More Comey

This is just extraordinary. James Comey, testifying in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee, about an attempt by Gonzales and Andy Card to overrule him by going to then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, totally indisposed with pancreatitis, for his signature to continue the NSA surveillance program. Titillating, indeed.

“I was very upset,” said James B. Comey, who was deputy Attorney General at the time, in his testimony today before the Senate Judiciary Committee. “I was angry. I thought I had just witnessed an effort to take advantage of a very sick man, who did not have the powers of the attorney general because they had been transferred to me.”Mr. Comey’s account offered a rare and titillating glimpse of a Washington power struggle, complete with a late-night showdown in the White House after a dramatic encounter in a darkened hospital room — in short, elements of a potboiler paperback novel.