.”

Asked why he shared copies of his memos with a close friend who subsequently shared parts of them with the press, Comey cited President Trump’s tweet claiming that there might be tape recordings of their interactions, his a desire to get the facts out to the public, and a need for an independent investigation that could corroborate his memos.

He said that his judgement was that he “needed to get that out in the public square, so I asked a friend of mine to share the content of the memo with a reporter. I didn’t do it myself for a variety of reasons, but I asked him to because I thought that might prompt the appointment of a special counsel.”

Asked who the close friend that he shared his memos with is, Comey said, “a good friend of mine who’s a professor at Columbia law school.”

Comey’s testimony highlighted the three things that President Trump asked of him, and the former FBI Director’s attempts to end frequently awkward, unusual one-on-one meetings with his boss at the time.

First, Trump asked Comey for loyalty. He promised honesty. Eventually, the two men settled on “honest loyalty,” a term that Comey acknowledges may have meant something different to them.

Second, the President said he hoped Comey could let the investigation into his former national security director go on the grounds that Michael Flynn is a “good guy.” Though Comey agreed with Trump that Flynn was a good guy, citing previous professional interactions with Flynn, he did not agree to close the investigation and described himself as “stunned” by the request.

Asked what the effect would have been had he heeded the President’s request, Comey said, “We would have closed any investigation of General Flynn in connection with his statements about and encounters with Russians in the late part of December. So we would have dropped an open criminal investigation.”

A key distinction as far as whether Trump actually attempted to obstruct justice or not rests on whether his expressed “hope” rises to the level of a command or directive to a subordinate.

Senator Angus King (I-ME) asked Comey whether he felt the President’s statement about the investigation into Flynn was a directive, at which point Comey appeared to read King’s mind, shaking his head as if in disbelief that this was even a question and saying, “Yes — it rings in my ear as kind of ‘will no-one rid me of this meddlesome priest.”

To which King lit up and responded, “I was just going to quote that in eleven-seventy December 29, Henry II said ‘who will rid me of this meddlesome priest’ and the next day he was killed.”

Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA) made a similar point during her allotted time, eliciting a brief hint of a smile from Comey when she observed that in her experience as a prosecutor, when a robber holds a gun to someone’s head and “hopes” for their wallet, “the word hope is not the most operative word at that moment.”

Lastly, Comey verified during the hearing that Trump had asked him to somehow announce or verify that he was not under investigation by the FBI, repeatedly complaining about the “cloud” hanging over his administration.

While Comey agreed that during his tenure as director the President was never under any FBI investigation, he also highlighted the reasons behind his reluctance to publicly say so.

Primary among them was the obligation to correct that would be created were he to make such a statement, meaning if the President did come under investigation at any point, Comey would then have to publicly announce the development — just as he did prior to the 2016 election when the Clinton investigation was reopened.

The topic of his firing seemed to strike a personal chord for Comey, his voice swelling with emotion as he expressed gratitude for the opportunity to serve and addressed his former employees.

“I am so sorry I didn’t get to say goodbye to you publicly,” he offered to the career law enforcement officials who learned, as he did, from cable news that Comey’s career in the Justice Department had come to an abrupt end.

Addressing the President’s allegations that the FBI had been in disarray and agents were losing confidence in their director, Comey didn’t hesitate to use the word that news organizations have gone back and forth on, saying bluntly, “Those were lies, plain and simple.”

Comey was also candid about his thoughts on Russian interference in U.S. elections in general, offering, “Oh, it’s a long term practice of theirs. It stepped up a notch in a significant way in [20]16, they’ll be back.”

To Senator King’s remark that “I don’t think Putin is a Republican or a Democrat. He’s an opportunist,” Comey concurred, “I think that’s a fair statement.”

Later, Comey went on to add, “The reason this is such a big deal is we have this big wonderful, messy country where we fight with each other all the time, but nobody tells us what to think, what to fight about, what to vote for, except other Americans.”

“And that’s wonderful and often painful, but we’re talking about a foreign government that, using technical intrusion, lots of other methods, tried to shape the way we think, we vote, we act.”

“That is a big deal and people need to recognize that it’s not about Republicans and Democrats, they’re coming after America, which I hope we all love equally. They want to undermine our credibility in the face of the world, they think this great experiment of ours is a threat to them and so they’re going to try to run it down and dirty it up as much as possible.”

He was mostly reluctant to answer questions about the current investigation, or get into more granular details about the investigations underway while he was director, referring many of them to Special Counsel Robert Mueller or the subsequently scheduled classified hearing.

Comey called Mueller “one of the finest people and public servants this country has ever produced,” assuring the committee that “he is a dogged, tough person, and you can have high confidence that when it’s done he’s turned over all the rocks.”

When asked if he thinks Trump colluded with Russia, Comey said, “that’s a question I don’t think I should answer in an open setting” and concluded that the question would be “answered by the investigation, I think.”

Finally, asked if he thought Trump’s actions would rise to obstruction of justice, Comey responded, “I don’t know, that’s Bob Mueller’s job to sort that out.”